THE DOCTOR WILL FEED YOU NOW

Dr Hazel Wallace has garnered a cult following for her quick nutrition and exercise fixes as the Food Medic, says Brigid Moss. Your lunchtime sandwiches and salads will never be the same again

As we sit down to talk, the first thing Dr Hazel Wallace does is bring out a box of delicious but healthy Three Ingredient Cookies, made with just bananas, oats and chocolate. The recipe comes from her second book, The Food Medic For Life (Yellow Kite, £20). Known for her healthy snacks and lunches, as well as quick supper recipes and workouts, Wallace has already written one bestselling book, The Food Medic, and has an army of 200,000 Instagram fans for her lifestyle-as-medicine approach. Until recently, medicine was almost always about cure, not prevention. ‘There’s a gap between medicine and our lifestyle and I’m one of the first of a new generation of doctors talking about it,’ she tells me. Her philosophy is this: she wants doctors to think outside the pill box when it comes to managing lifestyle-related diseases such as type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure and cardiovascular disease, and encourage people to take control of their health through diet, physical activity and stress management instead. She’s brave, when you consider she was just a medical student when she started this mission in her blog in 2013.

But it’s because Wallace is a doctor that people have embraced her message – as well as the fact that she’s anti-fad. ‘I feel a huge amount of responsibility. I’m constantly making sure everything I put out there is solid,’ she says.

It was Wallace’s dad dying of a stroke, when she was about to turn 15, that drove her passion to train as a doctor. ‘Part of me will always feel, when it comes to my father, what would have happened if we’d been more active or had a healthier diet?’ Full of homecooked food, her childhood diet does sound pretty healthy, though.

Wallace has had her own health struggles, too: she got dangerously thin while grieving for her father. At university she ate a lot of fast food and did no exercise, so she put on weight, her skin broke out and her asthma worsened. ‘I told myself: if I’m serious about becoming a doctor, I can’t let myself be this unhealthy.’ She began to teach herself nutrition and joined a gym, and noticed she was feeling ‘amazing, so energetic’. She started her blog to document what she’d learnt, and studied to become a personal trainer.

Wallace’s food principles are simple: eat more fruit and vegetables, wholegrains, legumes and lentils. And more healthy fats, which means oily fish, nuts, seeds and olive oil. She doesn’t believe in detox or clean eating. ‘It’s tricky to make any foods out of bounds, as then people want them more,’ she says. ‘You can have your cake and improve your health!’

She’s all about getting more action in your life, too. For a recent BBC Inside Out London episode, she coached a family of four to walk to work or school, get up from a desk every 20 minutes, and do a fun activity together on Sundays. Wallace’s own fitness week involves squeezing in four to five 45-minute gym sessions, plus ‘walking everywhere’. She does 10 minutes of meditation a day, too. ‘It’s brought me a lot of peace,’ she says.

At the moment, Wallace is working one day a week in hospital while she develops her business. She has plans for a pop-up cafe to showcase her new recipes. ‘I want to help people fall in love with food again. It’s my mission to feed the nation to good health through crazy delicious recipes.’

‘YOU CAN HAVE YOUR CAKE AND BE HEALTHY!’