It Starts With You: Dr. Sheila Carroll

Lisa Belisle: Hello, I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle, and you are listening to or watching our video podcast Radio Maine, where we explore creativity and the human spirit, sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. Today it is my exceptional pleasure to be in the studio with Dr. Sheila Carroll, who is a certified life and weight coach, and also, for many years, a dear friend of myself and my family, a fellow Bowdoin College graduate and fellow University of Vermont Graduate College of Medicine graduate. Thank you for being here.

Sheila Carroll: Thanks for having me, Lisa.

Lisa Belisle: This is so exciting. I am so happy to talk to you about this coaching work that you have been doing for now officially, I guess, three years and five months is what I have on your LinkedIn profile, but who's counting? You made such a different choice, from being a pediatrician for many years to saying, okay, I'm going to do this different thing now. I'm going to go get certified. I'm going to learn how to do this whole different set of skills. Talk to me about that.

Sheila Carroll: Sure. I was a pediatrician for about 20 years in clinical practice, most of it in hospitals. And I think as I was aging through that, we talk a lot about physician burnout, but I really experienced a lot of that extreme fatigue being a hospitalist. I was working half day shifts, half night shifts. So for about 10 years I didn't really get very good sleep at all. And I happened to bump into life coaching through another physician at the hospital that I worked at. She had joined a life coaching for weight loss program, and I wanting that for myself. I wasn't sleeping, I wasn't exercising very much. I just was overwhelmed and feeling stuck. And I saw, just peripherally, the changes that happened to her, not just her physical changes. Yes, she lost weight, but her whole affect changed, her mood, her whole approach to life changed.

And so I was very interested in that, and found out about it, and took the leap myself, and went through a life coaching program, and found it so transformative in my own life that I became a coach after that program. I thought, this is exactly what so many of my patients, not the kids, but this is what I think could help so many of the parents, so many of us, all of us, because the coaching aspect of the program gave you a framework with which to think about all the things that are going on in your life and understand them in a very thoughtful way. That our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings drive our actions, and our actions give us the results that we're having. And the results that you're having are actually just the experiences that you're experiencing in your life.

So you can use that framework to understand your experiences and, more importantly, change your experiences if you want to. And so that's what was so transformative for me, and I found it so empowering and so freeing. And then I realized, oh, I want to help other people experience this, and I can't do that in medicine. I tried in my little 15 minute visits with some parents who were open to that idea, but it just wasn't set up for it. Medicine today is not set up for us doctors to be providing that kind of help or service to a patient.

Lisa Belisle: When did you reach the place? Because you have a child and a house and a whole life that you probably have to fund. When did you reach the place where you're like, okay, I'm going to put this being a doctor as a profession, not as an identity, I'm going to put this behind me and move forward with this new identity and this new profession. What was the place where you said, okay, I'm taking a leap, but I feel good about this?

Sheila Carroll: I had worked for 20 years, so I had saved some money, so I had a little bit of a cushion personally. But I also said, what do I really want to spend the rest of my life doing? What I was currently doing in the pediatric office? And that was a really easy answer for me. No, I didn't, because honestly, it didn't feel like I was helping my patients, giving out prescriptions for stuff. It wasn't fulfilling for me anymore. And so I asked myself, do I want to spend the rest of my work life doing this? And the answer was no. And also, like you've mentioned, I have, well, he's now 12, but I was missing things in his life, and I said, what am I going to want when I retire? I'm going to want that time back. I'm going to wish I had spent less time at the office and more time with my son who's now grown and out on his own. So I decided, you know what? I can make this work. I'm highly intelligent. I can figure it out, and I can create the life that I want and still help people in a way that I feel is meaningful for them.

Lisa Belisle: It was bold. And I remember, I think I reached out to you probably not that long after you had started doing this. We had some pediatric hospitalist shifts at our hospital. I'm like, oh, I wonder if Sheila would like to do this. And you were unequivocal. You're like, no, thank you. Thanks for asking. I have moved on to this next thing. And I was like, I love that. I love that you're thinking to yourself, no, I'm moving in this direction now. And what I did before was valuable, and I'm done with that now, or at least for now.

Sheila Carroll: Yes, exactly. And it was a great experience. Anything you do in the past gets you to where you are today. So I don't regret any of that, but I'm super excited to be moving forward in this new way, to have my own business doing what I want. It's fun, and it's helpful for people, and I love it.

Lisa Belisle: Tell me about this decision to focus on weight and food and nutrition and children. It seems like this isn't something that we're seeing a lot of yet. It seems like a really nice area for you to be putting your efforts toward.

Sheila Carroll: Thank you. Yes. Well, I come at it with a personal history. As a former overweight child, I've kind of struggled with my weight my whole life, honestly, since I was nine or 10 years old. I really emotionally struggled. I didn't have any physical problems from my weight, but it was more of an emotional toll over all the years, and I couldn't get a handle on it for a long time. And then, honestly, even going to medical school and residency, I never learned how to manage my own weight, because I didn't have the skills and tools to manage my thinking or my mind around the actions I was taking. So when I learned those tools through life coaching, I realized, oh, this can help everybody. Because as doctors, we tell people, okay, do this, eat this, don't do that.

Go get some exercise, get to sleep, and that's great advice. And then the person leaves the office and they're like, yeah, but how do I? Of course I already know what you're telling me, but how do I actually get myself to choose to eat a salad, or choose to eat fish, instead of choosing the potentially less healthy food? So you need to go back before that, before you're taking that action of eating, or not going for a walk, or not going to the gym, or not going to bed. Really look at, bring awareness to, what are the thoughts I'm having that are creating my feeling, which is driving me to eat the salad or not eat the salad. And you can re-engineer those to help you get the outcome that you want to have. It's a different way of thinking about things, and we don't teach our patients how to do that. And I didn't know how to do that until I was 50 years old.

And I've always wanted to. I love kids, I love babies. I always have wanted to help kids. Today in the US we have a real crisis. I think it's probably north of 30% of all kids and teens would be considered overweight or in the obese category if you're using the BMI. And what's driving that is our broken food system and these ultra processed foods, which are just heavily marketed to kids, targeted to kids, and they taste so good, they're hard to stop eating. They're designed to be over-consumed. They're designed just to make money for the company, but it's driving this health crisis in kids, including mental health, and yes, obesity, but also kids are now experiencing diseases that only adults used to get. Type two diabetes, non-alcoholic fatty liver disease. There's more incidence of PCOS. There's all of these metabolic problems being driven by our food system. And so what's the answer to that? The answer is not for me to sit down with a 10-year-old or a 12-year-old, which is what the medical system offers us.

If you bring your child to the doctor and they are considered to be overweight or have a high BMI, they might say, come back in six months and we'll talk about it, and then the doctor's supposed to talk to the child. So that to me was almost a complete waste of time, and potentially harmful to the child, because what we really want to be talking about is health, overall health, not weight. Who really cares what that number is? But weight is sometimes a marker of people's health habits. So it would've been much more effective for me to have the opportunity to just sit with the parents and talk about what's going on with the parents, who are in charge of the child's lifestyle. And so that is what I decided, to continue helping kids, but only by working with their parents, because the parents are the ones who have the mature cognitive ability, the prefrontal cortex development, to really understand this thinking and the complexities of why they're doing what they're doing. And the parents are with their kids every day. So they're the ones who are best able to help their kids, but parents need a little bit of help being able to help their kids.

Lisa Belisle: Have you found it to be true that parents maybe didn't have the best coping strategies or thought processes, or whatever it was that they kind of brought to the parenting table, and that actually is a bigger driver of where things went with the child than perhaps anything the child started doing on their own?

Sheila Carroll: Yes. I think for all of us, the culture that we live in, we use food in ways that food wasn't originally designed to be used. If you think about us human beings as this very ancient species, we evolved very slowly over time, eating food to just sustain our physical self. We didn't use food for fun, for stress relief, for coping. That is a very recent phenomenon, and even more recent with the rise of the ultra processed food industry. So our culture is really teaching kids at a very young age to use food in ways that food was never meant to be used. And then your brain and your body learns to use food in those ways, and especially the food that's being offered to us. I think it's something like 70% of foods in the grocery store have added sugar and are considered ultra processed foods. We know these foods aren't good for our human body, they're not good for our microbiome, they're not good for any part of us, but they're cheap and they taste great, and they're hard to stop eating once you start. So parents are definitely swimming upstream, because there's a lot of forces at play that are driving poor health in our society today.

Lisa Belisle: As I'm listening to you, there's two things that I'm taking away from this that, in medicine, we have traditionally done, and I'm glad that you're changing the dialogue around this, because I think it needed to happen. One is that traditionally in medicine, the way that we handled encounters was to say, hello, patient. I'm going to tell you things. Here is information. You'll then leave with the information, because you didn't have the information, and now you'll change your behavior. So that's part one. We believed that it was truly a lack of information that caused people to make decisions. I'm glad we're past that now, because obviously it's multifactorial. The other thing, though, is approaching things in a really judgmental way and saying, you are bad because your numbers are bad. You are killing yourself. You're going to get diabetes, lose your legs, lose your eyesight. Your kidneys are going to die. You're going to die.

Sheila Carroll: It's horrible, the stigma that's been attached to health problems, that these health problems are actually created by the environment we live in, our food environment and our modern environment, where we're not really getting a lot of help to make it easy for people to do the healthy thing for themselves. And when they do decide to eat whatever and potentially gain weight or worsen their metabolic status, then we blame them. You just shouldn't have eaten that, as opposed to, why are these foods so cheap, so addictive, and we're making it so hard for people to do the right thing for themselves? So it's been very challenging, to work with parents, because we don't want anyone to feel that their weight makes them bad, or that there's something wrong with them. I thought that for so long as a kid, like, oh, something's not right.

My friends are thin, but I'm not. I just felt it was embarrassing. I felt ashamed. And that's the last thing we want anyone to feel. So I work with parents to really build a true, deep connection with their kid over the fact that their child is perfect the way they are, a hundred percent valuable and worthy just as they are. And we're not changing anything because you need to be better, or even because you need to be different. We're changing things because now we know a little bit more, and we've learned we want to keep our bodies as healthy as possible. So really coming at it from a health perspective, and we can even leave the word weight completely out of it, because weight is so stigmatized. And all of us have a lot of internalized weight stigma as well. But doctors are notoriously challenged in that department, meaning we're not that empathetic to people who are struggling with weight. And especially if you are a doctor who's never struggled with your own weight, that can be even worse. So I have a lot of empathy for people, because I am right there with them.

Lisa Belisle: It's interesting to me, because obviously you and I went to college at the same time. You grew up in Portland, not that far away from here. Your dad was an oncologist that I knew. And I never had any sense, because when I looked at you, I did not perceive there to be an issue. It didn't come up in conversation, obviously, but I never had a sense of the struggle. And so as you're telling me this, first of all, I thank you for being so honest and wanting to share this. I think it's so healing for people to hear that. But it's also this underlying thing, and it makes me, I am sorry if there was ever anything that I or anybody around you participated in, even unknowingly. What a terrible thing to have to have in your mind and hold onto.

Sheila Carroll: Thank you. And it's just our culture, and it's been that way. I don't know how long it's been that way, but even if you look at children's books like the Harry Potter series, look at Dudley, that character. They classify him as overweight. He's mean, he's dumb, he's this, he's that. And that's so classically stigmatizing. They've done studies that show that even kids as young as pre-K or K, they look at pictures of normal weight kids versus overweight kids, and versus kids with disabilities, potentially in a wheelchair. And they label the overweight child as less intelligent and meaner. So it's baked into our society, unfortunately. So I think just bringing awareness to that, and having some empathy for the people who are struggling with their weight. And the thing is, I know for sure two people can eat the exact same food, and one person could gain weight a lot more easily than another person.

And that just has to do with your body, your energy, your muscle mass, all of the things that make us an individual person. So those of us that gain weight easily, that's a phrase from this really awesome writer, Gary Taubes. Have you ever read any of his books? He writes amazing books, and he uses this phrase, those of us that gain weight easily. And I like that. I consider myself one of those people. But we were the people who would've survived in the ancient time, a long time ago. Our human bodies, we were designed to store weight, because for so long, food was hard to come by, and now it's not. This is the problem. We still have this ancient physiology, but in this modern time. And so this is the reconciliation that needs to happen. If you are a person who tends to gain easily, or if you are a parent who has a child who tends to gain easily, how do I live with my ancient body and my ancient physiology in this modern time? And it has to do with all the things: nutrition, but also exercise, movement, screen use, stress management, emotional regulation, sleep, of course. All of those lifestyle factors, parents can influence, can help their kids. And the number one thing, of course, is being the role model that you want your child to see. And that's what I help parents do too, become that person, be the parent they want to be in that regard.

Lisa Belisle: I love that phrase, those of us who gain weight easily.

Sheila Carroll: Me too.

Lisa Belisle: Because there's so many ways in which we have labeled people of all ages as whatever disease or lack of physical ability or whatever it is that has become their identity. And even to this day, when I'm going to medical practices in my current role, I will overhear somebody ask a patient, are you a smoker? And every single time I listen to that, and I think, well, no, they're not a smoker. They're a human. They're a person who uses cigarettes or something else perhaps, but they're not the thing that they're using. Just like someone is not a diabetic, or you're not an asthma person.

Sheila Carroll: Anorectic.

Lisa Belisle: Anorectic, asthmatic, whatever it is that we decided to label people as. And I think we need to just continue to say person, person who tends to gain weight easily, and try to understand what the words do as we have these conversations, if we approach it one way versus another.

Sheila Carroll: That first person language, I think there is awareness being raised to that, especially around weight. A person who carries extra weight, or a person who is struggling with their weight, or however you want to phrase it, instead of an obese person, or person living with obesity. I think that's an important way to talk about it, that we all need to just be aware of.

Lisa Belisle: Even in the way that, for example, we are reimbursed by healthcare organizations. They want a diagnosis of a person, and they want somebody classified, type one obesity, type two obesity. And every time there's a patient who comes in to see me and we talk about their weight and they see a diagnosis like that on their chart, it's so devastating to them in ways that I think we don't fully appreciate.

Sheila Carroll: It feels terrible. I can tell you. It's embarrassing. There's something really negative about it, and it hurts down deep inside.

Lisa Belisle: Yes.

Sheila Carroll: Because it's been translated to us that it's your fault, that you have obesity because it's your fault, as opposed to, well, I've never had cancer, but if you saw a cancer diagnosis on your chart, I'm not sure it would hit you in the same way. Oh, I caused this, I blamed myself for this. Maybe that is the case.

Lisa Belisle: I don't know. I did have breast cancer, and even though I acknowledge that it is a part of my health history, I don't necessarily love to see that on my chart. Because even with cancer, there is a sense. People with lung cancer, we always assume that it's because they smoked. Well, he smoked. We know that that's actually not true.

Sheila Carroll: Exactly.

Lisa Belisle: We aren't necessarily sure. We're showing up, we're engaging with the environment. There are things that we may or may not be doing more or less that might be impacting our health, but it is not always our fault.

Sheila Carroll: A hundred percent.

Lisa Belisle: And what you're describing, I just think is so important given the prevalence of what we're talking about. How can this be everybody's fault? Every individual person is showing up in the United States so that two thirds of our country now carries the diagnosis of overweight or obese. Each individual, it's all their faults?

Sheila Carroll: Yes. It's ludicrous if you really think about it. It is clearly the environment that we're living in, that we've created, or that has been allowed to be created. It's super challenging. When you start to really become aware of this, there are a lot of doctors now who are speaking up about this and really trying to push back on the ultra processed food industry and the government. Our government subsidizes corn, which gets turned into corn syrup, which goes into all of these highly processed foods, which makes them so cheap. So why is it more expensive to buy water than it is to buy a Coca-Cola? Because Coca-Cola has billions of dollars, and they fund some of the nutrition guidelines. They fund some of the research saying that soda is not that bad for you.

They're involved in the guideline creation. So it's really a systemic problem that's been created, but it's affecting every individual at such a deep level that it's hard to believe that we as a country aren't addressing this in a more intense, aggressive way. In my opinion, if everyone's health is going down, which we know it is, people are suffering more disease, more mental health problems, the life expectancy is actually falling in the United States, fertility rates are falling in the United States, and people are suffering, but we're not doing anything to help people. Well, what are we doing? We're creating these drugs potentially, like Ozempic, or offering these band-aid solutions to people, which are just making money for the drug companies. So it's a challenge. It needs to come top down. People need to be working at the government, and lots of physicians are trying to get some policy changes made.

And then there's where I'm at, the little person at the grassroots level. Okay, so this is where we live, this is what we live in. What can I do? I have a 12-year-old. How can I keep him safe? And that's how my view of food, my view of social media, my view of our world has shifted to, as a safety issue. We keep our kids safe in a lot of ways, wear a seatbelt in the car, bike helmets, safety on the water, things like that. We need to actually start looking at food as a safety issue for our kids. These highly processed foods, ultra processed foods, they're not harmless. They're not just empty calories, they're not junk. They're actually harming us and harming our kids, harming our microbiome, harming our mitochondria. And I don't want my son to experience that. So what can I do as his mom to create some boundaries around what I'm wanting him to have? It's obviously a work in progress as he ages, and he has his own agency and he can do his own thing. But what I'm trying to do is just instill in him the understanding of the big picture, and that ultimately he does have choices he can make, and he can choose to do the things that we think are going to keep us healthy.

Lisa Belisle: I'm glad that you are not losing hope on this, because I do think that when we talk about the healthcare environmental factors, it can be very overwhelming. And when you talk about you being the little person, which is a funny way to think about it, it's you against the world. I am Dr. Sheila Carroll, and I'm going to go out there.

Sheila Carroll: Well, you know what I mean? We're like the little, I don't make the rules.

Lisa Belisle: I get it. I totally get that.

Sheila Carroll: I have to live in this world.

Lisa Belisle: But I do think there's something about that that is so important. Okay, let's not give up here.

Sheila Carroll: Can't.

Lisa Belisle: I may not be testifying in front of Congress, but how do I show up every day and remain motivated to seek a healthier way, in whatever way it is that I'm operating personally or professionally? And that's what I think I'm hearing from you.

Sheila Carroll: Yes. How can I show up, help my son, help his friends, help our community? Because I don't want them to suffer unnecessary problems. There's enough problems that are necessary, or that you're going to bump into no matter what, but these ones that are avoidable, let's avoid them. And it's not that hard. It does take some education, and it does take effort, and it does take time, and it does take money, obviously. But I am hopeful, because I know the truth is, once you lose your health, what else is there? You can't live the life you want to live. If we're having teenagers who are having liver problems, they've lost their health and they're 15 years old. We have to help them, and we can. So let's try to prevent these kids from worsening their health, and just teach them how to protect their health.

Lisa Belisle: I think what you're describing is just incredibly important. I'm sure that I've given this example before in conversations I've had with other people who have come on the show. In working with patients, I've seen, for example, bad teeth. So by the time they're 20 years old, all of their teeth have been pulled for the rest of their lives. All they will ever have are something artificial that is put in their mouth to help them chew. So the things that we are doing in childhood are impacting people right now and forever. We have set people down a path. So I think what you're describing is something we all have to pay attention to, because we're not just talking about how it impacts children. We're talking about how it impacts people for decades, forever and ever, and probably the next generation and the next generation after that.

Sheila Carroll: Well, we know through epigenetics that yes, your kids' kids are being affected by what's going on right now. And I had a very similar patient to what you're talking about. She was actually the mom of my patient. She was having a baby, and the baby was in the NICU, and she had to leave the NICU one day. She was going to get all her teeth pulled out, and she was in her twenties. And I was blown away by that, and I had a long conversation. I was like, is this really the only choice you have? And she said, yes. It was the only choice she had. It is not a decision she made willy-nilly, and she didn't want that to happen either, but she had no other option. But because she's 20 something, that didn't just start. That's been going on probably since she was a baby. So nobody helped her take care of her body, and now she's having to do this thing that she doesn't want to do.

Lisa Belisle: It's challenging.

Sheila Carroll: But we can help our kids, and we can help all the kids in the United States do better.

Lisa Belisle: Well, I guess that's where I was going to go with this next. Obviously you and I have interfaced with people within the healthcare system. You're now interfacing with people adjacent to the healthcare system. And then there are people who really aren't even accessing either the healthcare system or people who are adjacent to the healthcare system, but they're still out there in the communities, and probably not getting the access to care they need, impacted by social determinants of health, like inadequate, healthy nutrition. So how do we pay attention to that, and how do we think about things from a population health standpoint?

Sheila Carroll: One way to go about at least trying to provide some really good nutrition for people, once they get into the school system, would be offering really healthy real food at schools. One of the leaders in the metabolic health movement, this physician named Robert Lustig, Dr. Lustig, he's written some amazing books. He calls the United States school system the number one fast food chain in the world. And it unfortunately is, because most schools are buying things from Sysco or these big companies, and they're highly processed foods, because there was some legislation a few decades ago that said that school food programs had to earn their keep and even make money, I think. So cooking real food became challenging for school systems from a financial standpoint. So again, we just looked at the money, and we didn't look at people's health. So there's a big movement in trying.

I know I'm in touch with our school department here. I am on the PTO. I forget what his official title is, but he's the director of all the food systems in Yarmouth. He's amazing. And he is highly aware. He's doing everything he can to get healthy, nutritious, real food in front of the kids. And there's a bunch of great programs. Eat Real is a really great program that is going on in the country. They'll come into a school system and help the school system pair up with farms and pair up with other suppliers to get real food. So this brings us to the topic of, okay, well, we live in this highly processed food environment, ultra processed foods, where it's reported that 67% of a teen's daily energy intake is coming from these highly processed foods. The solution to that is we need to start shifting away from some of these highly processed foods to more real food.

And if you were only eating real food, minimally processed food, we wouldn't be having these health problems that we're having today, because real food has fiber, real food has healthy fat, real food has protein, complex carbohydrates, and our bodies were designed to run on that. And also, if you're choosing real food, you are allowing your body's hormones, the hunger hormones, to function as they were designed to. And so people eat less when they're eating real food instead of highly processed food, because there's something about the ultra processing of the food that is, for lack of a better word, messing up people's hunger signals, so they're hungrier, so they eat more calories and eat more food in general when they're eating ultra processed food. Anyways, that was a long answer.

Lisa Belisle: Well, it's good. You're bringing forth solutions.

Sheila Carroll: Yeah, the solution. Thank you. So say your child is one of the ones who's eating 80% ultra processed food. As a parent, okay, alright, what can I do? Maybe I could bring that down to 60% over the next few weeks. What swaps can I make? How can I start to get my child interested in more real food? And then small step over time. The beauty of this is that once you start making some of these changes and you feel so good inside your own body. You don't even realize. That happened to me when I actually gave up eating flour and sugar a few years ago, and I didn't even realize how good I felt, because I didn't realize how bad I was feeling. I felt so good after that. I had so much more energy. I was sleeping better. I had less brain fog. And so I think that happens for kids too. When we shift their diets, they start to feel better, so it gets easier to feed them the foods that we want them to eat.

Lisa Belisle: Yeah, I agree. And I recently read a study where, I think it was China, but there was a specific type of drink that children were drinking, like bubble tea or something like that. And they were finding that the more of this they drank, the more mental health issues they had, the more depression, the more anxiety. And I was thinking, oh my gosh, here's this thing that we think is just a drink. But really it's having a negative impact on people's emotional and mental wellbeing at a young age. So bringing the real foods and fewer of the ultra processed foods to people and saying, okay, let's consider making some changes.

Sheila Carroll: And what you're talking about, it has nothing to do with somebody's weight. So you could have a very slim, thin child, but if he's drinking these drinks, all of these Gatorades and soda and Prime or whatever, he's going to have negative health effects from this ultra processed food, even though he's thin. So I think a lot of people think, oh, well, he's doing fine, he looks fine. There are hidden problems that will eventually come to light. But it doesn't only have to do with weight as to why you would want to feed your child real food. It has to do with just health in general, mental health, physical health.

Lisa Belisle: Clearly, you and I are of a mind about this, so I'm glad that you were willing to come in and have a conversation with me. Sheila, how can people learn more about the work that you do?

Sheila Carroll: I have a website. It's my whole name, sheilacarrollmd.com, and they could email me through there. On my website I have a free guide that is called How to Make Parenting Around Food Feel Less Hard, so people could download that if they wanted to. And I write a little blog. I'm just trying to provide some education and things, just things that you and I talked about today.

Lisa Belisle: I appreciate your taking the time to come and talk to me today.

Sheila Carroll: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Lisa Belisle: It's been a lot of fun. I encourage you to learn more about Dr. Sheila Carroll and the work that she is doing as a certified life and weight coach, but I don't think that weight enters much into the work that you do. More of a nutrition, health coach.

Sheila Carroll: Health, I think. Children, health for sure. But the reason why sometimes people seek out a health coach is because of their weight. So you see what I'm saying? A red flag for parents is sometimes, oh, the doctor told me my child is overweight. Then that gets them looking. So the weight is kind of like a marker, but really what we're going for is health.

Lisa Belisle: Dr. Sheila Carroll, who is going to coach your family back to health, that's what we're going to say. I encourage you to look into the work that she's doing, and actually maybe just on your own, learn more about ultra processed foods and real foods and how they impact your health and the health of your children. I'm Dr. Lisa Belisle. You have been listening to or watching our video podcast, Radio Maine, which explores creativity in the human spirit and is sponsored by the Portland Art Gallery in Portland, Maine. And today it has been, again, my great pleasure to have Dr. Sheila Carroll with me, solving the problems of the world. Thank you.

Sheila Carroll: Thanks, Lisa.