Dr. Fredrick Nyström: Weight management, the obesity paradox and the psychological impact of dieting

Dial Emma

Emma Reed Turrell

Society & Culture, Relationships, Mental Health, Health & Fitness

4.8 • 1.2K Ratings

🗓️ 27 October 2025

⏱️ 33 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Welcome back to Dial Emma! Each week, I'll be answering your dilemmas with honesty, empathy, and a few therapeutic truth bombs to help you make sense of life's stickiest moments. If you've ever wished you had a therapist in your back pocket, Dial Emma is here to help.

Our dilemma this week comes from a listener who is navigating a lifelong struggle with weight and self-acceptance. After years of dieting without lasting success, she finally found hope through weight-loss injections - but when she had to stop due to the cost, the weight, and the shame that comes with it, returned. Now, she finds herself caught between the pressure to start the medication again and the desire to accept herself as she is.

To help me respond to our lovely listener and provide some much needed scientific insight, I'm delighted to be joined by Dr. Fredrik Nyström, professor of medicine at Linköping University in Sweden and author of Lighten the Load on Your Shoulders. Fredrik has spent more than 30 years working within endocrinology and studying hormone-producing glands and organs, hypertension, obesity, and diabetes.

Fredrik and I explore the complexities of weight management, the societal pressures that often influence our relationship with food and appearance, and the psychological impacts of dieting. We also discuss the role of GLP-1 agonists in weight loss, the importance of self-acceptance in a world filled with conflicting messages about body image, and the power of challenging societal norms and embracing personal choices when it comes to our health and wellbeing.

If you have a dilemma for Emma, please fill out this form.

---

Dial Emma is hosted by Emma Reed Turrell, produced by Lauren Brook.

---

Social media:

Emma Reed Turrell @emmareedturrell

Dial Emma @dialemmapodcast

Email: [email protected]

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0	Tuesday night on a sofa watching telly with mum again.
0:04.9	May your hawkers stay with the mothers for life.
0:07.7	This is the moment Stephen chose to speak to Barclays about mortgage boost,
0:12.7	so he could borrow more with help from family or friends.
0:16.0	We're helping first-time buyers get on the property ladder sooner.
0:19.5	Search Barclays' mortgles.
0:21.2	Barclays make money work for you.
0:23.8	Your home may be repossessed if you do not keep up repayments on your mortgage.
0:26.6	Subject to application financial circumstances and borrowing history, Ties and CIS apply.
0:31.2	Hello and welcome to Dial Emma, the podcast where your Dial Emas meet my therapeutic insights.
0:37.8	I'm Emma Reid-Torrell, psychotherapist, author, and well-recovering people-pleaser.
0:42.4	Each week, I'll be unpacking real-life questions from listeners just like you.
0:46.9	The big ones, the small ones, the ones that keep you up at night,
0:50.5	offering practical tools and gentle truths to help you find your way through. So if you've got a
0:56.1	question, you don't know how to ask out loud. You've come to the right place.
1:04.1	Welcome back to this week's episode of Dial Emma and I'm absolutely delighted today to be joined by someone very special, special because he is less of the, what should we say, the therapist and more of the scientist. And I really wanted him with us today to start to give us a few hard truths about something, because sometimes
1:28.7	in these dilemmas, I will lead with a very therapeutic, person-centered, humanistic, TA, whichever
1:36.5	modality I choose to bring in in that any given moment, and sometimes what we need is cold,
1:41.7	hard facts. So the man I have for the truth today is Frederick H. Nistram.
1:48.3	He's a professor and senior physician in internal medicine at Lynn Sherping University in Sweden.
1:53.7	He has a book called Lighten the Load on Your Shoulders, which challenges some very long-held
1:59.7	beliefs about health and lifestyle. And when I heard his message,
	...

Please login to see the full transcript.

Previous episode | Next episode

Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Emma Reed Turrell, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.

Generated transcripts are the property of Emma Reed Turrell and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.