Mikki Williden, PhD

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Mikki Williden, PhD Registered nutritionist, whole food, health, nutrition, sport nutrition, primal, podcast Mikkipedia

When I was 21, I asked my nutrition lecturer whether eating carbohydrates at night made you fat. My personal trainer had...
03/10/2026

When I was 21, I asked my nutrition lecturer whether eating carbohydrates at night made you fat. My personal trainer had told me it did.

My lecturer said no.

And I chose to believe my personal trainer. 😂

Looking back, it’s a perfect example of something I see every single day in nutrition.

We don’t necessarily believe the person with the most expertise. We often believe the person who is the most convincing.

The person with the biggest following.
The best transformation photos.
The strongest opinion.
The simplest explanation.
The most confidence.
The message we’ve already heard 20 times.

Meanwhile, the person who actually understands the evidence is often saying something far less exciting:

“It depends.”
“The effect is probably quite small.”
“We need to look at the totality of the evidence.”
“That study doesn’t actually show that.”
“There’s more context here.”

And unfortunately, nuance doesn’t go viral quite as easily as DON’T EAT CARBS AFTER 6PM.

Credentials aren’t everything, and having qualifications certainly doesn’t make someone automatically right. But neither do followers, confidence, personal results or a compelling story make someone an expert.

So when you’re deciding who to trust, look beyond how confidently someone delivers the message.

Ask: Do they understand the evidence? Do they acknowledge uncertainty? Do they change their position when the evidence changes? And are they actually qualified in the area they’re advising you on?

Twenty-one-year-old me got that one wrong.

Which is probably useful to remember whenever I’m tempted to wonder why someone on Instagram believes their personal trainer over me. 😂

Not every meal is going to be on point for all of your nutrient requirements. And it is actually okay too. Most importan...
03/10/2026

Not every meal is going to be on point for all of your nutrient requirements. And it is actually okay too.

Most important thing is to be consistent. And I wouldn’t have really thought too much about this breakfast this morning in terms of hitting protein targets because it is just one breakfast.

But I am doing a longer run next weekend (Chicago! Have had to manage my expectations about the type of run with this hammy 🦵 a story for another day). And this breakfast was post a 10km run and I wasn’t overly hungry. So this EAA powder is perfect for boosting overall amino acids of that eating opportunity.

We need a certain amount of protein to deliver amino acids when we eat. And an egg and slice of black pudding might have 10g, whereas at my age I need at least 30g if not higher to deliver those aminos. Leucine is the amino acid that initiates muscle protein synthesis (repair and recovery) but it needs all other aminos along with it. Ideally you’d have around 2.5-3/4g depending on your age This product - not sponsored - is awesome as it has 3.5g.

I’m a bit vague on actual amounts you need as the research is on either college aged kids or 60y+ adults - and I’m neither of these so I hedge my bets and hit closer to the amounts required for the latter group (which I’m closer to in age 🤣).

PS this is good for making up a shortfall. And if you’re vegan or on weight loss meds or have low appetite then this is def helpful. It’s not an every meal strategy and doesn’t replace actual food.

01/10/2026

While it’s true you don’t need to fast for a cholesterol test anymore for a routine cardiovascular risk assessment, it doesn’t mean that what you’ve just eaten has no bearing on your numbers.

After eating, triglycerides typically rise, while LDL cholesterol and total cholesterol can fall slightly. HDL changes very little. On average these changes are fairly modest, which is why docs are fine with non-fasting testing for routine cardiovascular risk assessment.

But averages hide individual variation.

Some people can have a much larger post-meal rise in triglycerides, depending on what they ate, their metabolic health and how efficiently they clear circulating lipids.

So if you have a non-fasting blood test and the numbers come back unexpectedly high or very different from your previous results, I would not panic over one result.

Repeat it under standardised conditions. Cholesterol is labile to change.

My preference for comparing lipids over time:

• Morning blood draw
• 10–12 hour overnight fast
• Water is fine
• No alcohol the day before
• Avoid an unusually large or very high-fat meal the night before
• Avoid hard training immediately beforehand
• Eat normally in the preceding days rather than deliberately dieting or fasting longer
• Ideally use the same laboratory each time

This is particularly useful if triglycerides are high. NZ guidance recommends repeating the test fasting when triglycerides are >4.5 mmol/L because triglycerides are strongly affected by food and calculated LDL becomes less reliable.

So when your GP says “you don’t need to fast”, what they usually mean is:

“You don’t need to fast for this test to be clinically useful.”

They are NOT saying food has zero effect on the numbers.

01/10/2026

Ugh. The worst kind of content.

The suggestion is that every time you eat sugar, you should imagine yourself adding belly fat, love handles and getting closer to needing bigger pants.

No.

Eating sugar does not automatically mean that sugar is converted into body fat. An insulin response to carbohydrate does not override energy balance.

The evidence is pretty clear: when adding sugar increases total energy intake, body weight can increase. But when sugar is exchanged for other carbohydrate while calories are kept the same, we don’t see the same effect.

Does that mean unlimited added sugar is a great idea? Of course not. Diet quality, fibre, protein, micronutrients, dental health, satiety and overall energy intake all matter.

But that is VERY different from:

Sugar = belly fat.

I understand why content like this gets attention. It’s provocative. People argue in the comments. The algorithm has a lovely afternoon.

But we can communicate the downsides of excessive sugar intake without teaching people to look at a bite of food and imagine fat appearing on their stomach.

That’s not metabolic physiology. It’s fear-based nutrition messaging dressed up as physiology.

You can eat sugar. You can eat cheesecake. You can also have goals around body composition and health.

The dose matters. The context matters. Your overall diet matters. And this content is so dumb

29/09/2026

I hear this one a LOT, particularly in conversations about perimenopause:

“If you’re in a calorie deficit, your body is stressed, so it holds onto fat and stores more around your middle.”

Except that’s not how a calorie deficit works.

By definition, an energy deficit means you are expending more energy than you are consuming. That energy has to come from somewhere. Over time, stored energy is mobilised and body mass is lost. Your body cannot simultaneously manufacture additional body fat out of an energy shortfall.

Now, does perimenopause matter? Absolutely. Declining oestrogen can influence where fat is preferentially stored, with a shift towards greater central and visceral adiposity. Sleep disruption, stress, reduced activity, declining muscle mass, changes in appetite and food intake can also make achieving and sustaining an energy deficit more difficult.

And can dieting change energy expenditure? Yep. As body weight falls, energy requirements fall too, and adaptive thermogenesis can contribute to a greater-than-expected reduction in expenditure. Hunger can increase. NEAT can unconsciously decrease. What started as a deficit can become smaller or disappear altogether.

But those things affect whether the deficit exists and how large it is. They don’t turn a genuine sustained energy deficit into an energy surplus.

There’s also an important distinction between fat distribution and fat gain. Perimenopause may change the proportion of body fat carried centrally. That is not evidence that eating fewer calories than you expend somehow creates new abdominal fat.

And stress? Chronic psychological stress and elevated cortisol have been associated with central adiposity in some research, potentially through appetite, food choice, sleep, insulin signalling and fat distribution. Again, that doesn’t overturn energy balance. It may influence the behaviours and physiology that determine the two sides of the equation.

PMID: 30843880, 18332882, 33651741, 20935667, 18842775, 11020091

I client emailed me to say he accidentally had two drinks this weekend. Of course I callled him out. That wasn’t an acci...
29/09/2026

I client emailed me to say he accidentally had two drinks this weekend. Of course I callled him out.

That wasn’t an accident. That was a decision.

There’s a difference between guilt and ownership.

Guilt says, “I was bad this weekend.”

Ownership says, “I made choices this weekend that weren’t aligned with my goals.”

That might sound like semantics, but the language we use matters.

The w**e didn’t accidentally pour itself. The takeaway wasn’t forced upon you. You didn’t mysteriously wake up at the bottom of a packet of chips. You made a choice.

And that’s actually a GOOD thing.

Because if your choices got you here, your choices can also move you forward.

No punishment. No starving yourself on Monday. No doubling your cardio to “burn it off”. No declaring that you’ve blown the week and promising to start again next Monday.

Just acknowledge it.

Yep, I ate more than I planned.
Yep, I had the w**e.
Yep, I enjoyed it.
And now I’m going back to the habits that support where I want to be.

Taking responsibility isn’t the same as beating yourself up. It’s recognising that you have agency.

You don’t need guilt.

You need your next good decision. 💪

This came up at a conference recently and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.One of the speakers said they refused to u...
28/09/2026

This came up at a conference recently and I haven’t stopped thinking about it.

One of the speakers said they refused to use the word “obesity” because of the stigma attached to it, and instead used “metabolic dysfunction.”

I completely understand where that comes from. There is a LOT of judgement, shame and moralising attached to body weight, and nobody should have their character, discipline or worth assessed by the size of their body.

But I don’t think replacing “obesity” with “metabolic dysfunction” solves the problem. They aren’t interchangeable terms.

Obesity is a medical term. It describes excess adiposity that may impair health, and increasingly the conversation is moving beyond BMI alone because BMI is an imperfect proxy for body fat and tells us very little about fat distribution, function or individual health risk.

Metabolic dysfunction is different.

You can be in a smaller body and have insulin resistance, impaired glucose regulation, hypertension, dyslipidaemia, fatty liver or excess visceral fat. Conversely, someone who meets a BMI definition of obesity may not currently have those metabolic abnormalities.

That distinction matters.

If we simply substitute “metabolic dysfunction” for “obesity”, we risk suggesting that metabolic health can be determined by looking at someone’s body size. It can’t.

And perhaps the bigger question is this: if a medical term has become so loaded with judgement that we feel we can’t say it, do we need a different medical term, or do we need to remove the judgement?

Obesity is not a character assessment. It tells you nothing about whether someone is lazy, disciplined, motivated, intelligent or worthy of respect.

Changing the language might make conversations more comfortable. But changing the assumptions attached to the language is far more important.

A few things I thought as I listened to an excellent podcast this morning (Iron Culture) and one of the two Eric’s said ...
25/09/2026

A few things I thought as I listened to an excellent podcast this morning (Iron Culture) and one of the two Eric’s said something that I think about a lot:

Just because you live in your fitness world, doesn’t mean that it is THE world.

We are often blinkered to the realities of life for people who don’t live a fitness lifestyle.

And we judge people based on our own values whether we realise this or not.

How they spend their money. How they prioritise their time. What the medications they are on says about the type of person they are.

Most people have no idea what a macro is, much less be able to work out their gram/kg amount to optimise for muscle growth and / or fat loss.

BMI for the wider population doesn’t over report clinical obesity, it undershoots by a fair amount, missing many ‘normal’ weight yet over fat individuals. And mostly the people who are categorised as ‘obese’ who are highly muscled are those we care least about for what it’s measuring.

It’s easy to forget when you’ve been in the gym for over 3 decades that it’s a foreign and intimidating environment for most people. Forget progressive overload, where do I start and on what machine and how do I use it?

The things we’ve learned through the years were once new to us also, but we’ve forgotten along the way about all of the skills that got us to this point.

Anyway. That’s where my mind wandered during the podcast, and it was a great conversation of how the fitness lifestyle really represents a tiny percentage of people in the real world.

And it discussed the idea that not all muscle an average person loses on their weight loss effort is a big deal, especially as someone may be WAY healthier and likely to find a fitness lifestyle because of it.

PMID 20125098
PMID 18091006

Podcast https://podcasts.apple.com/nz/podcast/iron-culture-presented-by-mass/id1452114380?i=1000791288662

23/09/2026

In our latest collab, Brandon and I discuss diet breaks, refeeds, who they are for, why we would (and would not) use them and if it makes sense for you to incorporate in your fat loss approach.

These conversations are science and practice led, so you can hear how Brandon and I both utilise these for clients and groups.

Comment ‘refeed’ and I’ll send the link!

23/09/2026

We can be very fixed in our mindset around food.

I am stubborn
I don’t eat THAT
I’m very picky
I don’t eat leftovers. I wish I was the type of person who did.

Here’s the great thing: you can be the type of person who eats leftovers.

Your tastes change as your food choices change.

Being picky is something you decided. Not something you were born with.

Being stubborn is a choice. Not something that is set in stone.

These statements rolled out are your brain keeping you comfortable and stuck in the habit loops that hold you back. They are also great excuses for not changing anything despite your stated goals.

You deserve better than that. A little friction initially, and a little uncomfortable for sure, but in that you can change these and of course change how you see yourself.

A person who is open minded and willing to try new foods and new ways of doing things. Like eating leftovers - this saves a lot of time in the kitchen FYI.

You can def teach an old dog new tricks. You just have to decide to do that.

PS this song 👌🏻🥹. Love this live version.

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