The Habit Healers

What if your bedroom thermostat is the most underused metabolic tool in your house? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I unpack what the research actually shows about brown adipose tissue, insulin sensitivity, and how a small shift in bedroom temperature at night can change your blood sugar, your energy, and how your body handles food the next day. I walk you through a landmark four-mon...

Your cholesterol panel can look completely normal and still miss the cardiovascular risk that lands people in the hospital. Almost half of heart attack patients have an LDL under 100. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the five markers that reveal what your standard lipid panel was never designed to see. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, a board-certified lifestyle medicine phys...

PCOS just got an official new name, and if you were diagnosed back in your twenties or thirties, you need to hear what changed. After a global consensus process involving 56 medical and patient organizations, polycystic ovary syndrome has been renamed polyendocrine metabolic ovarian syndrome, or PMOS. The new name points to where the real engine of this condition has been hiding all along. In this...

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 yours...

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-spe...

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 b...

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 vocabul...

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...

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 c...

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,...

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...

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 th...

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. L...

Your blood pressure spikes every single morning, and a standard doctor’s visit can miss it completely. That morning blood pressure surge is when heart attacks and strokes cluster most, yet most people never know theirs is dangerously high because office readings look fine by mid-morning. In this episode, I explain why high blood pressure in the morning is so commonly overlooked, and what researche...

If you’re tired but can’t sleep, or you fall asleep fine and still wake up exhausted, the problem may not be your bedtime at all. In this episode I walk you through why better sleep actually starts in the morning, and a simple four-part protocol to reset your circadian rhythm from both ends of the day. Most sleep advice obsesses over the hour before bed, but the research points somewhere most peop...

Is your smartwatch actually accurate? Your Apple Watch, Garmin, Fitbit, Oura Ring, or Whoop band tracks up to fourteen health numbers, but it never tells you which ones come from a real measurement and which ones are an algorithm’s best guess. In this episode, I break down exactly which wearable health metrics you can trust and which ones to ignore. Here’s what I want you to know. The most famous...

I’m writing this from Bend, Oregon, where we parked our RV for the start of a summer road trip. Chef Martin Oswald is across the Atlantic, where Europe has been baking in early summer heat. And that’s how we ended up here, making Vietnamese summer rolls on a Wednesday morning with viewers from all over the world watching us fumble through German vocabulary and debate the correct pronunciation of “...

What if the biggest driver of skin aging isn’t sun or genetics, but your blood sugar? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’ll show you how to boost collagen naturally and rebuild your skin from the inside, no expensive serums or collagen supplements required. Here’s something I find most people have never heard. A chemical process called glycation, the same reaction that browns a steak,...

If you’ve tried every sleep tip on the internet and you still wake up at 3 a.m. or drag through your afternoons, the problem probably isn’t your bedroom. It’s everything you’re doing during the day. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and on this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through seven research-backed sleep habits, one for each day of the week, that build better sleep hours before you ev...

What if better sleep has nothing to do with your bedroom? In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I’ll show you how to sleep better naturally by building a full-day sleep system, no supplements, no apps, no expensive gadgets required. Here’s the truth I share with my patients all the time: if you’ve struggled with sleep for years, your sense of “normal” has quietly drifted. You’ve adjusted t...

Your fasting glucose is normal, so why is your A1c going up? If that question has ever left you confused, this episode is for you. I’m Dr. Laurie Marbas, and on The Habit Healers Podcast I explain why a single morning blood draw can miss the most important window in your metabolic health: the hours after you eat. We start with a surprising idea borrowed from engineering, a 1949 mathematical proof...

Why does grip strength predict how long you’ll live better than your blood pressure does? In this episode, I dig into the science of muscle power, grip strength, and longevity, and why the strength that keeps you independent as you age is not the kind you build with slow, heavy lifting. Most of us assume that staying strong is about how much we can lift. But here’s the part most people miss: as we...

What’s your heart’s GPA? The American Heart Association built a cardiovascular health score called Life’s Essential 8, and the average American adult is pulling a D+. In this episode of The Habit Healers Podcast, I walk you through the eight measures that determine your heart health, why a single composite score is more useful than any one lab value, and how to figure out which habit to change fir...

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, an...

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 T...