At 18, Brooke Kelaart was cast as "the beauty" on Beauty and the Geek. The producers told her she wasn't allowed to say she was at university. Nearly two decades later she's the one in the lab, doing a masters in healthcare innovations and researching how health misinformation spreads online.

In this episode Lara sits down with Brooke to talk about the long road from DJ-ing with her twin sister, to reality TV, to pharmacology and toxicology, and why she's spent years being underestimated by people who decided who she was before she opened her mouth.

They get into the peptide boom that's taken over everyone's feed, why people are suddenly comfortable injecting things they bought online, and the vitamin stacking trend that's sending people to hospital with liver damage. Brooke's research found that a huge portion of health content online is false or misleading, and that people are more likely to believe a stranger they follow than their own doctor.

It's also a conversation about being a woman who doesn't fit the box. Brooke talks about dressing down before going to uni so people take her seriously, the study that shows girls stop associating being smart with their own gender at around age six, and the moment her eight year old came home convinced boys were smarter than her.

Brooke opens up abput her recent separation and solo parenting two girls and why rest is not in her vocabulary.

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The information shared in this episode is general in nature and is not medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. It does not take into account your individual health circumstances. This episode includes discussion of peptides, supplements and prescription medications, some of which are not approved for the uses discussed and are not supported by long term human safety data. Nothing here is an endorsement or recommendation of any product, and nothing in this episode establishes a practitioner and patient relationship. Please speak to your own doctor or qualified healthcare practitioner before starting, stopping or changing any medication, supplement or treatment.

Lem Zakaria has produced some of Australia's biggest podcasts and now runs her own talent agency. But that is not where her story starts. She grew up in Jordan, in a culture where being different came with real consequences, and she spent years living a double life.

This episode contains explicit language and adult themes, and includes discussion of homophobia, police detainment and blackmail.

We talk about the secret girlfriend, the night they got caught by the cops, and the acting job that got them out of it. We talk about what living like that does to you, and why she describes that whole period as feeling numb even while the accolades were rolling in.

I also share something I have not talked about much on here. When I was twenty five I fell head over heels for one of my hockey teammates, and it turned my sense of who I was completely upside down.

From there we get into masking, labels, why so many of us perform a version of ourselves, and the codependency pattern Lem sees again and again in relationships. Then Lem tells me the real reason she walked away from a very good job to start her own agency, and it is not the reason you would expect.

If you have ever felt like you did not fit the mould, this one is for you.

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This week Light It Up looks a bit different. Lara is joined in person by Tara Pavlovic, and instead of a standard interview, they open the floor to the audience. Anonymous questions, sent in by listeners, answered without the usual polish.

Heads up, this episode contains strong language and frank discussion of separation, marriage breakdown, mental health, and sex.

The first one goes straight for the throat. How do you survive financially as a single mum, and what is your annual wage? Tara answers it properly, which almost nobody does. She talks about growing up with nothing, leaving home at seventeen, and why she has never once felt able to stop working. She names the number. She names the rent. She talks about legal fees, therapy costs, and the fact that ten Medicare-subsidised psychology sessions a year does not go far when you are in the middle of a crisis.

Question two comes from a woman who has been married seventeen years and still thinks about an ex from twenty-five years ago. Lara and Tara unpack why our brains run a highlight reel of the good times and quietly delete the rest, whether this is a nervous system safety mechanism, and what it might actually be pointing to in the current relationship.

That leads into the conversation the episode is really about. Marriages get boring. Desire needs distance, and when you have kids climbing on you at the breakfast table there is no distance to be found. Lara and Tara talk about the seven year itch, why monthly date nights are easier to recommend than to execute, and why pretending none of this happens is doing everyone a disservice.

Question three comes from someone consciously uncoupling and living in the same house, wondering how long they are meant to do this for. The advice is practical. Start looking for your own space while things are still good, keep talking, and ask the harder question underneath it, which is if you are such a good team, why are you splitting up at all.

Honest, funny, occasionally filthy, and exactly the conversation most of us are only having in our group chats.

Part two coming soon

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