On this week's episode, Julie Goodwin, the first-ever winner of MasterChef Australia, bravely shares her personal journey through depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma.
Julie’s candid revelations from her new memoir, "Your Time Starts Now," offer a raw and honest look at her struggles and the healing power of vulnerability.
Learn how writing and promoting her book took Julie on an emotional journey and how she found unexpected solace in connecting with readers who had similar experiences.
Reflecting on growing up in a household where diet culture influenced every meal, Julie discusses the impact of 80s dieting trends, how they shaped her food habits, and her efforts to foster a healthier approach for her children.
Our conversation also explores evolving relationships with alcohol and the moment of clarity when it no longer served its purpose.
But what does it take to heal from trauma and addiction truly? Tune in to find out.
Want to feel more in control around food? Check out my Stop Struggling With Food Guide, currently on sale for 40% off.
You’ll also find 50 of my favourite recipes to get you inspired!
Get my Free 5 Day Course to help you stop binge and emotional eating.
Looking for more support to feel in control around food? I'd love to support you in my Binge Free Academy.
If you don't already - come follow me on the gram at @nude_nutritionist (no nude pics, sorry).
Want to share some feedback or have an idea for an episode, I'd LOVE to hear from you - hit me up at hello@lyndicohen.com
On this week's episode, Julie Goodwin, the first-ever winner of MasterChef Australia, bravely shares her personal journey through depression, anxiety, addiction, and trauma.
Julie’s candid revelations from her new memoir, "Your Time Starts Now," offer a raw and honest look at her struggles and the healing power of vulnerability.
Learn how writing and promoting her book took Julie on an emotional journey and how she found unexpected solace in connecting with readers who had similar experiences.
Reflecting on growing up in a household where diet culture influenced every meal, Julie discusses the impact of 80s dieting trends, how they shaped her food habits, and her efforts to foster a healthier approach for her children.
Our conversation also explores evolving relationships with alcohol and the moment of clarity when it no longer served its purpose.
But what does it take to heal from trauma and addiction truly? Tune in to find out.
Want to feel more in control around food? Check out my Stop Struggling With Food Guide, currently on sale for 40% off.
You’ll also find 50 of my favourite recipes to get you inspired!
Get my Free 5 Day Course to help you stop binge and emotional eating.
Looking for more support to feel in control around food? I'd love to support you in my Binge Free Academy.
If you don't already - come follow me on the gram at @nude_nutritionist (no nude pics, sorry).
Want to share some feedback or have an idea for an episode, I'd LOVE to hear from you - hit me up at hello@lyndicohen.com
I was raised with. You know you shouldn't eat fat and you shouldn't. You know those bloody puffy rice cake things with cottage cheese, like absolutely soul-destroying stuff. I had a horrible relationship with food All through my life. I've gone you know what this is unhealthy. I'm not doing well drinking this much. I'm going to stop. I've got to have creative time in my week. I've got to have a little bit of solitude here and there in my week. It's just got to happen.
Speaker 2:You may have first heard of Julie Goodwin when she captured our hearts as the first ever winner of MasterChef Australia. I know I watched the entire series and fell in love with her then, and since then she has become a household name in Australia. Everyone knows her and very much known for her warmth, her personality, her down-to-earth cooking style and very, very delicious recipes. In fact, her first book, our Family Table, went immediately to number one, where it stayed for over 10 weeks, and it's now sold over 200,000 copies, which makes it one of Australia's largest selling cookbooks ever. But behind her smile and laughter, julie has struggled with depression and anxiety, as well as addiction and trauma, and she shares her story candidly and beautifully in her new book your Time Starts Now, which I think is a spectacular read, a spectacular memoir for any person, and I do highly recommend.
Speaker 2:I'm lucky enough to sit down with Julie and ask her some questions, but hey, if you're new here to the podcast, my name is Lindy Cohen. Welcome to no Wellness Wankery. As a dietician and nutritionist, I'm here to help you be healthy without the nonsense, without the wellness wankery that makes it so tricky for us to just eat healthily, and eat when we feel hungry and stop when we feel full, and all those things we know we'd like to be better at, and I'm going to help you do that with some intuitive eating tips to help you eat more mindfully and with less guilt and less shame. Now it's time to talk to Julie. Well, julie, welcome to the show. I'm very, very happy to have you here. Thanks, lindy.
Speaker 2:I thought your book a memoir your Time Starts Now was truly. It was breathtaking. It was raw, it was beautiful, it was hard at times, and I just want to say thank you for writing it, because what you do is you share your highs and your lows and I, just before we get into it, I want to talk about that book promotion period, which I know you are in the throes of at the moment, and I think one of those hard things when you've written a book that is as vulnerable as this memoir is you have to rehash your very hard, tricky stories sometimes to people who have like just gotten a press release of like what your book is about and haven't taken the time to like understand it. How has that felt?
Speaker 1:Look, in all honesty, it's really nice to actually start an interview with someone acknowledging that they've read the book, because it is hard to have the sort of conversations around it with an interviewer who hasn't, and who may have only read the press release and only has those little same bullet points that everyone else has.
Speaker 2:So thank you, thank you for reading it, you used to keep getting asked the exact same question and giving the exact same answer.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but the thing that obviously it was a hard thing to write but I wasn't prepared for how hard it was to release, actually At the very start. You know the very first interview that came out, you know the tabloid media they got hold of like a really salacious headline and that came this clickbaity thing and they put up pictures of my face, sort of in ugly crying mode from MasterChef a few years ago, and I just thought, oh my God, what have I done? But being on book tour has been very healing because I'm going face to face with rooms full of people who come up and meet me afterwards and I can forget about all that tabloid crap because it's so unimportant in the face of the conversations that I'm having with real life people.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and the conversation you're having in this book, which is spectacular and I would like everyone listening to read it. What it is is you're sharing the vulnerability and I think we have this fear that once we tell people our darkest moments, the things that we feel the deepest shame around and you reveal a lot of those moments in this book I think we think that people are going to judge us and think less of us, and yet what I think happens is the exact opposite. It's by sharing our shame stories that we actually help everyone else go. Oh, we can sigh in relief because we realize it's not just us, it's not just us who carries around these really heavy, imperfect moments. So that's what I took away. Is that you kind of? In this book, you're giving us permission to be human? It's the vulnerability for me that I think makes this book pretty special. Did it feel that way writing this book? Did it feel like you were alleviating that shame? Was this book cathartic?
Speaker 1:Yeah, look, in many ways it was, and I'm still working through whether it's been a cathartic process, but it's becoming more so, like I say, as I meet people and hear other people's stories. Writing it was freaking brutal. It was really hard. I relied on my psychologist to help me through some of it. I had to have some really hard conversations, you know, because this is not just me telling my story.
Speaker 1:This is publishing a book that's going to go out into the world. It's got things about my parents in there and it's got, you know, things about other people, and I don't like to tell other people's stories, but in the telling of my story I have to touch on other people, you know. So I've had to speak to some of those people and say this is going to impact you as well. But you know, my parents have been so gracious about the whole thing, which has blown my mind, because you know they're boomers, right, and you know boomers don't air our dirty laundry and it's the whole that culture that we, you know, stiff up a lip and soldier on and and we don't talk about the hard stuff and we don't talk about the, the, you know, the undainty stuff, um, so I'm really proud of them for just saying you know what the world has changed and we wish there'd been more support back when you needed it, when you're a kid, when you're a teenager, even as a young mum. You know that's now 28 years ago, holy hell. So you know there is better support now. But this is in the writing of this book, lindy. So I mean, we all know that we're all talking more about mental health and we're all talking, you know, same with what you do. We're talking more about healthy diet, culture and all that sort of stuff instead of shaming people.
Speaker 1:But I think where we need to land a lot of us is to give ourselves permission to have that conversation about ourselves. So I don't know anyone who wouldn't say are you OK? And if somebody said to me, no, I'm not, it would be what can I do? But how many of us are willing to say I am struggling? You know, we've got to let go of years and years and years of conditioning, of count your blessings. Always be grateful. There's always someone worse off than you.
Speaker 1:All of that is true, all of that is valid and perspective is important. But we also need to be able to say yeah, all of that is true and I am grateful and I do have a roof over my head and I've got a beautiful family and I have my physical health. Whatever it is that you have to be grateful for, however, I am struggling. I can't cope. I feel sad too often. I can't stop crying at the moment, I can't feel joy in the things that used to bring me joy. I don't feel a connection with the people around me. We have got to be able to let go of all the shaming that comes from the outside, from the internet, from the first world problems. Crowd and say I have perspective, I have gratitude, I count blessings and still I'm having a struggle and I need help.
Speaker 2:So it's having better conversations, and sometimes very hard conversations, with the people closest to us, which I think feels incredibly brave. You know that's the irony. You know we've been told that having a mental illness means you're weak and so you must hide it. But actually that is the kind of way where we're slinking off and not confronting, whereas the saying I'm not okay. That is a very hard thing and it actually takes a very brave person to be able to do that it doesn't.
Speaker 1:I wish it didn't, you know. I wish there wasn't that feeling of shame. I'm trying to normalize it. In my own household used to be. We'd sit around the dinner table and we'd go around the table asking highlight of the day, and I loved that because no matter how shitty a day they've had, they've got to think of something good about it. And it was very distressing to me how few times it was dinner, you know. But then, after I went through all of this, I'm like that's not the only thing. I need to be teaching these boys that they need to look for the positive. I also need to teach them that they're allowed to say when they're struggling. So now we still do highlight of the day, because it's still important to look for the good and to feel that gratitude.
Speaker 1:But then we go around where's your head at? And that's where they get to say you know what? I had a really bad day at work. My boss was hard on me today. I don't think it was fair and we can either go into it or they can say I don't really want to talk about it, but that's why I'm a bit quiet at dinner, you know. So the whole family gets to be a little bit aware of where we're all sitting in our own brain, and so I've got three young adult men who are absolutely comfortable talking about where their head's at, you know. So there's no shame around that, and I no longer say no, no, no.
Speaker 2:I don't want to hear that, I just want to hear the highlight.
Speaker 1:You know there's learning for me too. I'm the product of my parents, they are the product of their parents, and you know we've got to. When we know better, we got to do better. That's what I'm trying to crack open, you know.
Speaker 2:Amen, and it's also realizing that your parents were raised in a certain way and they handed down to you the best blueprints that they were given. They probably made a whole bunch of improvements based on how they were raised. In a way, it helps us to forgive the little things that may have happened in our childhood to go. You really were doing your best, you really did have my best interest in heart and this was done to you in a worse way, and so every generation we are helping to change this so that, I mean, it sounds like the way that you've raised your boys this is what you know we're talking to parents these days about is asking this how do you have better conversations around it? And I think this is a very, very tangible example. Also, this prioritization around the dinner table. This is a very important thing to me because it is a meeting place. It is more than just food. Food is always just more than just food, isn't it? And I want to talk to you about your relationship with food.
Speaker 2:You entered the MasterChef kitchen as a home cook. You didn't have any formal training and, in fact, that was kind of what was so spectacular to watch you. It's like I think many people listening, watched you in real time. Through that experience, fell in love with you is that we felt akin to you. You were everyone's favorite from the beginning and then you've gone on to just do all these incredible things. You've opened a cooking school, you're a radio host, you wrote bestselling books. Can you tell me a little bit about, I guess, your relationship with food throughout all of this? Because food is something that can be very healing and it sounds like to me that the way you use food these days is it's a creative outlet, it is something that brings you joy, it's a healthy coping strategy. Can you talk to me about that, certainly.
Speaker 1:I grew up in the 80s, teenagers throughout the 80s, and the diet culture then was out of control. My mum used to go to the Kilo Counters Club, which was like Pavo Weight Watchers and whatever diet she was on, we were all on. So we had some pretty sketchy experiences eating some of her diet food. But I know I was raised with, you know, you shouldn't eat fat and you shouldn't you know, those bloody puffy rice cake things were with cottage cheese, like absolutely soul-destroying stuff and and a horrible. I had a horrible relationship with food and, uh, you know, finish your plate because there's children starving in Africa, all of that kind of stuff. So I, you know, and all love to my mum.
Speaker 1:You know her mum was raised in the Depression. She was born at the very end of World War II. There was scarcity, there was a lot going on then that's not going on now, but I tried to flip that. So my boys have never been forced to finish their plate and generally my philosophy is that the food goes in the middle of the table and you take what you want. So I'm not serving up these heaping plates to everyone and then forcing it down them. You take what you want. I do say to them you've got to eat all the colours, and I also.
Speaker 1:Our house rule and it was just a rule was you don't have to like it and you don't have to finish it, but you do have to taste it, and they sort of took that on board, and I know that it's not that simple for everybody. Those are the rules that I've sort of changed from my childhood, but my beliefs around food. So you know, lindy, I cook with butter and I cook with joy and we eat fried things sometimes. And you know, for me, if you make it from scratch, you know exactly what's in it. So if you've got a particular dietary, you can make adjustments to a recipe to suit what you need. If your doctor's told you to lower your sodium intake, you eat something homemade. You lower the sodium that you put into it. You can't do that with food that you go out to eat or that you buy in. That's my contribution to health.
Speaker 2:I think it's spot on, because I think you have to have a certain degree of trust with food in order to go. I'm allowed to cook and I'm allowed to cook foods that aren't in a meal plan. I am allowed to cook in a way that varies from this perfect one version of health that I've been given, and I think cooking is like there's no better way to be connected to your food than by cooking what it is, and we used to do this thing where we'd like bake a cake from scratch and it was this beautiful, like connected process and that has been. You know, we've been told that that's not okay, but I think there's. I think that's wholesome and beautiful and there's time and place for all of that. And something where I think, if you're raising kids, where you're cooking healthy foods, less healthy foods, all in the same sphere, and we're all connected around the kitchen, I think that's health to me.
Speaker 1:Oh look, I think there's unhealthy eating. But I think that food itself if you're talking about natural food, the way our grandparents used to grow it, prepare it and all that sort of stuff food itself isn't bad. I think sometimes the way we use it as a crutch or as self-medicating, that can become problematic. But for me, food is at the centre of everything important in our lives. It's at the wedding, it's at the funeral, it's at the christening, it's at the birthday party, it's at the barbecue, the weekend gathering what are we bringing? What do you want to bring? What do you want to bring? It's at the heart of every dinner time.
Speaker 1:So for me and this will come as a surprise, I'm sure, to a lot of people the food is secondary to the act of gathering.
Speaker 1:So the reason I like to cook good food is, you're right, it's a creative outlet for me and it's one that contributed to my family. It's not like painting or anything where I had to feel sort of guilty and selfish to do it. I'm letting go of that, by the way, but you know, I could be creative and it was contributing to my family. The reason I like to make good food is because it made them happy to come to the table, you know, and they still are happy to come to the table. I've still got two of them living at home and the third one lives five minutes away and we eat together a lot. So my plan for world domination in that sense has been well executed and they're happy to come to the table. But once I've got them there, the food is secondary to the conversation, it's secondary to the connection, it's secondary to the. It is the team meeting and if you've got a business, you know that the team meeting is pretty crucial part of that business's culture.
Speaker 2:I mean, that's what's important, right, you know, not all the the fandangled things we think of success, but that connection. Can we talk about coping strategies for a moment, because my specialty is in people who feel like they use food as a coping strategy, as something to get through the day. There are lots of different coping strategies out there. One of those, you know some people overexercise, some people are addicted to gambling over shopping, whatever it is. And can we talk about alcohol as well? And in this book you talk about your relationship with alcohol, how it got to the point where you found you were going for a glass of wine and it became a habit. And then, at some point when did you realize that your relationship with alcohol wasn't serving you?
Speaker 1:Oh, look, in all honesty, I've realized that on and off over the years throughout my life, you know, I've got to a point where I've thought, yeah, this is not great. And I've stopped on and off throughout my whole life, but this time around it was just a part of this whole toxic mess that I was in, and I guess the realisation that it was like a proper problem was when I went to stop and I couldn't. So all through my life I've gone. You know what this is unhealthy. I'm not doing well drinking this much. I'm going to stop and I could stop. This time around I literally couldn't sleep unless I'd had wine to stop my brain and it just got out of control.
Speaker 1:And, yeah, I mean I would love to have been one of those people who took up over exercising. I'm sure that there's people who do that, who don't love it, but there's not the social stigma attached to exercising too much that there is to drinking too much, um, or eating too much, you know, um, self-medicating with sugar or with you know. So, yeah, it was doing me a massive disservice and it has all my life. In all honesty, I'm not one of those. I'm engineered for it to be a problem for me it's you know, there's science behind the genes of the whole thing and I'm certain that there's genetic predisposition, and so that doesn't help and my personality is kind of all or nothing.
Speaker 1:I'm not a by halves sort of person. So if I do something I go out hard on it and I always say that's why I'm grateful I've never been offered an illicit drug in my whole life because I'd be dead. I just have no doubt. I'm just not someone who can go oh that was nice, so I'll leave it at a little bit. I'm like oh that was nice, so more will be nicer, and a lot more will be a lot nicer, Sure.
Speaker 2:Exactly, I always think, with alcohol.
Speaker 2:I've recently not been drinking not drinking much for a year and a half at least now because I just like my brain a whole lot better when I don't drink alcohol.
Speaker 2:I like my life a whole lot better when I don't drink alcohol, and that's just what I found for me, which requires you to do a little bit of an experiment in addition to creating a life that you don't need to flee from, and I think this is perhaps the thing that's kind of underestimated a little bit, where we kind of do these coping strategies. We're like cool, I'm going to try the little tips and the tricks, but it's also doing the work which I think you have consistently done going to therapy, speaking to psychologists, psychiatrists, doing the hard stuff so that at the same time, you're using these coping strategies but you're also doing the hard work to kind of create a life that you feel like you don't need to take alcohol so you can fall asleep to quiet your brain. You're doing that hard work. Can you talk to me a bit about how you've come to feel about things like talk therapy?
Speaker 1:Well, you know, I was kind of forced into it. I went like all the way to the bottom before I, you know, you say willingness to do the work I didn't want to acknowledge anything. I didn't want to acknowledge anything. I didn't want to acknowledge a mental health condition, I didn't want to stop drinking, I didn't want to say there was a problem, I just wanted to feel better and I couldn't. And it became a life and death situation and I was taken to the hospital. It became a life and death situation and I was taken to the hospital and so I was kind of forced into a situation where it was like, okay, nothing I'm doing is working, I've just got to surrender to other people who know better than me and just, bloody will do it, you know. And so I did.
Speaker 1:The pieces of the puzzle fell into place slowly and one at a time, but that taught therapy about having to heal certain things and process some old traumas and go through all of that. What that has meant is that I don't need to drink now because the parts of me that wanted to be numb, that I needed to shut up, don't need to be numb anymore and they don't need to be silenced anymore and that sounds a little bit airy-fairy and out there, but it's just the truth and it's a, it's a process and it's one that I'll probably be going through, um, hopefully, in ever depleting circles for the rest of my life. You know, um, you've just got to keep doing the work, the physical side of it, the mental side of it, the the emotional side of it. That you know all the things, that all those memes on facebook that you roll your eyes and scroll on by until they mean something to you. Oh, my god, you cannot pour from an empty cup.
Speaker 1:That butterfly loaded pink thing in my face was right you know, so there comes a point where you sort of go maybe I shouldn't be annoyed by those things and question as to why they annoy me, and maybe it's because I need to hear it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you have to hear it. The algorithm realizes that you have to hear it. Listen, lady, I heard a conversation where you were speaking to Jessica Rowe and you were talking about. You gave this analogy about a German shepherd and in the relationship of talking about trauma and addiction, do you mind sharing that with us?
Speaker 1:Sure. So there's a statement that is Not all dogs are German Shepherds, but all German Shepherds are dogs, and that is a statement I've heard, not in relation to those things, but what occurred to me and this is when I was doing work on alcohol addiction, when I was in a rehab that all of the people that I met who were struggling with one addiction or another, every single one of them had some kind of trauma from their past all different kinds of trauma, not all the same trauma. And what occurred to me was that there are people who've suffered trauma that don't end up with an addiction. Right, we all know people who aren't addicted to anything that have had traumas, but every single person with an addiction that I have met has a trauma. So all German Shepherds are dogs.
Speaker 2:This is beautiful to me because I mean, it is backed up very much by the research. What we know is, with disordered eating and eating disorders, we know it's a coping strategy. It's not really about the food, as you said, not never really about the food. It is a way of coping and there is this very clear relationship between going through trauma and using food as an addiction, as a coping strategy, and I don't think I talk about that enough and I think it's a very clear relationship in the research to say that if you're kind of going I have experienced some real hardships in my life, some trauma, and you have notices coming up for you with food then I think it is very worthwhile exploring. And whether or not you're forced or you willingly go, I think getting that talk therapy and doing that hard work is very important.
Speaker 2:In addition to the coping strategies which you now sound like you've got a bucket load of, I have lots of coping strategies to deal with my anxiety and my shtick, including I need to go for walks, I need to do certain things. Sometimes it feels kind of exhausting having to keep up with the number of coping strategies in order just to stay afloat. Most people don't have to do all these things. But I feel like once you've got a mental illness, you're like okay, it's just one more thing to think about. Can you share with us some of those coping strategies that you rely on, that you kind of go no, these are what help me stay afloat.
Speaker 1:Sure, and I will point out, like you say, it can feel exhausting, it can feel overwhelming, and when you're really in that illness it's impossible, you know, and it's unhelpful for someone to come along and say, oh, just go for a walk and you'll be right, it's unhelpful and actually sometimes not possible. So my hope is that in having these conversations that people catch these conditions and these problems before they get to the point where it's really hard to put your feet on the floor in the morning. But for me now and this will sound like an exhausting laundry list, but it's just the stuff I have to do so I do take medication and I've got to say there's people who don't think that's the right thing to do. It's working for me, baby, and I don't want to go back to where I was Um, the number of women, older women, who've come up to me after my chats and said thank you for saying that about medication, because I've been made to feel very ashamed about it. So no, I'm sorry, it's working.
Speaker 2:You do it. Um, I want to jump in here and just confirm that I fully, wholeheartedly agree that medication can take, give you what feels like a lifeline, can help you feel like you are finally able to hold onto a flotation device so you do not feel like you are drowning. And if that's what, just what you need to make to balance out your, your chemical composition, and it's just one of the coping strategies you need, then I don't think we should let that shame and the stigma get in the way. I've used medication. You do. It is a lot more normal than you probably think.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so medication meditation. So I go to bed with headphones on every night and listen to a meditation.
Speaker 2:And some days I assume that's easier than other days.
Speaker 1:If it's a day where I can't cope and I think I'm not going to focus, what I do is I find, and it's, you know, in a practical sense. Insight Timer is one of the apps that's free and it's got hundreds of thousands of things. So if I don't think my brain is ready to find anything, I just put on something that's got binaural beats or solfeggio tones for healing or whatever, and that requires no effort from me and it's just putting things into my brain that alter my brainwaves, calm everything down and help me to sleep. So it's like soothing, it's lovely and it's healthy. You know, it's good for you.
Speaker 1:I swim, so I swim in the ocean. Obviously on book tour. I'm missing that enormously. I go to the gym and I do that a few times a week and literally only a few weeks ago I had a mental shift where I stopped thinking of it as something I've got to jam in between all my obligations for the day and just said you know what, this is one of my obligations for the day, so I'm not going to race there, I'm not going to drop, you know, the massage chair at the end because I'm in a hurry to get home, and so I'm not going to race there. I'm not going to drop, you know, the massage chair at the end because I'm in a hurry to get home and start dinner. I'm not going to, I'm going to give it its own space in the day and all of a sudden it became easier because it's just one of the things that needs to get done and so I can relax into it. I can enjoy it. I'm not, I'm going to be where my feet are and enjoy that moment and it does become enjoyable. Trust me, if I can enjoy it, anyone can enjoy it. I do art now, so I get back. I'm back into my music and my painting and all the things that used to bring me joy as a kid are an important part of my day. And if I'm starting to feel anxious or stressed or depressed and I have a look at what I've been up to quite often that's what's gone by the wayside and also prioritise my family. My three-year-old granddaughter can bring me up so comprehensively, quickly, completely and utterly that she is like a drug. You know, I see her and my heart lifts. I am so happy. You know she's beautiful.
Speaker 1:And babies and mindfulness man. What they can teach you about being in the present moment is phenomenal If you can get a hold of somebody's kid and just observe them for a bit. They are so good at mindfulness. They don't care what happened this morning. They couldn't give a rat what's going to happen next. They're're just, they're playing with the blocks or they're crunching the leaves. They might stop crunching the leaves to look at a bird. Go by, then they're back to the leaves, they are in their moments and um. So she is my greatest teacher at the moment.
Speaker 1:So those are those, and, of course, nutrition. Obviously I don't drink, um, and I'm trying to eat better. You know, when you stop drinking and this is just the truth you eat a lot more sugar for a little while and eventually I had to sort of go. Well, you know, it's been a good long while since I've drank. I probably need to say goodbye to this much sugar.
Speaker 1:I haven't quit sugar, but I'd replaced one thing, replaced a coping strategy. Yeah, for a little while, but that's a lot easier to wean off of, because it's not a mind-altering substance like alcohol is. I mean, it is to a degree, obviously, but it won't knock you out after you eat a whole block of chocolate. It won't put you to sleep. Actually I know because I tried. You eat a whole block of chocolate and it won't put you to sleep. Actually I know because I tried, yeah, so keeping.
Speaker 1:I've always liked good food and fresh food and food that's made from scratch, so that's not been a problem. But, yeah, just making sure I keep that in check. So those are the things. Those are the things. There's the physical things and I still see my psychologist. She's been a massive part of this whole journey for me. So you know it's, it's there's mental work, there's physical work, there's emotional work. There's, you know, there's remembering things, having to remember things over and over again. Oh yeah, that's right. You know I've got to do. I've got to have creative time in my week. I've got to have a little bit of solitude here and there in my week. It's just got to happen. That's maybe why I'm feeling like this.
Speaker 2:And I know that, as I said when I opened the book, tour is a particularly gruelling time.
Speaker 2:It is a very tough time, so hopefully you can get back to all those things that bring and spark that joy for you. Julie, it's funny because in your book you kind of have this mention to this idea that you were never meant to be famous, you were never meant to be this superstar that you turned out to, and you talk about how you're going to use it to do good and turn it into action, and I think you very much do. And also I want to say that, speaking to you, it doesn't feel like a surprise to me. It's very obvious to me how you are as influential as you are, because you are switched on, you are smart, you are so warm and it's easy to fall in love with you. Thank you, thank you for sharing your book with us. Your Time Starts Now is now available for you to buy, to read, to devour, and I really think that you will. I've loved reading this and, julie, I've loved speaking to you, so thank you.
Speaker 1:Thank you so much, Lindy. I really appreciate you giving me your time.