Dr Hazel Wallace: ‘There was an element of burnout there. I was not the same person when I left medicine’
Having toiled on the chaotic frontlines of Covid healthcare, Dr Hazel Wallace is now hanging up her scrubs to focus full-time on her no-nonsense health and nutrition empire
In May of this year, Hazel Wallace closed the door on what she calls the “most chaotic two years” of her life. As a doctor in the NHS, she has spent much of her energies in recent times working in Covid medicine. Everything we’ve heard and read about the chaos, the burnout among professionals, the lack of resources within the Covid-era NHS is, alas, true.
“I did everything from wards to intensive care to follow-up clinics,” the Louth-born doctor says. “It was just chaotic.”
When news of the Covid virus broke, Wallace, who is 31, admits that she was “very much in denial about it all, like everyone else, for a long time”.
At the same time, she was juggling her work as a doctor with her passion project, a lifestyle website/podcast/online community called The Food Medic that she started in 2012. Owing in part to the resounding success of her first two books, The Food Medic (2017) and The Food Medic for Life (2018), publishers were also hoping that Wallace might write a follow-up. In March 2020, she was planning to take time away from her life as a doctor to write her third book. We all know what happened next.
“There was a point where we didn’t have many patients in the hospital, maybe two or three at a time,” she recalls. “But one of the senior doctors came to meet me and asked if I’d consider joining the Covid team.” I was like, ‘If you need me, I’ll be there.’”
She could barely have foreseen just how intense her working life would become. “We were a bunch of nutrition and gastro doctors, and then we were Covid doctors overnight and our ward was turned into a Covid ward,” she recalls. “We were learning about Covid by going to lectures in the morning and hearing from other doctors in China. It was a whole new field of medicine we were learning about overnight. Then the numbers went crazy. I was working eight full days in a row. Because we didn’t have enough PPE [personal protective equipment], loads of my colleagues went [out] sick the very first week. At one point, I was working as a nurse in intensive care, because they didn’t have enough nurses.”
Thanks to BBC shows like Adam Kay’s This Is Going to Hurt and medical memoirs like Christie Watson’s The Language of Kindness, the public are starting to get a handle on just how demanding and arduous the work of medical professionals is.
“I think people acknowledge it, but I don’t think enough was done for us,” Wallace says. “I grew up in Ireland, with the HSE, and when I started working in the NHS... I’m so grateful for the NHS because it’s such a fantastic service. The people in the NHS are what keep it up, almost on goodwill. But there’s not enough that’s done on a government level in terms of giving people pay rises. It can be really demoralising for staff when you’re working your hardest, and it just feels like all you’re getting is a clap.”
Dr Hazel Wallace, The Food Medic. Picture: Olivia Beasley
Much of this has fed into her decision to hang up her scrubs and concentrate on The Food Medic, and to focus her energies on bringing her wellness project up another level. With a charming lightness of touch, Wallace has always served up near-daily updates on social media, offering healthful recipes, exercise reels and other health information. Balance and everything in moderation are her watchwords, to the joy of her devoted fans.
“There was an element of burnout there,” she says of leaving her medical career to the side for now. “I was not the same person when I left. I was a shell of a human, and I didn’t feel like I was giving my patients my best, or doing the best for myself. I think the pandemic has really made a lot of people rethink their life goals and what they want to be. I got to the point where I’ve been a little fed up with everything. My life is very, very different right now. I think I’ll maintain that space for a while and go back [to medicine] whenever I feel like I’m ready to go back.”
Working on the Covid frontline would leave many people with nothing left in the tank after a long week, yet Wallace somehow found time not only to keep The Food Medic on the rails, but also to write her third book, The Female Factor. As it happens, writing became her sanctuary at a time when she was “living and breathing Covid”.
“The book became the one project that almost allowed me to escape what was going on around me,” she says.
The inner medic was very much present in the writing of The Female Factor. Wallace has an interesting line in its introduction about how women, in Ireland and beyond, are viewed within the healthcare industry: “understudied, underdiagnosed and undertreated”. While training to be a doctor, she noticed, almost immediately, that the health needs of women were often unmet.
“What was interesting was that people weren’t really talking about it and there wasn’t much research ongoing to support this,” Wallace says, via a Zoom call from her home in London. “I mean, we don’t really talk about sex differences at medical school. We’ve just always sort of assumed that women are small men. Most of the medical research is based on a typical 70kg white male, and obviously not everyone fits that, but you’re using that research to treat women.”
Since training as a doctor at Cardiff University and entering the NHS as a locum doctor between surgical and medical departments, Wallace has been forced to examine her own biases as a healthcare professional.
“It’s almost as if men present with symptoms and women present with feelings,” she observes. “Women are more likely to be given a psychiatric diagnosis for a physical problem than a man would. And diagnoses of anxiety and depression are twice as common for women. I do fear whether we give a lot of women that diagnosis or that label before really appropriately screening them for that condition. I don’t think people within the healthcare system are out to get women, but I just think that there’s years and years of unconscious bias at play.”
With her new book, Wallace wanted to expand the definition of women’s health “beyond reproductive health and gynaecological things, because there are so many things that are important for our health, not just our ovaries”.
Sure enough, The Female Factor contains a wealth of information on health issues like movement, mood, breast care, stress, menopause, fertility and nutrition. Just as she did with her first book, The Food Medic, she is aiming to bridge the gap between medical wisdom and lifestyle/wellbeing advice.
“When I was writing that book, it started from a place of activist frustration,” she smiles. “I want to highlight that and start the conversation, but I also want this to be a very practical book that women can understand.”
As The Food Medic, she has over 600,000 followers on social media, mainly on her Instagram page. Several wellbeing “experts” of a similar standing online can offer a decent patter about bringing wellness, fitness and nutritional info to their community, but Wallace has the goods to back it all up.
Hazel Wallace, The Food Medic. Picture: Olivia Beasley
Certainly, her day job as a medic has helped to bolster her reputation and enable her to stand apart from the glut of other wellness influencers.
I ask her about the impossible, holier-than-thou standards that wellness influencers are routinely held to.
“I think some people hold themselves to a very high standard, especially if you’re someone who had kind of built their following on selling books based on how they look — whether they’ve gone on a ‘fat to fit’ journey or whatever,” she says.
“I think a lot of girls put pressure on themselves and then they build huge communities and apps and stuff like that, based on how they look. I think I’m very careful that my page and my books are not based on me; they’re based on the information. So I don’t feel the pressure to look a certain way. I guess I have to behave in a professional way because I’m a doctor, but I also know that my followers really appreciate when I am watching Netflix or ordering a takeaway, because I think that’s a healthy approach to promote as well.”
While it may seem that some wellness gurus have an eye trained on the sponsorship opportunities at all times, Wallace certainly gives the impression that she cares deeply about imparting the right sort of information to the community that she has built up around her. She isn’t averse to calling out the pseudoscience around fad eating plans, like the alkaline diet.
“I never kind of call [out] people that directly on social media because it can get very catty,” she says. “But I do call out fad diets. There’ll be lots of things [that need to be called out], and it’s worse for women. They’re bombarded with things that they ‘should’ be doing, whether it’s using specific washes for their vagina or going on a weird diet. I mean, men just don’t get that. And that annoys me to a degree.
“Usually, things are brought to my attention when someone follows me with a [message] and goes, ‘Is this true or false?’ In those cases, I will be very clear. It’s very hard on social media to know what’s kind of true and what’s false or who’s got the credentials and who doesn’t.”
And yet, Wallace’s wisdom is served with a healthy dash of high-end aspiration. She is an attractive woman and the content is as pleasing to the eye as any Goop-fed guru — is that a help or a hindrance when it comes to her core messaging?
“It’s very hard to make some information sexy when we’re talking about vaginal thrush or heart disease,” she says. “I think you have to be very resilient and maintain integrity when it comes to these things.”
She only very occasionally allows her 600k-strong following a glimpse into her personal life. Previously, she was in a long-distance relationship with a former boyfriend, Ben, but she keeps much of her personal life under wraps.
“I’ve been very closed for a number of years,” she says. “I have done a little bit more [revealing my personal life] on Instagram stories [which exist online for 24 hours only] that are a little bit more transient. I will show a bit more of my weekends or what I do with my free time. But I keep my cards close to my chest because there’s about [600,000] people following, and you don’t want them to know everything. Like, they’re a community, but they’re also not your friends or family. And so there’s an element of protection that you have to have over yourself, right?”
Despite admitting previously that she would love to do more TV, Wallace says that the idea holds less allure now. Rather, she hopes to expand her team and build more Food Medic courses, webinars and podcast episodes.
“I’d like to write more books in the future,” she says. “I’d like to maybe step into a research role. I’d like to do more ambassadorship for women’s health. I think that’s kind of my focus for now. I’ve never had the chance to sit down and think about what we can actually do until now.
“I think the times that I’ve done TV, it can be very scripted and it feels quite stiff and, you know, I never got into this because I wanted to be a TV doctor. I know there are doctors who would love that, but it doesn’t really appeal to me. If it was the right programme or something I was passionate about, then maybe, but it’s not like I’m looking for a presenting role.”
Hazel Wallace, The Food Medic. Picture: Olivia Beasley
All in all, it’s a remarkable trajectory for the girl who decided to dedicate her adult life to wellbeing and medicine after the death of her father, Kevin, in 2005, when she was just 14.
“We were sitting down to a family meal, just like we always did and everything imploded,” writes Wallace of his death in her book The Food Medic. “His death changed my life in every way — it’s hard to explain really, except that I felt like the rug had been pulled right out from underneath me.”
Originally, Wallace’s plan was to study accountancy. “I think I was just going to do what I thought my mum and dad wanted me to do,” she smiles. “I would have hated it. I’m absolutely terrible with numbers.
“But when my dad died, I was so firm in my belief that I wanted to be a doctor.”
At 18, she headed to Wales to start her medical training, eventually getting a job in one of London’s top teaching hospitals, University College Hospital. In tandem with her medical education, she trained as a registered nutritionist, obtaining a master’s degree in Clinical Nutrition and Public Health Nutrition in London (she is also a qualified personal trainer).
“I just became really fascinated with the role of nutrition and lifestyle and how it influences our health,” she explains now. “What I found in [medical school] lectures was that we were just paying lip service to this. We were just mentioning risk factors, but never going into great detail. When it came to my peers, many of them didn’t understand it, and oftentimes they would make fun of me because of it, but I kept going.
“I never thought it would ever be my full-time job. I’m not like a firm believer of ‘what will be, will be’ but it’s all kind of put me on this path now.”
Medical training aside, Wallace’s wisdom also comes from a handful of formative experiences. In the wake of her father’s death, her weight plummeted to five-and-a-half stone.
“It was when I was grieving my dad, and I just became very secluded and stopped eating basically, and stopped going to school,” she recalls. “It got to the point where my mum and GP were like, ‘We need to do something or we will bring you to hospital if things don’t improve.’
“But I got myself back up to health with the help of a dietitian and my GP and my mum, over the course of a couple of months. I was very lucky in that we turned it around quite quickly. I think it was another kind of moment where I realised how complicated nutrition and our physical health can be.”
Would she classify that time as having an eating disorder? “I was never fully diagnosed,” she says. “I think the doctor that I saw felt it wasn’t an eating disorder. I wouldn’t call it a normal relationship with food. An absence of wanting to look after myself, I guess.”
While studying in Pontypridd in South Wales at 18, there was another dramatic shift in her lifestyle. Like most students dealing with long hours and exams, she began eating convenience and junk food. She was lethargic and lacked body confidence. In 2012, she decided to take matters into her own hands and cook her meals from scratch, eat a more balanced diet and do more exercise. She detailed her progress back to true wellness on Instagram, and The Food Medic was born.
From those unassuming beginnings, her passion project now celebrates its 10th anniversary this year. “To build an educational platform has always been my goal,” she affirms. “I’ve never been able to fully invest in it and build it to be that kind of a resource, but I can now. Hopefully, it will help an awful lot of people.”
All the while, her father is rarely far from her mind. “If it wasn’t for my dad, I would never have started The Food Medic. I feel terrible saying it because I would never want to see his death as any kind of blessing. But I do feel in some way he’s inspired me and it’s his legacy that I’m carrying through.”
‘The Food Medic: The Female Factor’ is out now via Yellow Kite. For more information on The Food Medic, see thefoodmedic.co.uk
