S1 E7: Family, Food & Finding Balance — Life on GLP-1s with Emma’s Health Mission

A whole generation of people are coming off GLP-1 medications, looking in the mirror and wondering what to do about what they see. In this episode I'm joined by Olivia Falcon, an award-winning journalist and the founder of The Editor's List, the UK's leading cosmetic concierge. Olivia is the former health and beauty director of Tatler, where she edited thirteen of the Tatler Cosmetic Surgery Guides, building an unrivalled contact book of the world's best aesthetic and wellness practitioners and personally road-testing very nearly every non-invasive treatment out there. She has worked at British Vogue, is a contributing beauty editor at Country and Townhouse, and writes regularly for The Times, Condé Nast Traveller, The Daily Mail, Grazia and The Telegraph. She hosts The Editor's List Live in London, sits on Annabel's wellness committee, and has spoken openly on ITV's This Morning about her own experience with Ozempic and Mounjaro. We talk about her own journey and what surprised her, what genuinely works for a face that has changed after significant weight loss and what is being oversold, what is actually worth paying for and the most common waste of money she sees, how to vet a practitioner and the red flags that should make you walk straight back out, what separates the very best practitioners from the merely competent, how honest aesthetic content and endorsements online really are, and where the line sits between looking after yourself and chasing something that isn't achievable. 🎙 Hosted by: Marc McKee 📍 Featuring: Olivia Falcon, founder of The Editor's List Connect with Olivia 🔗 Website: https://editorslist.co.uk 📸 Instagram: @TheEditorsList 🎟 The Editor's List Live: https://editorslist.co.uk/events/ell27/ Connect with Marc 📲 TikTok: @my.journey.with.marc 📸 Instagram: @my.journey.with.marc 📺 YouTube: @myjourneywithmarc 🎧 Podcast Instagram: @this.is.my.journey.podcast 🎧 Podcast: https://www.myjourneywithmarc.com/podcast

When you change on a GLP-1, everyone asks how you are doing. Nobody asks your partner. In 2023 there were 102,678 divorces in England and Wales, and the marriages that ended had lasted a median of twelve point seven years. These were not whirlwind mistakes. They were long marriages, with mortgages and children and shared history, that came apart anyway. And here is the thing nobody has measured. When one person in a couple changes dramatically on a GLP-1, their body, their confidence, the way strangers look at them, the way they walk into a room, what happens to the other one? There is no study for that. There is no leaflet that comes with it. There is only what actually happens in the therapy room, week after week, when two people who love each other find the ground has moved underneath them. In this episode I’m joined by Jonathan Van Viegen, a Canadian couples therapist and relationship coach, a Registered Psychotherapist in Ontario with a Master’s in Marriage and Family Therapy and more than a decade of clinical work behind him. Jonathan has built an audience of hundreds of thousands of people online with blunt, jargon-free relationship advice, built on a principle I love: connection beats chemistry, every time. He describes himself as the therapist your therapist follows, and his stated mission is to help save a million marriages. His first book, Choosing Us: Stories and Strategies to Strengthen Your Marriage from Inside the Therapy Room, is published by Jossey-Bass on 3 November. We talk about what actually walks into his therapy room when one person in a couple changes fast, the insecurity on both sides of it and why the partner who stayed the same is the person nobody ever asks about, the two questions almost nobody can honestly answer yes to underneath, why people do not take action when they do not truly believe they will succeed, what being chosen and cherished looks like as a behaviour on an ordinary Tuesday, what the therapy internet has got wrong about attachment styles and triggers and labels, what a better conversation actually sounds like and how to start one, the question to ask your partner about what makes them want to stay, what new attention and new confidence does to a marriage, and what genuinely reignites desire after years together. 🎙 Hosted by: Marc McKee 📍 Featuring: Jonathan Van Viegen, Registered Psychotherapist (Ontario) 🔗 Connect with Jonathan Van Viegen 📸 Instagram: @jonathanvanviegen 🔗 Website: jonathanvanviegen.com 📖 Book: Choosing Us: Stories and Strategies to Strengthen Your Marriage from Inside the Therapy Room, published by Jossey-Bass, 3 November 2026. Pre-order: jonathanvanviegen.com/book 🔗 Connect with Marc 📲 TikTok: @my.journey.with.marc 📸 Instagram: @my.journey.with.marc 📺 YouTube: @myjourneywithmarc 🎧 Podcast IG: @this.is.my.journey.podcast 🎧 Podcast: www.myjourneywithmarc.com/podcast 🎧 New episodes every Tuesday at 6am. Sources referenced in this episode: Office for National Statistics. “Divorces in England and Wales: 2023.” Published 2 July 2025. 102,678 divorces in total; median duration of marriage at divorce for opposite-sex couples 12.7 years. No published research currently exists on relationship outcomes following rapid weight loss or transformation. That gap is stated in the episode as a gap rather than filled with an estimate.

Ninety-one per cent of people who have actually taken these medications would recommend them to a friend who was struggling with their weight. Now ask those same people whether they've told their friends they're on it. That figure comes from a survey of nearly thirteen hundred UK adults published in BMJ Public Health. The same study found people who had taken these drugs were around seven times more likely than people who hadn't to reject the idea that they're unsafe or unproven, a mismatch the researchers themselves flagged between what the public assumes and what the people living it experience. Only nine per cent first heard about these medications from a healthcare professional. Sixty per cent first heard about them from the news. In this episode I'm joined by Dr Treena Orchard, an anthropologist, author and activist whose work on sexuality, gender and health sheds new light on how people behave in the twenty-first century. She's an Associate Professor in the School of Health Studies at Western University in Ontario, and the author of Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps. Her next book, Vulnerbro, looks at men, masculinity and vulnerability. In 2025 she was named a YMCA Woman of Excellence for Social Justice. We talk about what happens to your sense of self when your body changes faster than you do, why identity lags so far behind the mirror, the disclosure dilemma and what people are really afraid of losing, why this particular medication has been moralised when nobody demands you disclose your blood pressure tablets, what the advertising for these drugs is actually selling, what happens inside a long marriage when one person changes and the other didn't sign up for it, how differently the world treats a body when that body changes, and why almost no men talk about any of this. 🎙 Hosted by: Marc McKee 📍 Featuring: Dr Treena Orchard, Western University 🔗 Connect with Dr Treena Orchard 📸 Instagram: @treenaorchard 🔗 Website: treenaorchard.com 📖 Book: Sticky, Sexy, Sad: Swipe Culture and the Darker Side of Dating Apps 🔗 Connect with Marc 📲 TikTok: @my.journey.with.marc 📸 Instagram: @my.journey.with.marc 📺 YouTube: @myjourneywithmarc 🎧 Podcast IG: @this.is.my.journey.podcast 🎧 Podcast: www.myjourneywithmarc.com/podcast 🎧 New episodes every Tuesday at 6am. Sources referenced in this episode: Auerbach N, Liu VN, Huang DR, Clift AK, Al-Ammouri M, El-Osta A. "What are community perspectives and experiences around GLP-1 receptor agonist medications for weight loss? A cross-sectional survey study in the UK." BMJ Public Health 2025;3:e002519 Rad J, Melendez-Torres GJ. "Critical discourse analysis of social media advertisements for GLP-1 receptor agonist weight loss drugs." BMC Public Health 2025;25:2996

Sport England's Active Lives survey puts it starkly: 11.8 million adults in England, nearly one in four of us, are classed as inactive. That means less than thirty minutes of moderate movement in an entire week. Now put that next to what happens on GLP-1 medication. In the STEP 1 trial of semaglutide, roughly 39% of the weight people lost was lean mass. Not fat. Muscle and bone. The scaffolding you need to hold your body up for the rest of your life. So the number on the scale goes down, everyone congratulates you, and something you can't see is quietly going down with it. In this episode I'm joined by Dr Ash Bowden, a UK-trained, Australia-based GP with a background in Sport and Exercise Science, known online to a lot of you as Doctor Do More. He's passionate about lifestyle medicine, physical activity and health literacy, and he makes movement feel like something you do rather than something you're told off about. We talk about what's actually happening to muscle and bone during rapid weight loss and how worried people should be, what "protect your muscle" looks like in practice on a Tuesday evening when you're exhausted, how to start moving when you have no energy in the early weeks, where to begin with resistance training if a gym feels intimidating, whether walking is genuinely enough, what movement does for maintenance that food alone can't, and where to start if you have a bad back, sore knees, a disability or a lot of weight still to lose. 🎙 Hosted by: Marc McKee 📍 Featuring: Dr Ash Bowden (Doctor Do More) 🔗 Connect with Dr Ash Bowden 📸 Instagram & Facebook: @doctordomore 🔗 Clinic: domoremedical.com.au 🔗 Connect with Marc 📲 TikTok: @my.journey.with.marc 📸 Instagram: @my.journey.with.marc 📺 YouTube: @myjourneywithmarc 🎧 Podcast IG: @this.is.my.journey.podcast 🎧 Podcast: www.myjourneywithmarc.com/podcast 🎧 New episodes every Tuesday at 6am. Sources referenced in this episode: Sport England, Active Lives Adult Survey (Nov 2024–Nov 2025, published April 2026) Wilding et al., STEP 1 trial, New England Journal of Medicine, 2021, body composition analysis

The volume goes. The skin envelope stays. And there is a line somewhere between what a good skincare routine can do and what only an operating theatre can do, a line almost nobody in the beauty industry has any commercial interest in drawing clearly for you. Here's something that might surprise you. Everyone assumes the weight-loss injections have triggered a tummy-tuck boom. But BAAPS's own audit shows UK cosmetic surgery actually fell two per cent in 2025, with abdominoplasty down four per cent. Meanwhile in the United States, more than 800,000 aesthetic patients were using a prescription weight-loss medication in 2024, and one in five of them had already had surgery. In this episode I'm joined by Dr Frank Agullo, a double board-certified plastic surgeon based in El Paso, Texas, known to three and a half million people online as Dr WorldWide. He trained at the Mayo Clinic, holds certification from both the American Board of Plastic Surgery and the American Board of Surgery, and is a Clinical Associate Professor at Texas Tech's Paul L. Foster School of Medicine. He's the founder of Southwest Plastic Surgery, where patients fly in from as far as Canada and South America. We talk about why the skin doesn't know you lost the weight the healthy way, what actually happens to the face, breasts and midsection and why they behave so differently, what "Ozempic face" really is underneath, what a topical can genuinely do and where it stops, how stable your weight needs to be before surgery is sensible, whether loose skin really retracts if you wait, and what before-and-after culture online completely hides. 🎙 Hosted by: Marc McKee 📍 Featuring: Dr Frank Agullo, MD, FACS 🔗 Connect with Dr Agullo 📸 Instagram: @realdrworldwide 📲 TikTok: @realdrworldwide 🔗 Website: www.agulloplasticsurgery.com 🔗 Connect with Marc 📲 TikTok: @my.journey.with.marc 📸 Instagram: @my.journey.with.marc 📺 YouTube: @myjourneywithmarc 🎧 Podcast IG: @this.is.my.journey.podcast 🎧 Podcast: www.myjourneywithmarc.com/podcast 🎧 New episodes every Tuesday at 6am. Sources referenced in this episode: BAAPS Annual Audit, procedures performed in 2025, published 2026 American Society of Plastic Surgeons, 2024 Procedural Statistics Report, released 25 June 2025 (GLP-1 figures from the survey component, US only)