Lesley Burch

17/01/2026

Wow! The takeaways for me right now (but wowsers there are plenty!) are:

It doesn’t matter your gender, age, current health status, trained or just starting out, what you do to move your body matters and whatever you do will result in more energy making machines (which makes you feel energised) and improve cardiovascular health - START TODAY!

Your training intensity - how strong the training effort is - tells your body it needs to adapt to keep up 💪

Your training duration - how long that training effort lasts - is what allows the area of your body you are training to fully rebuild and strengthen💪

Be it walking, gardening, swimming, riding, pushing a pram or a wheelbarrow - KEEP GOING. It does make a difference.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1K8TvYhFHu/

Most exercise advice focuses on how much you train. This paper shows the real question is what kind of cellular architecture you’re building.

This systematic review and meta-regression synthesizes data from 425 human studies to quantify how different exercise modalities reshape mitochondrial content and skeletal-muscle capillarization, two core determinants of metabolic health and endurance capacity.

The mechanistic takeaways:
• Training intensity is the dominant driver of mitochondrial expansion.
High-intensity and sprint-interval training produced ~2–4× greater increases in mitochondrial markers compared with traditional endurance training when normalized for time.

• Volume still matters, but differently.
Mitochondrial adaptations scale with training intensity × volume, whereas capillary growth depends more on intervention duration (≥8 weeks) than intensity alone.

• Capillarization and hypertrophy are not the same adaptation.
Capillary density and capillaries per fiber increased even when cross-sectional area did not, reinforcing that vascular remodeling is a distinct biological response.

• Trainability is context-dependent.
Untrained individuals showed larger relative gains, but well-trained individuals still adapted, especially under higher-intensity stimuli, contradicting the idea of a hard “adaptation ceiling.”

• Age, s*x, and disease status did not negate adaptation.
Young vs. old, male vs. female, and healthy vs. cardiometabolic or pulmonary disease groups all demonstrated meaningful mitochondrial and vascular remodeling with appropriate training exposure.

I'm sum, exercise is not merely a behavioral intervention, it is a dose-dependent biological signal that remodels mitochondrial density, oxidative capacity, and skeletal-muscle microvasculature. Intensity determines how much adaptation you get; duration determines how completely the tissue remodels.

16/01/2026

Some of the most simple ways to reach your goals and dreams are the best. This concept from ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is one of my favourites.

Brilliantly explained by .

Read, try and tell me how you plan to try it out. ​

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1BgewUPuB6/

14/01/2026

What a fantastic visual of the stages of aging through the body.
Where are you at?
What have you noticed?
What are you ignoring that you could be supporting?
Where could you be kinder to yourself?

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/14Wc6xLqUGB/

When different organs begin to show signs of aging

This visual summarizes findings from a 2025 Cell study mapping when specific organs become most sensitive to aging. It shows that aging is not a uniform process but a sequence of organ-specific declines that follow predictable timelines in midlife.

1️⃣ Early adulthood (25–35 years)
Most organs function at peak performance, with minimal measurable decline. Early molecular signs of aging begin in metabolic and reproductive systems.
🟢 Example: Around age 30, subtle changes in ovarian and testicular function can begin, marking early reproductive aging.

2️⃣ Mid-30s to early 40s
The heart and kidneys become among the first major organs to show measurable age-related changes.
🟢 Example: Cardiac tissue begins to lose elasticity, and early shifts in kidney filtration efficiency can appear by the late 30s to early 40s.
🟢 Example: Liver metabolism starts to slow modestly, altering the body’s ability to process fats and toxins.

3️⃣ Midlife (45–50 years)
Aging becomes systemic, with multiple organs showing concurrent stress. The lungs, liver, and digestive tract display reduced regenerative capacity.
🟢 Example: By age 50, the gastrointestinal system becomes more prone to inflammation and microbiome shifts, influencing nutrient absorption and immunity.

4️⃣ Early 50s to mid-50s
This is a critical turning point for cardiovascular, hematologic, and musculoskeletal health. The study identified this window as when the greatest number of organ systems show synchronized molecular aging.
🟢 Example: At age 55, changes in heart muscle stiffness, blood oxygen transport, and muscle fiber composition converge to accelerate physical decline.

5️⃣ Late 50s to 60 years
By this stage, most systems—heart, blood, muscle, and lungs—show coordinated aging patterns. Cellular repair slows, oxidative stress accumulates, and inter-organ signaling (such as inflammation and hormone balance) weakens.
🟢 Example: Age-related muscle loss (sarcopenia) and reduced lung elasticity directly affect endurance and metabolic stability.

This organ-by-organ aging timeline underscores that biological aging begins decades before clinical symptoms appear. Interventions that support cardiovascular, metabolic, and muscular health in the 30s and 40s may delay multi-organ decline later in life.

10/01/2026

Not rocket science that adding chemicals to our food is causing - and has caused for a VERY long time - harm resulting in life long injury, health issues and cancer.

If you must buy packaged food, check the labels for anything other than whole food ingredients.
If you can't pronounce an ingredient or the ingredient is a number, put it back on the shelf.

You and your family deserve better.

What a week!

Definitely a turning point in our movement!

After more than a decade of highlighting the impact on our kids, the tide is turning!

I knew it would take at least a decade for the science to start to catch up to what we already knew, what we already saw in our children.

We saw our kids suffering from a multitude of symptoms (asthma, hives, rashes, eczema, behavioural issues, headaches, migraines the list goes on!).

People came to Additive Free Kids as their absolute last resort, after they had been let down by doctors and specialists, at their wits end, at breaking point.

We knew our kids were suffering.
We were dismissed time and time again.
We were advised to ignore our mothers’ intuìtion.

We undertook our own research anyway.
We found the scientific studies that proved these ingredients were harmful.
We educated ourselves and we educated those around us that were interested.
We did what we needed to do for our children to keep them safe.

We listened to their bodies.
We made the changes and looked crazy to all those around us.
We bore the brunt of being the outcasts in our own families, schools, work places and the broader community.

This is why the AFK community was created to support the parents on this lonely journey. With a lack of support from partners, family and friends we came together to support each other.

We did it for our kids and our kids thrived as a result.

Every kid should have the opportunity to thrive!!

Our shopping aisles are full of ultra processed foods. It was/is a mine field for time poor parents to navigate. The AFK community came to love the product reviews that I did, to cut through the marketing jargon, to make the complex simple, to empower parents to vote with their dollar each and every time at the supermarket.

A product review has been released evey month to our Additive Free Advicates membership for the last five years.

The Additive Free Advocates painstakingly went to supermarkets, taking photos of products around Australia and submitting them for review. A labour intensive exercise for us all!

Together with our Advocates we are doing what our regulators aren’t.
We keep an eye on changes in ingredients (and have 5 years of history).
We hold manufacturers to account.
We vote with our dollar.

We have a long way to go with this movement, but these are very exciting times ahead.

Change will start to happen much faster with more people voting with their dollar.

It can happen VERY quickly if we all start voting with our dollar simultaneously.

Is it time that you ditch the additives for your family?

22/11/2025

"Rich people get Ozempic" and the social approval and wealth that goes along with thinness and an appearance of health, everyone else gets "body positivity".

There is circumstances where these groups of drugs are lifesaving however the tidal wave of prescriptions for everyone else is disturbing, potentially harmful - they are already considering approval of these drugs in young children to "improve physical appearance".

"To use such drugs to reinforce a kind of cultural aesthetic hierarchy is both troubling and ethically problematic".

Ever since 2023, a class of GPL-1 based drugs — which for two decades were used to treat type 2 diabetes — have been heralded as a “revolution in weight loss” and signalling the “end of obesity”. While these drugs go by different names, they’ve become popularly grouped under the shorth...

15/10/2025

What we put into our bodies leaves a longer imprint than we realise. Even prescription medicines.

This new research shows that common medications - from antibiotics and antidepressants to reflux and blood pressure drugs - can disrupt the gut microbiome for years. Even if you stop taking it.

The average adult has about 30 trillion human cells but it hosts roughly 38 trillion microbial cells!

Not only that, the collective microbiome has at least 100 times more genes than the human genome which influence digestion, mood, immunity, and even how we metabolise medications.

Now you see why we need to take care of it.

This isn't a call to 'cancel' medication or to stop your script. It's a call to increase awareness of the knock-on effects and highly the need to help our microbiome recover so it can keep working it's best for us.

Read the study here:

This is the first study using detailed retrospective medication usage data from electronic health records to systematically assess the long-term effects of medication usage on the gut microbiome. We identified carryover and additive effects on the gut microbiome for a range of antibiotics and non-an...

20/09/2025

Buy your supplements from your supermarket or pharmacy?
Loud labels telling you "I'm the supplement for you!"?

Read this. And read it again.

Unregulated, unproven, dust might be all you're spending your hard earned $$ on.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/177jr8srP9/

07/07/2025

11/05/2025

This is such a fantastic video showing how different our performance can be depending on where we are in our cycle.

Not only can we feel flat, but we can feel flat in the gyms or our sport events too.

Notice your thoughts when reflecting on your performance, check in on your cycle and give buckets of grace to the work your body is doing that you are not in control of or even aware of.

That body is working hard 24/7, you are such a complex creature, give grace and exhale.

Then, plan for your next session 💪

29/04/2025

Mmmm cookie 🍪 🤪

04/04/2025

Why kindness is the winter immune booster you didn’t know you needed.

Doing something for others doesn’t just feel good—it strengthens your body too. Research shows acts of kindness can shift gene expression, reducing inflammation and boosting antiviral defences at the mRNA level.

Meanwhile, stress and self-focus do the opposite, weakening immunity over time.

Your winter wellness goal?
Look beyond yourself. A small act of generosity—checking in on a friend, lending a hand, or simply sharing a smile—can support both your well-being and theirs.

Because true health isn’t just about what you take in, but what you give out.

Start preparing your body for winter wellness by taking action today.

01/04/2025

Denial is meant to be a short-term plan, not a way of life.