1KHO 891: When Did Every Childhood Activity Start Coming With a Treat? | Kelly Leveque, Body Love

**Ginny Yurich** (0:00)
There are so many things we think about when we think about our kids' future. What will they become? Who will they marry? Where will they live? What will our family look like 10, 20, 30 years from now? And somewhere along the way, we realize that planning for their future also means planning for the possibility that life doesn't go exactly the way we hope. That's why we have life insurance. Not because we live afraid of what might happen. Actually, it's the opposite. It gives us peace of mind, knowing that if something happened to one of us, the other wouldn't suddenly be trying to figure out how to support five kids while also dealing with unimaginable loss. If you've been putting this off, Ethos makes getting life insurance remarkably simple. It's 100% online. You can get a quote in seconds, apply in minutes, and potentially get same-day coverage. There's no medical exam, just a few simple health questions. You can get up to $3 million in coverage with some policies as low as $30 a month. You spend your whole life taking care of your family. This is one more way to take care of their future. Take 10 minutes to get covered today with life insurance through Ethos. Get a free quote at ethos.com/1000hours. That's ethos.com/1000hours.
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I'm the founder of 1000 Hours Outside.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:08)
And I'm so excited today because I get the chance to talk to Kelly Leveque. Welcome Kelly. I've been a fan for such a long time.

**Kelly Leveque** (1:16)
Oh Ginny, I have been a fan as well. I'm like fangirling over here, so excited to talk to you just like the movement you've created to get kids outside, all the education you give and the people you interview. Like I'm so honored to be a guest. Thanks for having me.

**Ginny Yurich** (1:31)
We're going to be talking about some incredibly important topics today. We're talking about health for adults, but even more specifically health for our kids. And we're talking about sugar. And we're going to be talking about what is the best way to feed our children and to feed our families. You have a phenomenal book. It's called Body Love, Live in Balance, Way What You Want and Free Yourself from Food Drama Forever. You have on your website, there's all sorts of things that people can find there. Courses, PDFs, instructional videos. It's called bewellbykelly.com. And then you have your own podcast with phenomenal episodes. But could you give us a little bit of your backstory where you got interested in nutrition to begin with?

**Kelly Leveque** (2:09)
Sure.
So I spent eight years in cancer and genetics after I graduated from the University of Southern California in Los Angeles. And I fell in love with nutrition in high school. My first class was health.
And it was a science elective that I took. And then at USC, I took this course called Nature of Human Health and Disease, where I learned all about metabolic disease states. So metabolic syndrome, type 1 diabetes, which is an autoimmune disease, type 2 diabetes.
I learned about Alzheimer's and dementia, all of the cascading effects of metabolic disease. And at that point, I was born in 1983, so I'm going to date myself here.
But I was growing up in the diet era. Like, it was Atkins. Snackwells. Yeah, it was Snackwells. It was O-Lean. It was, you know, Fen-Fen. It was all of these, like, weird ways to lose weight, count calories, control. I played soccer growing up. I was really active. I had access to all the Costco pantry snacks at my parents' house growing up. I was, like, typical 80s, 90s adolescent, right? So help yourself to the frozen taquitos from Costco, but also mom's plating up a plain chicken breast, cottage cheese, an iceberg salad and some rice, right? So, like, now you know who I am, where I come from. But this course taught me everything about blood sugar. And what I found so fascinating about blood sugar was that my body was amazing. I could eat whatever I wanted, and my body was constantly trying to maintain homeostasis, or what we call this balance in blood sugar. So your blood sugar is constantly going up and coming down based on the foods that you eat. And the more balanced you eat, the more of a low flowing curve that you have versus aggressive spikes and crashes. And I thought, wow, that's amazing. And now I don't need to have guilt and shame over having like processed foods or sugar or candy. But now I understand why when I have those things, I'm craving them the whole rest of the day. And I have all this power now to understand that plating up the foods that don't cause aggressive spikes and crashes in my blood sugar, not only do they give me sustained energy throughout the rest of the day, they're what my body is built from, proteins which break down to amino acids, fats which break down to fatty acids, and slow fiber based carbohydrates, which can kind of give me this slow drip of blood sugar the rest of the day. I had this aha moment of, oh, this doesn't have to be hard. We don't need to count macros. We don't need to count calories. I do not need an eat and do not eat list. What I need to understand is what does this stuff digest into, and how is that impacting my energy right now and the rest of the day? And so that was like, everyone needs to know this. I need to distill this information down into something that is so easy. And that's what I did with my first book Body Love, which we're coming up on 10 years of it being available and being a best seller. And I'm so proud of it. Like this truly is easy, accessible science for people who don't find themselves interested in the science of nutrition or blood sugar. And something that is actionable at your home, on your plate, sharing it with your family, plating meals up for your kids. And so it stood the test of time. I'm really happy I didn't get on some crazy, restrictive keto carnivore diet book, but it is what it is. It's out there in the world. And so after eight years in cancer and genetics, one of my best friends was like, Kelly, we are all annoyed with you talking about health and nutrition at parties, and at all of our get-togethers. So go back to school, make it a career, and that's what I did. First graduated from a health coaching program, but then went back to school at UCLA and UC Berkeley, took nutrition courses, sat for a clinical nutrition exam, and have been in practice since 2012