Sometimes the most unexpected medical events become the turning points that reshape everything we thought we knew about ourselves. A routine trip to the emergency room for chest pains can evolve into something far more significant than a health scare—it can become the moment that forces us to confront the gap between who we are and who we want to become.
For Kyla Holley, what began as a Saturday night dash to the hospital with mysterious chest pains evolved into a twenty-year journey of personal and professional transformation. The gallbladder surgery that followed wasn’t just a medical procedure—it became the catalyst that prompted her to lose 90 pounds, discover an undiagnosed eating disorder, and ultimately build a career helping others navigate their own complex relationships with food and weight.
“I think up to that point, I thought that my weight had had no effect on my health, no connection to it,” Holley reflects. “It held me back, not at all. And that really hit me that I thought, okay, this is a thing.” Her story illustrates how medical crises can serve as powerful wake-up calls, forcing us to make decisions about whether to accept our current circumstances or take active steps toward change.
The intersection of health scares and life transformation reveals something profound about human resilience and the capacity for reinvention at any stage of life.
When Health Reality Collides with Self-Perception
The emergency room can be a place of harsh truths. When Holley arrived with chest pains, doctors quickly ruled out heart problems but suspected gallbladder issues. Her physician’s explanation would prove more revealing than the diagnosis itself. “He sort of nodded wisely and he said, let’s just say you fit the criteria,” the doctor told her, referring to what medical professionals call “the five Fs”—female, 40s, fertile, family history, and fat.
That final criterion hit differently than the others. “Four of them I figured I really can’t do much about because it just is,” Holley explains. “The last one, though, the fat one, really shook me because I think up to that point, and I’d only just turned 40. Up to that point, I thought that my weight had had no effect on my health, no connection to it.”
This moment represents a common experience many face during medical crises: the sudden recognition that our bodies have been trying to communicate with us in ways we’ve chosen not to hear. The gallbladder surgery itself was routine, but the psychological impact proved transformative.
The power of such moments lies not in the medical event itself, but in how we choose to interpret and respond to the information it provides about our lives.
The Space Between Acceptance and Change
Holley’s response to her health crisis reveals the complex navigation between self-acceptance and the desire for change. She was careful to clarify that her motivation wasn’t about pursuing societal standards of thinness. “This wasn’t really a quest for thinness,” she emphasizes. “But it was just a quest for the inside and the outside to match.”
This distinction matters. Her weight struggles dated back to age 18, with gradual increases throughout her 30s—”only a couple of kilos a year, which doesn’t sound a lot. You know, that can come on very, very easily. But when you kind of add up a decade of two kilos a year, suddenly it’s a reasonably substantial amount of weight.”
At the time of her surgery, Holley was also navigating other life challenges: she was a mother of two young children, felt directionless in her career, and had been job-hopping due to boredom and lack of fulfillment. Unknown to her then, she was also struggling with binge eating disorder, which she simply attributed to laziness and lack of willpower.
The gallbladder surgery forced a decision point: “I really had to take my life back into my own hands and try and resolve a lot of the situation I was in.” Sometimes medical events provide the external pressure needed to address internal conflicts we’ve been avoiding.
The Ripple Effects of Personal Transformation
Two years after her surgery, Holley made a bold career pivot that would define the rest of her professional life. She began studying counseling and psychotherapy, approaching her education with intense personal interest. “It was quite narcissistic, I suppose, as a study method,” she admits. “But I learned so much. I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about human behavior and what sort of prompts a lot of our behaviors and our coping mechanisms.”
This self-focused approach to learning yielded unexpected professional opportunities. After earning her diploma, Holley took what she describes as a “leap of faith” and approached her surgeon with an eight-page proposal about providing psychological support for bariatric surgery patients. Her reasoning was practical: “There’s a whole load of people who are going for surgical options and non surgical options as well, without really having a look at their entire relationship with food, reassessing past trauma, reassessing how their relationship with food works.”
The surgeon agreed to a trial arrangement, beginning a professional relationship that has lasted over 16 years. This transformation from patient to practitioner illustrates how personal healing experiences can translate into meaningful ways to help others navigate similar challenges.
Amy Stone’s observation during their conversation highlights this connection: “It really speaks to taking your chance and asking for the thing that you want.” Sometimes our greatest professional contributions emerge from our most personal struggles.
From Weight to Wellness
Holley’s journey continued to evolve as she recognized the complexity of eating behaviors among her clients. This led her to pursue specialized training in eating disorders, ultimately completing a three-year Master Practitioner program in the UK. The irony wasn’t lost on her when she eventually realized she had been living with binge eating disorder herself.
“One of the delegates on the course said, out of interest, Kyla, have you ever had an eating disorder? And I said, no, I haven’t,” she recalls. “And it wasn’t really until later I got back to my hotel room and I don’t know how it hit me, but I suddenly thought, you idiot, of course you had an eating disorder.”
This revelation came after she had already founded the Australian Centre for Eating Behaviour and trained over a thousand health professionals. Her late self-recognition demonstrates how we can be simultaneously our best observers and our own blind spots.
Today, her work encompasses the full spectrum of weight and eating interventions, from natural approaches to bariatric surgery to the newer GLP-1 medications. Her perspective emphasizes the importance of addressing psychological factors regardless of the chosen intervention: “It’s far more beneficial to learn how to live comfortably in that environment than it is to find ways to reject the environment because you’re never really going to be successful in doing so.”
The Lasting Impact of Moment-in-Time Decisions
Holley’s story demonstrates how single medical events can catalyze profound life changes when we’re ready to receive their message. Her gallbladder surgery didn’t just resolve a physical problem—it provided the external validation needed to address long-standing internal conflicts about health, career, and self-worth.
The transformation required both courage and timing. At 40, with young children and an established life pattern, making such dramatic changes involved significant risk. Yet sometimes the alternative—continuing on an unsatisfying trajectory—poses the greater risk to our long-term wellbeing.
Her journey also illustrates the interconnected nature of personal and professional growth. The healing work she did for herself naturally evolved into a career helping others, suggesting that our greatest challenges often contain the seeds of our most meaningful contributions.
Twenty years later, Holley’s work continues to impact thousands of people struggling with similar issues. What began as an emergency room visit has rippled outward into a career dedicated to helping others navigate the complex relationships between food, weight, and psychological wellbeing—a reminder that our most difficult moments can become our greatest gifts, both to ourselves and others.
This article was inspired by an interview with Kyla Holley and Amy Stone on The Art of Imperfect Adulting podcast. To hear more compelling conversations like this one and receive special offers from our guests directly to your inbox, join our email community today.
Interview Transcript Kyla Holley with Amy Stone | The Art of Imperfect Adulting | September 11, 2025
Amy Stone [00:00:00]:
Foreign. Welcome to the art of imperfect adulting. I’m happy you’re here. Are you ready for a fun chat?
Kyla Holley [00:00:11]:
I will try to be. It’s early in the morning here, but I’m certainly looking forward to it.
Amy Stone [00:00:17]:
Very good. I start all my conversations by asking my guests what part of the world they call home. People might be able to guess from your accent, but tell us where you are.
Kyla Holley [00:00:27]:
Well, they probably won’t be able to guess by the accent because I grew up, I was born in the uk, I spent half of my life in the uk and we migrated to Australia just after my second child was born. So 1998, we moved to Australia. So I’m a little bit of an in betweeny.
Amy Stone [00:00:46]:
Yeah.
Kyla Holley [00:00:48]:
When I go back to the uk, they always say I sound so Australian. And here people say, oh, you haven’t lost your accent, have you? So I’m kind of an in between Sweeney and always will be, probably.
Amy Stone [00:01:00]:
Yes. I knew you were in Australia, so I would have guessed for that. The one, the accent that I almost always get wrong is the South African accent, which I will put them, depending on how they speak. I will put them in some other country, but for some reason I never guess South Africa, but. And it’s quite the time split between you and I, so I appreciate you making the. Making the time for us. In a second, we’re going to get to the official interview, but I have one more warm up question. The saying is that laughter is the best medicine. So what’s something that you can count on for bringing a smile to your face or laughter to your day?
Kyla Holley [00:01:35]:
Well, I’m gonna be really soppy with this one and say my husband, unfortunately, or fortunately, whichever way you look at it, just because he’s kind of, he’s kind of my rock. He’s. We’ve been together for how many years? 34 years. And he just, he’s, he’s just daft. He still makes me laugh, I still make him laugh. We still have huge amount of fun together.
Amy Stone [00:02:04]:
That’s amazing.
Kyla Holley [00:02:04]:
Which I think after that length of time is quite an achievement. It’s probably one of the things that I’m most proud of in life is a really solid, happy marriage.
Amy Stone [00:02:16]:
It’s something definitely to be very proud of. And I love that there’s a root in laughter and joy.
Kyla Holley [00:02:24]:
Absolutely.
Amy Stone [00:02:25]:
As opposed to grim determination, white knuckling it through a lifetime.
Kyla Holley [00:02:30]:
I’m sure it has been on some occasions, but generally we cruise through pretty well together.
Amy Stone [00:02:36]:
That’s really nice. All right, so the topic of the Day we’re going to talk about how your life changed after a surgery. And I’m interested in this story. You and I’ve had a chance to talk about just other topics before, but you shared a little bit with me on the intake form. But I have a feeling there’s a lot more to this story. So we’re talking about gallbladder surgery. My first question is actually about the timetable. How long ago was this?
Kyla Holley [00:03:05]:
This would have been nearly 20 years ago.
Amy Stone [00:03:08]:
All right, 20 years ago. Okay, so now I’m going to ask another question because I did not actually know the answer to this when I started getting ready. I know that you are not well, I don’t. I don’t think you’re a doctor. I’m asking you, based on your experience, tell us what the gallbladder does. And then what was the reason for the surgery in your case?
Kyla Holley [00:03:30]:
Well, the gallbladder produces bile, and bile is a substance that breaks down fats basically in the digestive system. So when you eat something that has a high fat content, the gallbladder produces bile and kind of squirts it into the digestive system to help chemically break down those fats. So that’s its purpose. You can live without it. Many people do. But it’s useful to have put it that way.
Amy Stone [00:03:56]:
I actually know somebody who doesn’t have one and takes a supplement on a regular basis, which is the only reason I know this about them. They have a supplement that they take. And so tell us more about what was going on with you that you had this operation and did you have it removed? Is that the operation, the surgery you had?
Kyla Holley [00:04:15]:
Okay, yeah, I did eventually have it removed. Leading up to that point, just to give you a little bit of context, I was in a bit of a rut. I had two young children at the time. I was a little bit directionless in life in that I had sort of hopped from job to job. And I’ve sort of. I class myself as intelligent, but with a very short attention span. And that meant that as soon as a job bored me, as soon as I felt that I kind of got it and knew what I was doing, I was absolutely mind numbingly bored in that situation and felt that I couldn’t do it anymore. I had to move on. So I’d had a whole series of jobs up to that point, some of them trying to fit in around child care. And it was just a real mishmasher, directionless sort of life. And also, to put it in context, I didn’t know at the Time. But I did have an eating disorder. I had binge eating disorder, and I had no knowledge of it. I just thought that I was kind of lazy and lacked willpower, couldn’t stick to a diet, and didn’t realize that it was actually an eating disorder going on in the background. So this brings me all to a point where one day I started having what I thought were chest pains right in the center of my chest. And it was really pretty bad. I think it was a late on a Saturday night. And I said to my husband, this is not right. You have to take me to hospital. We have to see what this is. So he took me along to the local hospital and they immediately, of course, with chest pain, they rush you through and hook you up to ICG machines and things like that. And it quickly established that there was nothing wrong with my heart. And then I went to the bottom of the queue.
Amy Stone [00:06:15]:
It’s amazing the way that happens. Once they determine that you do not have a heart, you. It’s like ordering it, or it’s like, wait, the waitress is never coming back. Like, you’ve moved to the exact bottom. Go home, Come back tomorrow. You’re not in danger. It’s really bizarre.
Kyla Holley [00:06:32]:
Absolutely, it was. You’re not dying out in the waiting room. So we got thrust out into the waiting room, and hours and hours later, I eventually saw a doctor. And the doctor said, well, look, we’re going to have to get an ultrasound to confirm this. But educated guess, I would say gallbladder. And up to that point, I was. I just. It was a real bolt out the blue. I was like, oh, okay. I said, well, how. How did you come to that diagnosis? And he sort of nodded wisely and he said, let’s just say you fit the criteria. So being kind of a nosy person got straight home. And I was like, criteria. I was googling criteria for diagnosis of gallbladder. And it said that doctors look for what they call the five Fs. I try and remember them all. Female, 40s, fertile, family history, and the last one was fat. So Those are the five Fs. And four of them I figured I really can’t do much about because it just is the. The last one, though, the fat one, really shook me because I think up to that point, and I’d only just turned 40. Up to that point, I thought that my weight had had no effect on my health, no connection to it. It held me back, not at all. And that really hit me that I thought, okay, this is a thing. This is possibly the first thing that’s happened, which is directly connected to my weight. And I have decisions to make about my life going forward, whether to accept who I am, the weight I am, the situation I’m in, what I do day to day, and just say, hey, this is me. I fully accept myself, which would be a lovely place to be. I do advocate for full acceptance of yourself, but at the time I just thought, oh, is this me? Does this feel like me? Does this look like me? And I decided that no, it didn’t. And I. I really had to take my life back into my own hands and try and resolve a lot of the situation I was in. So I, I set about doing that. And it took me two years from having my gallbladder out to start to study counseling and psychotherapy.
Amy Stone [00:09:16]:
Okay.
Kyla Holley [00:09:17]:
And apply everything I learned to myself. It was. I was a one person case study. So.
Amy Stone [00:09:24]:
Right. We are our own first patient. Of course.
Kyla Holley [00:09:28]:
Absolutely everything I learned that was interesting, I thought, okay, how does this apply to me? So it was quite narcissistic, I suppose, as a study method. But I learned so much. I learned so much about myself, I learned so much about human behavior and what sort of prompts a lot of our behaviors and our coping mechanisms. And yeah, it was just absolutely beautiful. That process of first starting to study for initially a diploma. I started off at diploma level and. And then my career took an entire. My life took an entire different direction at that point.
Amy Stone [00:10:15]:
So there’s layers to this, because I think you said that this happened when you were 40. Yeah, early 40s. So this is a shift you had reestab. You had a previous professional life and you had a family life. And so this is a health situation. But you’re going back to school identifying a different skill set at this time. That is really, really interesting. So I wonder. I have like this random thought as you were going through that because we are in a place, at least in the United States, where we’re like renaming things to be more inclusive in many, many good ways. And one of the things is there’s been a big push for body positivity and size awareness and all of those wonderful things. Big fan. I wonder if you went back and saw the same doctor today if he would use the same words with the F for fat, as you said. I was like, gosh, I wonder if they would still say that I just have no ide. Or whether it’s been retooled to be something that is a more generalist, less. Because it can be a judgment, it can be a Tough conversation is, I guess, what I’ll say between medical professionals and individuals about body size and judgment. So the gallbladder surgery happened with sort of a. Sort of quickly, and then it was two years of studying and healing. All right, so the. So after the surgery, you’re in doing this research, you’re going back to school, you lose £90.
Kyla Holley [00:11:45]:
I think that’s what it is.
Amy Stone [00:11:46]:
Yeah, well, I got that.
Kyla Holley [00:11:48]:
It was about 40 kilos.
Amy Stone [00:11:50]:
That’s an enormous amount of weight. That’s an enormous amount. It’s an enormous amount of weight to carry. Right? That’s enormous amount of weight to carry anybody. And it’s. And I actually wrote it in my question to give you a gold star for converting from kilos to pounds for my imperial measurement audience over here. So let’s talk a little bit about, like. Well, you mentioned it, you started it, that you had been okay with your body size up until you had to face it from a medical perspective. Is. Was there anything that you were going through as a. As a mom of young kids, like, as somebody who is in their 40s, we call that midlife now. Like, what were your. What were your thoughts and feelings? Like, how did you go through that process of evaluating? Is this what I want to look like? Is this what I want to do?
Kyla Holley [00:12:39]:
Well, it’s incorrect to say I was happy up to that point. I really wasn’t, because I think the health question really shifted and forced me. It was a catalyst for change. But up to that point, I really wasn’t happy. I wasn’t in the body that I felt matched my personality. It didn’t match who I believed I was on the inside, and I just aspired to have a body that matched that. So this wasn’t really a quest for thinness. I wouldn’t put myself into that category even now. But it was just a quest for the inside and the outside to match. Okay, so I have that level of.
Amy Stone [00:13:25]:
Can I ask. So this happened when you were 40. Is this something, a mismatch that would go back all the way to, like, your teenage years, or is this because of a change in body size that happened as a result? Result of, like, becoming a parent and growing, going through your 30s?
Kyla Holley [00:13:44]:
It goes back to about being 18.
Amy Stone [00:13:48]:
Okay.
Kyla Holley [00:13:49]:
That’s when I really started to gain weight. 17, 18. And. And my weight sort of progressively grew in my 30s, probably, but only a little bit. Only a couple of kilos a year, which doesn’t sound a lot. You know, that can come on very, very easily. But when you kind of Add up a decade of two kilos a year, suddenly it’s a reasonably substantial amount of weight. And it was just creeping on and on and on and on and on because, as I say, I had binge eating disorder. I had no idea.
Amy Stone [00:14:24]:
Yeah. And so. All right, so we’re talking. I’m talking to Kyla about how her life changed as a result of this surgery, and she lost a lot of weight and all of these things. I want to take a minute and invite all of the people watching and listening to join us in the conversation. If you’re interested in this topic, I post a discussion question on Instagram, Facebook and YouTube. We’d love to have you there. I’ll be there in the comments. Kyla will hopefully pop in and be there. If you don’t already follow the show on social media, of course, the links are in the show notes. All right, so back to talking about this. You study, you go back to school, you study. You’re getting a diploma in psychology, it.
Kyla Holley [00:15:04]:
Sounds like, in counseling.
Amy Stone [00:15:07]:
Counseling, counseling, counseling. In counseling. And at some point, a couple of things happen. At some point, you realize that you have a binge eating disorder. And also at some point, you talk to the person who did your surgery and say you want to work with people who he. Who are his clients and support them through weight loss or bariatric surgery. So I’m curious where those two things come together, how those two things happen.
Kyla Holley [00:15:35]:
Well, he took my gallbladder out.
Amy Stone [00:15:37]:
He took your gallbladder? Well, that part I knew. But I’m trying to think of any time I’ve called like a doctor back and been like, hey, let me help you. So I’m trying to figure out what that bridge is like. How did that happen?
Kyla Holley [00:15:49]:
That, that was just a leap of faith. That was just me being, I suppose, blindly positive and thinking, hey, what could, what’s the worst that could happen here? But I realized I, I got my diploma, which is, which was my first qualification. I went on then to get a couple of degrees after that. But initially I started at diploma level and started looking for work and realizing the transformation that I had been through personally and how I always knew with food, it wasn’t the food. You know, we kind of go into relationships with food with this idea I just have to eat less and exercise more. You know, ka ching. The moment will happen immediately that I do those two things. The truth is, for a lot of people, it isn’t that simple. There’s a lot of complexity. And I think I’d gotten to the stage where I really started to understand the complexity behind weight loss. So I approached the surgeon because I had found out in the meantime that he did bariatric surgery locally. And I thought, well, there’s a whole load of people who are going for surgical options and non surgical options as well, without really having a look at their entire relationship with food, reassessing past trauma, reassessing how their relationship with food works. And so I approached him. I wrote an eight page, what was the equivalent of a paper basically, on why he needed that sort of support for his patients. Because I thought, he’s a doctor. I can’t just breeze in there and go, hey, look at me. I’m gonna have to go in with something a bit more scientific. So I did. I wrote this paper and I delivered it to him and I said, please think about this. Didn’t hear from him for about a month, I think, and then he said, look, come in for a chat. And I. I went in and saw him and he said, well, look, let’s give this a trial. And that was, I think, 16 or 17 years ago. And I’ve stayed with him ever since, basically.
Amy Stone [00:18:02]:
That is such a spectacular story. It really speaks to taking your chance and asking for the thing that you want. How long after, how far into your academic change and after the surgery did you initiate this conversation with the surgeon?
Kyla Holley [00:18:20]:
It was as soon as I got my diploma, actually. So it was two years after my own surgery.
Amy Stone [00:18:26]:
Two years after your own surgery. And so one of the things that I was, the dots that I was trying to connect was because you had gallbladder surgery, but you really reached out to him about bariatric surgery. And so bariatric surgery, the way I think of it, is primarily a weight loss intervention, right?
Kyla Holley [00:18:46]:
Correct.
Amy Stone [00:18:47]:
Yeah. So then that’s that. So. And you were working with those folks. So when did you begin to study eating disorders?
Kyla Holley [00:18:58]:
It was the realization that some of the people that he was sending to me were presenting with behaviors that in the limited study I had done, I kind of thought, well, this sounds disordered. This perhaps is an eating disorder. And I don’t know enough about this subject. So by this time, I had done a degree, I’d updated my diploma into a degree. And it was that realization that I really needed some specialist knowledge, particularly in eating disorders. And at the time in Australia, there really wasn’t much available. Okay, not as. As far as a comprehensive approach to eating disorders. There were courses that. That dealt with the recognition of them, but didn’t really tell you what to do afterwards. You know, yes. Okay, I recognize this person has bulimia. Now what. What do I do with these people? And what I was seeking was a much more comprehensive approach. And I actually found it back in the uk, back where I come from, with the national center for Eating Disorders over there, who I spent another three years doing their Master Practitioner program over there, which taught me about eating disorders, nutrition, treatment of obesity, which is a word, like you were saying before, we don’t say obesity anymore, but at the time, that’s how it was worded. And it was a really rounded education about not only the recognition of all these things, but the treatment methodology behind all of them as well. So it was, as I say, three years of going back and forth to the UK to study, but it really, for me, completed my education and led me down this road that I never expected to be on. This found me. I didn’t find it 100%.
Amy Stone [00:21:02]:
I mean, there is a sort of a. I don’t know what we call it, a colloquialism phrase. There’s this concept that, like, you know, we. We seek out knowledge for the things that impact us. So there’s a joke that, you know, people who are studying psychology have questions about themselves or somebody in their family. Within the medical profession, you often find that somebody is deeply passionate because of some personal connection to things like that. So that is definitely. And then within the coaching space, often people will say, you know, you go there because you’re seeking answers for yourself and for you. There’s a variety of layers of this. Like, so part of it is you had a medical intervention for a critical thing with your gallbladder, and then also you were curious, which you turned into advanced studies on that topic. It’s really. It’s really a layered pattern here with what you did. So it would. No conversation in 2025 about weight and eating would complete without at least a nod to the fact that at least in the United States in the last two years, there’s been a very big shift in medical intervention, which are the new medications. So Ozempic, I don’t know if they have completely different names in Australia, but ozempic, tirzepatide, the GLP1s that are massively popular and much less invasive in some ways than, well, I guess in always than bariatric surgery, which is a major operation, but have also, interestingly, pushed to the forefront the conversation that you started with at the beginning, which is that this is a much more complicated thing going on for people than it has been treated for such a long Time where the instructions were just eat less. And people were like, yes, we know, we know exactly the apple and not the Dorito go. It’s not working. But what have you seen? Is this, are you experiencing, like, is it as popular? I mean, I guess you have no idea. Like, is it popular in Australia? Are people looking to these medications and these prescriptions for intervention?
Kyla Holley [00:23:10]:
Absolutely. And we, interestingly enough, the last international conference I, I went on, which was last September, I believe it was an international conference for bariatric surgery. And pretty much every presentation concentrated on these GLP1 agonists and how to use them in conjunction with surgery instead of surgery. You know, what’s happening in the industry. It was huge. Absolutely huge. So yes.
Amy Stone [00:23:41]:
Yeah. And one of the things that I think is so interesting about, and I am not an expert or and I don’t even actually have personal experience, so this is just completely anecdotal, is that several months ago there began to be a wave of press where people were talking about how they experienced it took away what they were calling food noise for the people who were taking it. And it just was such an interesting conversation to see, like, you know, not small amounts of people, hundreds of thousands of people with such gratitude for the change in their, their current situation facing what is like, like a complete, almost disbelief from the medical community who had been saying, that doesn’t. That wasn’t there. Like, we didn’t know you had this. And as an observer, I was like, wow. Yeah, wow.
Kyla Holley [00:24:29]:
Yeah.
Amy Stone [00:24:30]:
But as somebody who’s in the industry, that may not have surprised you to hear that people were really struggling with what we’re calling now food noise.
Kyla Holley [00:24:37]:
Oh, absolutely not. And it doesn’t surprise me that a lot of people are leaping into the GLP1 agonist solution. It worried, I think, the surgical sector at first because we all thought, oh, okay, is this the end of bariatric surgery? But very quickly we did notice a little bit of a, a downturn, I suppose, in referrals for a little while. But again, that’s all shifted back now because a lot of people are trying them as, as a sort of a last ditch attempt to lose the weight by other means.
Amy Stone [00:25:15]:
Sure.
Kyla Holley [00:25:15]:
They’re realizing that it’s not the solution for them and then they’re coming back to surgical options. So interesting. We have noticed a turnaround that is really interesting.
Amy Stone [00:25:28]:
I hadn’t heard that. One thing that I think mirrors it as an observer is that the conversation that you mentioned that took you to your surgeon and said, I think that your patients would really benefit from counseling on their relationship with food. And I had heard that over the years, definitely in making a decision on a major surgery. And I still hear it with people talking about these medications like, this is a medication. It doesn’t. You will be better off if you look at your relationship with food. So do you see that the issues that the work that you do still has value for people who are going through this process either way?
Kyla Holley [00:26:06]:
Absolutely. And I do think, because the thing with all the medications is that they work while you’re on them. And as humans, if we invest in something, because they are quite a financial investment, quite expensive, I don’t know quite how it works over there, but over here, they’re reasonably expensive. And generally, behaviorally, if we invest in something either financially or giving our time and we get a big reward, then we’re willing to continue that behavior. The reward reinforces the behavior when it gets to a stage where you still have to keep paying, but the reward has diminished. So, in other words, when you’ve lost the weight, but you’re still having to pay for this medical solution and there’s no reward anymore, that’s when people go, well, hold on now. Why am I still doing this? And they believe that they can just come off the medication now that they’re much smaller and just continue. But what happens is the hunger comes back, the food noise comes back, and quite often quite aggressively comes back. And people suddenly realize, whoa, I’m on a roller coaster of weight gain. All of a sud. Because the body’s natural defense is to replace the weight that it’s lost. So suddenly people realize that, hold on, I do have to keep paying forever for these medications. And if you are, I don’t know, in your 30s or even 40s, the prospect of paying forever for that medication suddenly gets very expensive. And then you weigh up the cost of surgery, which is hopefully a permanent solution, against the cost of ongoing medication for the rest of your life, and suddenly the surgery seems like a bargain. And people kind of go, oh, okay, I made a mistake here.
Amy Stone [00:28:06]:
I had not thought of it that way. That is very interesting. I had. I mean, I had had the conversation with just friends about the. It’s forever. Forever is so hard to understand at any given point. So when somebody says, you’re going to take this medication forever or you’re going to be married forever, and I did an interview earlier today about somebody who got married in their 20s and said, I didn’t understand what forever would be, and I was like, no, I don’t think you can. I mean, at any point, I don’t know if you can. It’s just a really tough concept. But then that’s true. Like later on you’re doing the cost benefit analysis for yourself. And I think it also happens in other medications where people begin, they feel better and they’re like, well, obviously I’m cured. I don’t know. Now need my allergy medication. I’ll just stop. And then they run into a cat and they’re like, no, nope, still allergic. Moving on.
Kyla Holley [00:28:56]:
Absolutely. Absolutely.
Amy Stone [00:28:58]:
As it works out, I wasn’t cured. The medicine was working.
Kyla Holley [00:29:02]:
Exactly. But I do think that there is a real chance for people on the medications if they also take the time to. Once that food noise is gone, once they’re in a place where they feel that they have an element of control over the relations with food, if they take the opportunity then to learn.
Amy Stone [00:29:25]:
Yeah.
Kyla Holley [00:29:26]:
Then there’s a possibility they can come out the other side and wean themselves off the medication. With much more knowledge around their relationship with food and medication. That’s possible.
Amy Stone [00:29:40]:
Yeah. And I, that’s, you know, that’s not my area of expertise. But I would say that it seems logical and commonsensical, which is not a real word, that working on your relationship with food and empowering yourself in that way is. Has benefits outside of weight loss or anything, because it’s such a big part of the human experience and how we live our lives.
Kyla Holley [00:30:06]:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s something that is fundamental. We have to eat. It’s not as easy as saying, well, I will distract myself forever from food. Food is everywh. And it’s far more beneficial to learn how to live comfortably in that environment than it is to find ways to reject the environment because you’re never really going to be successful in doing so.
Amy Stone [00:30:33]:
Yeah. And I think that one of the things that’s unique about your perspective or advantageous or nice and supportive is that you’re doing counseling about relationship with food. From the starting point of, of we support medical interventions like this is a judgment free, safe space. We’re talking about relationship with food without saying that one way of doing this is better than another way.
Kyla Holley [00:31:00]:
Absolutely. And I see a whole variety. Some people want no intervention. They literally just want to see me and sometimes see a dietitian as well. I work very closely with dietitians and sometimes they don’t want on any medication, any surgery. They just want that natural approach. Absolutely. Fine. But you’re right, there’s no judgment for anybody that decides that another option would suit them Better.
Amy Stone [00:31:27]:
Yeah, I love that. I think that’s good. So you, at one point, did you self diagnose yourself with the binge condition or did you work with somebody else who confirmed it for you?
Kyla Holley [00:31:38]:
It was a self diagnosis. And it came crazy late in the picture because by this time I’d set up the Australian Centre for Eating Behaviour. I was teaching other health professionals about eating disorders in Australia, and we trained well over a thousand other health professionals to date. And I was in a training room as I had been many, many times. And one of the delegates on the course said, out of interest, Kyla, have you ever had an eating disorder? And I said, no, I haven’t. And the conversation continued. And it wasn’t really until later I got back to my hotel room and I don’t know how it hit me, but I suddenly thought, you idiot, of course you had an eating disorder. And suddenly it was one of those real light bulb moments that I thought, how, how have I missed this? How in everything I know, how did I miss the fact that I had an eating disorder? And it was so obvious to me after I realized, but I’d just never gone back and really reviewed my own behavior back then to realize that yes, I did have binge eating disorder and I had, during the course of my studies, basically counseled myself out of that eating disorder. It was, yeah, yeah, it was one of those things that you don’t realize about yourself. You’re often the last person to know in those situations.
Amy Stone [00:33:16]:
We are, we’re terrible. We are our own best observer because we are the only person who knows this. But at the same time, it’s hard to see what we’re doing for ourselves. And then it sounds like you are a person, that when you are studying something, you run yourself through that filter like, oh, maybe I should try this for myself. And so you work through it that way. I tend to do that, that with many, many things. Like if I read a recipe, I’m likely to try it. If I read about a new thing, I often have to be talked out of it. I’m like, sure, let’s try this new theory. That sounds fun. All right, so you study the eating disorders. You form the Australian center for Eating Behavior. In a minute, we’re going to do the final questions. You have a podcast. I would love to give you a chance to tell people how they can look up the Australian center for Eating Behavior and your podcast, which is called change your relationship with food.
Kyla Holley [00:34:11]:
Well, the podcast is on every podcast platform, so you just have to look up Change Your relationship with food with Kyla Holly. And you will find me somewhere very nice.
Amy Stone [00:34:23]:
Very nice. And the Australian center for Eating Behavior is probably the same thing. Just look at the.
Kyla Holley [00:34:30]:
Absolutely. Yeah. Just Google the name and you will find us. And we offer a whole list of health professionals all over the world, actually, that have studied with us now with the advent of online learning, who have done a course with us and are able to help you if you have an eating disorder or a weight concern.
Amy Stone [00:34:51]:
That’s another wonderful thing about being alive in 2025, that if you have something, if you’re in a situation where you regionally do not find people who specialize in a type of. The Internet has opened up an entire just smorgasbord of options. For better or worse, we can now reach around the globe for support. All right, Kyla, are you ready for the final fun questions?
Kyla Holley [00:35:17]:
Oh, okay.
Amy Stone [00:35:19]:
People get nervous about this, but these are just silly. Don’t be nervous. They’re just for fun. All right, so I try to make these unrelated to the topic, but the first one, I didn’t follow my own rule. On your birthday, what’s a sweet treat or dessert that you would like to have with friends and family?
Kyla Holley [00:35:35]:
Oh, there’s something called Princess Cake.
Amy Stone [00:35:40]:
Princess cake? I don’t know what that is.
Kyla Holley [00:35:43]:
It’s Swedish. And when I lived over in Perth in Western Australia, there was a chain of shops over there that sold Swedish baked goods. And Princess Cake is delicious. It’s marzipan, it’s sponge, it’s cream. It’s just heaven on a plate. But unfortunately, they don’t have that where I live now, so it’s the first thing that sprung to mind.
Amy Stone [00:36:09]:
That’s delightful. I love that answer. All right, so this is going to be a fun question because we live in different countries. What is a recent TV show or movie that you have enjoyed that you can share with the audience?
Kyla Holley [00:36:20]:
Ah, I’m late to the party with this one. It’s a British program called Gavin and Stacy. It’s actually finished now. It ran for 17 years, on and off, I believe. And I knew of it but had never watched an episode. And it was only last week I thought, people talk about this. And I started watching and couldn’t stop. And I’ve seen the whole thing.
Amy Stone [00:36:48]:
I love it. I have decided that that’s my favorite way to watch shows. I do not want to. I prefer if it’s gonna run for a year or a season, I want to wait until they’re all out and be able to watch the full Season or I’d love to watch. So I can just go through, you know, five years or whatever it is and really get the whole I’m completely out of practice of once a week, wait until the next year. Drives me bananas. So I’m all in for the binge eating. Okay, last one. If you won a $5,000 gift card, let’s pretend. But you have to spend it today. You have to spend it on yourself and you have to spend it all in one place. It can be a real store, like a brick and mortar store or an online shop. Where are you going to go to spend this money?
Kyla Holley [00:37:36]:
I would say a kitchen shop because I need a new kitchen and it’s something that is not a cheap project. So we’ve been renovating our house for five years and we keep pushing the kitchen to the last place because we know it’s going to be the big ticket Item. So with $5,000, I would probably buy myself a, a cooker. That sounds kind of boring, doesn’t it? A holiday to Tahiti might be better.
Amy Stone [00:38:09]:
But no, I, I think that if you like, if you work in like I spend a lot of time in the kitchen and I love having the, you know, the right things. And so I think, I mean, I always say this way by spending $5,000 on a new, you know, range or oven or even a refrigerator or the world’s greatest ice maker. Right? That’s so much more fun than like a washing machine or new tires for the car or like a lawnmower like nobody wants. No, well, that’s not true. Some people will be like, you got to see my new lawn lawnmower. But like, nobody’s like, oh my God, I can’t wait to show you my new, you know, car repair that I just had to spend some of that. Wait till you see my new dry, you know. Yeah.
Kyla Holley [00:38:57]:
A new kitchen would make me a happy woman. I’ve got big plans in my head. I just need them to transfer into reality.
Amy Stone [00:39:04]:
That’s a speak it into existence that we do. That’s it. Kyla, Holly, thank you so much for being a wonderful guest today on the show.
Kyla Holley [00:39:11]:
Beautiful. Thank you, Amy.