Let's Say Hello

[00:02:48.550] – Allan

Hey, Ras. How are you?

[00:02:50.540] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:52.540] – Allan

I'm doing all right. I'm traveling to see family. We're doing a family reunion on my father's side. First time I'm probably going to be around all of my brothers and sisters on that side of the family in it's got to be 15 years. No. They all came to my wedding. So there was the wedding, which I guess was a little over eight years ago. So eight years ago we were all together. But this is extended families, so my father's brothers are going to be there with their families and my stepmother's sister is going to be there. There's going to be all the nephews and nieces and all that. So what turned into what was going to be just probably about a dozen of us is now going to be something like 30 or 35.

[00:03:41.990] – Rachel

Nice.

[00:03:43.110] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:03:43.580] – Rachel

That's awesome.

[00:03:44.390] – Allan

It's kind of crazy. Yeah. And you may have recognized that last week I didn't really talk a lot about my life, about what was going on, and I apologize. I did that on purpose. I was going through a pretty rough week. I lost a really good friend, and it was very frustrating because he was staying with us at Lula's, and he was supposed to stay through July 5th, and then he left two days early, and he died of heart attack on the morning of July 5th. Now, the thing was, when he got to Lula's, he wasn't feeling well. He told us he wasn't feeling well, stomach issues and that kind of thing. And so we were like, okay, you got a parasite, go get some medication, that kind of thing, because it happens down here. It just does. But he started complaining about heartburn, and then he justified that in that he had had spicy soup the night before. There's a Japanese chain here. It's the only chain restaurant we have on the whole island. And I don't actually like their sushi all that much, but he had one of the spicy soups, and as spicy as they'd make it, that's one thing he and I had in common, was we like spicy food.

[00:05:11.570] – Allan

But he was complaining about heartburn, and then he was complaining about just difficulty breathing, and that's what I heard. And I was like, okay, well, just try slowing yourself down, slowing your body down, and try breathing through your nose. If you can get yourself to where you're breathing through your nose, you're going to regulate your sympathetic nervous system, and that should help calm you down. That's why people will, if they're hyperventilating, will breathe into a bag. It's all about slowing down your sympathetic nervous system anyway and getting a balance of CO2 and oxygen. But I wasn't in the conversation where he talked about the arm pain, so I didn't know about that symptom. But my wife had tried to talk him into going down and seeing the doctors and having a conversation, getting an EKG or something. Again, had I known this, I think I have an EKG at the house somewhere. I still find it, but I have one. And we could have sat down with him and done that, or we could have just made him go to the hospital, which we didn't. We didn't do either of those. And so it's kind of one of those things where you're like, I should have paid attention to the symptoms.

[00:06:25.870] – Allan

I know the symptoms. He had poo pooed them as being the soup, and I should have paid a lot more attention. So I was just saying, the only reason I'm bringing this up today instead of I didn't bring up last week because it was still really raw, was just pay attention to the people around you. If they're not feeling well, tell them to go get checked out, particularly if they're over 50, over 60. Just tell them, don't play around with it. Don't play around with it. Just go get checked out. In our little hospital, it would have cost him I shouldn't even probably say this on the air $18, $18 to get an EKG. He'd gone down to the emergency room. They'd have brought him in. They'd have hooked him up to an IV, because that's what they do. They would have hooked him up to an EKG a little bit later. They would have probably seen some problems, enough problems to tell him, we've got to ambulance you to Changanola or David, where he would have gotten proper care in time. And as a result, now he hasn't, and he passed. So I'm only saying that to bring you down or anything, but I just recognize your body tries to tell you when it's hurting.

[00:07:44.380] – Allan

It tries to tell you when things are wrong. And if you feel things are wrong, things are wrong. So listen to your body. Listen to what's going on, and then just go get checked out. It's not that big a deal. And yeah, there's a little bit of expense, even more expense maybe for you up there in the US. But just realize that if you don't get checked out, what's the alternative?

[00:08:11.790] – Rachel

I'm sorry, Allan. I'm really sorry for the loss of your friend. My heart goes out to you. And I think just to emphasize your point again, I feel like we're in our 50s. Most of us, and a lot of our listeners are certainly over 40, but we're not as invincible as we used to be. And it's easy to dismiss common aches and pains because we're weekend warriors or we're doing these really big projects around the house and we hurt our joints and we're fatigued and stuff. But I think that once you hit 40 or maybe even over 50, those little aches and pains can also signal something else. And you're absolutely right. I'm not a doctor, and I need a doctor to help diagnose what's going on, and it's just a quick trip to the hospital. I'm a better safe than sorry kind of person myself. Good to listen.

[00:09:07.150] – Allan

Go get your regular tests, the things you're supposed to do. If there's blood in your urine, go talk to a doctor. Urologist, if your chest is a little tight, if your arm is hurting, if you're having trouble breathing, if you have what you think is heartburn and it lasts more than a tums, go to the doctor. It's worth it. And you don't even have to make it a 911 thing. It's just a simple, hey, let's head on down to the emergency room, let them know I'm having this symptom. And I can tell you from experience when you go up to an emergency room and you're over 40 years old and you walk in there and tell them your chest hurts, you go in first.

[00:10:01.020] – Rachel

You get attention.

[00:10:02.330] – Allan

They just walk you back there. There's no questions about, oh, go sit in the no. They just come on with me. You're literally sitting down and you're hooked up to an IV and an EKG. Boom.

[00:10:15.070] – Allan

Like that. They're handing you a nitroglycerin and saying, here, take this. And you ask them what it is. It's a nitroglycerin is it just a precaution. Doesn't hurt you if it's not a heart attack, but could really help you if it is. For me, that one was dehydration and water poisoning. I collapsed and I threw up, and I defecated at the same time, which is not a nice thing to do. I don't recommend it. Probably was really close to going into a coma and didn't know it. Went home and I told my coworkers, don't call 911 because it's kind of the thing. I got dirty underwear now, I didn't when I came to work, but I do now. I'm going home and getting cleaned up. And I went home, got cleaned up, I rested, and I didn't feel any better. I went to the emergency room, but I didn't call 911. I just got in my car, calmly drove down to the hospital, walked in and told him I have chest pains. So we'll kind of get off that topic because we are going to talk about running and new runners and health and things of that.

[00:11:24.860] – Allan

So, yes, let's have this conversation with Martinus.

[00:11:29.310] – Rachel

Great.

Interview

[00:11:55.350] – Allan

Martinus, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:11:58.190] – Martinus

Hey, man, thank you for having me.

[00:12:00.250] – Allan

So your book is called Slow AF Running Club: The Ultimate Guide to Anyone Who Wants to Run. This is a family-friendly kind of show, so I'm not going to spell out what AF is. But even if you're not one of the hip kids, I think you kind of know what that is.

[00:12:16.250] – Martinus

And fabulous. Slow and fabulous.

[00:12:18.910] – Allan

Slow and fabulous. I'm really glad that you took the time to write this book because so many of the books that are out there and I think you even mentioned it, they're written by previous Olympians. They're written for someone who wants to shave 30 seconds off their time so they can come in with a PR on their half marathon or whatever, and where they're going to get that one, two or three place in their run. But you're this person that's in the back of the pack that doesn't fit the mold, if you will. When I was doing my longer runs, I weighed about 195 pounds, and that was called a Clydesdale. In those days, we'd call those Clydesdales because there weren't a lot of us that big running marathons and ultramarathons. And you kind of saw it because I was probably a good 60, 70 pounds heavier than just about everybody else out there. But I was also somewhat of a back of the packer then because I just couldn't run as fast as most of them could. But I still ran. And I think that's what was so awesome about your story is you were basically told you need to do something or you're going to die.

[00:13:31.420] – Allan

And then you told him what you were going to do, and then he says, you're going to die. You mind telling that story?

[00:13:38.230] – Martinus

Yeah. So approximately ten years ago, I was working at Men's warehouse at the time. Let's give it a little context. Working at Men's Warehouse was on my feet eight to 10 hours a day in hard bottom dress shoes selling suits. And I developed some hip pain because of this, right? Like, who wouldn't in your hard bottom dress shoes walking on concrete. So I go see a doctor. First time he ever meeting this doctor. He has no previous experience with me, and he goes, I know why you in pain. Okay, what's that? He's like, you're fat. And then he goes on to say, fat, you need to lose weight or die. And I remember being frustrated, just being a person of size, and just going through all of this again. Like, you telling me to lose weight or die, but you don't know me, right? Like, you're here to figure out what's going on with my hip. So then he's going like, you need to start walking. You need to go buy walking shoes and all this other stuff. And I was like, screw that. I'm going to run a marathon. And then he laughs at me and tells me that's the most stupidest thing he has heard in all his years of practicing medicine.

[00:14:44.340] – Martinus

So now you didn't call me fat, now you didn't tell me I was going to die. And then he goes on to say, well, if you run this marathon, you're guaranteed going to die on the course. So I'm just sitting here with all these options where it just ends up just me being dead, for lack of a better words. So, like, lose weight or die. All right, I'm going to run a marathon. No, you can't run a marathon because you're going to die then. So I just left that doctor's office very frustrated and very irritated, and on my way home, I just happened to drive by a running shoe store, and I went in there and told them, I need running shoes. I need them now.

[00:15:20.410] – Allan

And that's awesome. It's funny. That what will actually trigger us to basically say, we've got to do something different. We're going to do something different. And I love stories like that, because yours was one of being a rebel of just saying, screw it. I know what I can do. Don't tell me who I am. I'm going to prove you wrong. Now, when you decided, okay, then you had those new running shoes, and you put them on, your first running story didn't quite go as planned. How does someone get started doing this? Because I see a lot of people thinking about it the same way you did as well. Just jump on this treadmill and go, can you talk a little bit about that, your story? And then how does someone get started?

[00:16:06.470] – Martinus

Yeah. So I get home, I got these shoes on. I was like, I'm going to run a marathon today, and I'm inconveniently sandwiched in between two gazelles on a treadmill. These guys are going nine and ten on the treadmill. They made it look effortlessly. And here I am, 300 pound guy who haven't been on the treadmill in years, and trying and sizing these guys up to figure out, all right, how fast do I need to go? So I thought to myself, where these guys is going nine and ten, I can at least go seven. And next thing you know, 15 seconds later, I fell off the treadmill. Mortified, embarrassed, because the gazelles all on their pedestal. They just looked down at me as they're still running. I just feel like they just look down on me like, hey, bro, are you all right? So I went home, tears in my eyes, embarrassed. And it's something about that, right? I have this tattoo on my right wrist, and I talk about this in the book of like, I have a tattoo that says no struggle, no progress, which is a famous quote from Frederick Douglass. And the portions of the speech that stands out to me is where he goes, if there's no struggle, there's no progress.

[00:17:22.330] – Martinus

Men who favor freedom, yet deprecate agitation is men who want crops without plowing the land. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want ocean without its roar. He goes on to say that the struggle may be a physical one, a moral one, or even a mental one, but there needs to be some type of struggle in order to get progress. And I think for myself, going through that and hearing that speech rang true in my head in this situation and being like, okay, I really know what this quote really means. This really means that, all right, I have to go through this struggle in order to figure out what's on the other side. And I think that's one of the things I want to mention to the people who are out here, right, where you're starting to get started. Hopefully, you don't fall off the treadmill like I did.

[00:18:10.220] – Martinus

Hopefully. I pray that you don't, but I think that when it comes to most individuals, when they do start out, they do what I call the terrible twos. They start out too fast, too soon, or do too much. So if they do too much too soon and too fast, you're still going to have that fall off the treadmill instance because they are going out the gate and not necessarily going at a speed or at a rate that can be healthy and something that their body can get used to.

[00:18:42.710] – Allan

Now, the run plans that you do have in the book, I like how they kind of start someone out where they are. So not everybody's going to jump right into maybe your twelve week program for the 5K. They might need to do a little bit of base building first. And you kind of have almost like a four week plan in there that they can repeat and do until they feel like, okay, now I can do this and now I'm ready to do this. And so it's kind of stairstep built. So I really like how you put that together because I think it makes it, I'm not going to say brainless, but at least makes it to where someone knows, okay, I have to conquer this thing first and then I'm ready for this thing. And I just like how you did that.

[00:19:24.240] – Martinus

Thank you. And I think that really just goes from the amount of experience I have coaching individuals as well as the experience I had when I was going through this journey when I first got started running, is that most training plans start you off with, let's start running with a slow ten minute mile. And it's like, wait a minute, this is what you're assuming is slow and this is what you're assuming a beginner should do? And I think that's where a lot of people get tripped up at.

[00:19:58.940] – Allan

Yeah, I think that's important because for some people who have never run and you say ten minute mile, that doesn't actually mean anything to them until they get out there and actually get on their watch and they do a mile, and they're like, okay, well, that mile took me 20 minutes, so I'm not ready for a ten minute mile yet.

[00:20:18.550] – Martinus

Right.

[00:20:19.750] – Allan

I'm ready for a 20 minutes mile. But here's the key of it. You put in the 20 minutes of work and you got that mile behind you. And every mile that you do after that is just another one that's building on the one you're going to do next. And I think that's when you talked a lot about how you got started and then you were going and there are times even when you were well trained, that you struggled and you fought. And so I appreciate again you saying that this is about the struggle and running for anyone that's done it for any amount of time knows that that's what most of this is, is a struggle and it's an internal struggle because no one else is going to pick up your foot. You got to do it, and you got to take that step in the next step. And the next step. And I liked how in the warm up, because everybody will say this, okay, well, do your warm up. And so you're going to put a warm up in there. But your warm up is not just physical. You have a mental component to your warm up.

[00:21:22.810] – Allan

Can you talk a little bit about your warm up process?

[00:21:26.330] – Martinus

Absolutely. So running is just as mental as it is physical. And I personally think that running is 90% mental and 10% physical because anybody, if you do it consistent enough, you can lift this bottle of hand sanitizer and get something out of it. Right. So the actual movement part, I think it's the easy part. I think it's the mindset part that a lot of people struggle with. Right. Like, anybody can be a runner, but not everybody do it. And it's because of the mindset aspect of it. So when it comes to my mindset, warm up, it's one of the things of really just getting yourself mentally prepared for this bout of movement. You're understanding, how do I feel in this moment? Did I get an argument with my significant other? Did my dog bite me? Whatever may happen, right. To really figure out, all right, where am I at mentally right now? So then you can figure out, all right, do I need to have a mental adjustment to really get into this? Because for a lot of people, when it comes to running, it's like, oh, I don't want to do this. The weather is not good.

[00:22:39.430] – Martinus

The wind is blowing in the wrong way, like all these other things, right. So first is where are you mentally and do you need a mental adjustment? And then the second thing is really understanding, all right, let's go through your body. Let's go through from head to toe. How are your legs feeling? How are your arms feeling? So that way, once you start to go into the physical aspect of it, you'll already know where you need to add more focus. 

[00:23:08.620] – Allan

And the reason I think all that's really important is this is not a straight line. You're going to have great training runs, and you're going to have some that just suck. And it's your energy level. It's something. But you got out there, and it wasn't your day, and you've got to kind of accept that because that one day doesn't define you unless you let it. And so I really liked that idea of checking in with yourself beforehand, because that kind of gives you some precursors to know, my energy level is not 100% today. Maybe I didn't sleep as well as I needed to. Maybe I haven't been recovering as well as I need to. Maybe my nutrition is off. And you talk about a lot of all this in the book. So that's why I liked the book overall, because it was not just a just do it kind of thing. It was, here's everything that you need to consider as you go into this, because for you, a lot of what's out there isn't designed the way it should be for a runner that's going to finish back of the pack or maybe not even finish before time.

[00:24:17.730] – Allan

And I think that was another important thing that I kind of took out of this, was for a lot of people going out to run their first five or 10K, they don't really take into consideration, well, what happens if it takes me over the 50 minutes for this 5K and I'm not finished? What are they going to do then? And there's a lot of other considerations that you brought up that I thought were really important. Can you talk about some considerations if someone's looking at their first five or 10K, maybe even first half marathon, that they should consider looking into before they get started?

[00:24:51.500] – Martinus

Absolutely. I would say the first thing is really understanding what is the pace limits? Like, what is the pace cut offs for this particular race? And then that way you can understand, all right, where are you at physically to understand if you're either going to have a good time with this pace cut off, or you're going to have what I like to call a bad time with this pace cut off? So I think that's the first thing that you think about. And then you ask yourself, all right, can you do it within this pace time? The answer is yes. Great. If the answer is maybe. All right, now let's see what happens to the runners who fall behind the pace limit. Do they let you continue to run? Do they put you on a sidewalk? Do you put you on a bus? You really need to understand what is the ramifications if you don't make it to the finish line in the allotted time. And then you have to ask yourself, are you okay with those ramifications? Are you okay with having to run on the sidewalk because they're open the streets up? Are you okay with getting on a bus because they're like, hey, the race is over.

[00:25:57.410] – Martinus

You got to get on this bus because this thing is done. Are you okay with that? I know for some people, they'll be devastated if they participate in their first race. And the bus is like, hey, you're too slow. We got to open this course up. You got to get on this bus. We're sorry, but your race is over with. And some people will be devastated. They might not even run ever again. So making sure that they understand, what are the ramifications if you don't make it to the finish line in that certain time period? And then I think there are other ancillary things that you can also think about the time of day the race start. Like is it a morning race, is it a night race? I think about for longer distances. Say you're training for a half marathon or a marathon. Are you training for a spring marathon, which means you have to train throughout the winter, or are you training for a fall marathon which means you have to train throughout the summer. And those have their own ramifications as well. Whether you're training throughout the summer months and I don't know if you're down south or whatever, but that's something you also need to think about as well.

[00:27:04.390] – Martinus

And I also think about the last thing is for individuals who enjoy traveling to know how easy is it to get to that particular place. So for example, I went to a race in Montana, I live in New York City. You would think out of all the places, there would be a straight shot or a non stop plane to Montana, to New York City because it's one of the busiest cities in the world. That wasn't the case and I ended up getting delayed on a stop and all types of things that goes along with that. So it's also understanding where are you going and what does the airfare looks like or the travel look like to get there as well.

[00:27:50.580] – Allan

Yeah, I was running the Big Sur Marathon. They had the expo the day before and I went to the Expo and they had this speech and the director did not say anything about the four hour limit for the finish line. So what they were doing was they said okay, because they had some mudslides. So they were having to close this particular road, this particular bridge for the race, and they didn't want to shut it down any longer than they had to. So they were looking at the first finishers finishing in 2 hours and a little over 2 hours. And then at 4 hours they said, okay, well, we're going to have to open up the bridge. And so I'm running and all of a sudden they divert us and now we're running through this artichoke planting. This is down a gravel road into the middle of nowhere. There's no fans down there, there was no nothing. You finished the race and it's like, here you are, here's your medal. And it's like, okay, there's two guys standing down here besides the people that were just running in with me. So we're walking back up to where the finish line is, which was now about another mile and a half away.

[00:28:55.800] – Allan

And then all the people that had come to watch people finish, they didn't see us finish. So there's these things that happen because 4 hours, that was a slower marathon for me at the time, but it was that whole thing of had I known, I could have run just a little bit faster pace, particularly for the last few miles, and I probably would have made. Their cut off. But you brought up a couple of other important things in the book as far as they may run out of medals, they may not have your Tshirt size. There may be all these other little things that are going to somewhat be little digs into you and being a slower runner or your size or those different things. And that can really mess with you as a runner because you did finish the race, and now you don't have the medal to hang up in your closet or wherever you hang up your medals. And so there's a lot of considerations that you had in the book that I agree you want to make sure you're paying attention to because we all do it. We're all going to make mistakes as we prepare for our race.

[00:29:58.180] – Allan

Like you said, not having a nonstop flight. I had my luggage lost when I was flying to the DC marathon, the Marine Corps. Fortunately, I was wearing my running shoes. But I had to go into the Expo and break your primary rule, which is nothing new on race day. My shorts, my shirt, everything else I was wearing besides even my socks, all I had on was I had my running shoes on on the plane. And that's all I had going into the next morning for the race. So I had to stop at the Expo and buy everything I needed. And that was not the funnest race because I broke your rule. And I agree it's an important rule, nothing new on race day. Now, another area that you got into, a lot of runners kind of skip because they think, okay, well, I'm running, so that's my exercise for the day. I'm done. And they're going to run even if it's just I'm going to run three or four times per week. That's all I need to be in good shape and be able to run. But you're a big proponent of cross training. Can you talk a little bit about why you're a proponent of cross training and what someone should consider doing for cross training if they're running?

[00:31:12.680] – Martinus

Absolutely. So what I like to tell people is the things that you don't do as a runner that actually makes you a better runner. And I have this phrase that I tell all the people that I train, and that is you make time to cross train or you're going to make time for doctor's appointments and physical therapy appointments because you're going to get injured. And it's not if you get injured, it's when you get injured. So that's something I always tell people, is that make time for cross train. Are you going to be making time for doctor's appointments? Because that is the true fact about running. And this sport that we do is a very repetitive sport. I think that a lot of people forget about all the other ancillary muscles or accessory muscles that needs to help keep you upright while you run and get injured a lot. So I'm a big proponent of cross training, more particularly, most people, since we all have jobs that makes us sit on our butt. There's this phrase called gluteal amnesia, dead butt syndrome. And this is thing, this is real. And it's the fact that you sit on your butt for so long that your glutes don't fire properly or don't fire at all when you're running.

[00:32:35.860] – Martinus

So then while you run it, you rely on some of the smaller muscles versus some of the larger muscles in your body. So you rely on calf or mainly your calf and your soleus muscles to help push off versus using your glute muscles, which is like one of the larger muscles to help move your body. So that's one of the things that I like to tell people and let people know that you need to strengthen your glutes. And then the last thing is like engaging your core. I think that comes with another thing. We're just sitting down for so long is that a lot of people forget how to necessarily engage their core and really think about that. When people say core or like AB workout, they think about like sit ups. Right? But your core moves in multiple directions. It just don't go in that crunchy format. It goes to the side, it goes left to the right, to the front and the back. We need to make sure that our core is stable in order to make sure that everything else is grounded while we run as well.

[00:33:42.380] – Allan

Yeah, I like to explain the core to people I train and say think of it as like a soda can. And when that soda can is full, it's solid, you can put something on top of it, you can move it around, it's not going to crush. But you take that fluid out, which is how most of us are walking around, or worse, put a kink in it and it's going to collapse. And so any kind of training volume you put on yourself, if you don't have a strong core, it is going to break, it is going to break you at some point. So I totally agree with that. Strength training, core training, and then even doing some of your endurance training off of your feet or off of the road so that it's not so much extra repetitive effort on your body just to have a certain level of cardiovascular strength.

[00:34:29.150] – Martinus

Yes, and I think that's a great thing to mention right inside the book. I break up cross training in like two ways, right? You have strength cross training and you have cardio cross training. And I think a lot of people tend to forget that cardiovascular fitness can be brought on through various methods of exercise. It don't necessarily have to be running, it can be swimming, it can be cycling, it can be a plethora of things. But all of that still helps you with running as well.

[00:35:04.060] – Allan

Yeah, well, when I trained for my first one, I was in Washington, DC. And I was training during the winter because it was a spring, it was a February marathon. So I'm like, okay, I'm in Washington, DC. It's cold January in December in Washington, DC. And I was from Mississippi, so I was flying up there, but that's when I had to train. So I'm like, well, I'm going to go over here to this YMCA and go in there and just do some training. There some cross training inside and they had a 20 minutes limit on the machines. So I would get on one machine like an elliptical, and I'd do that for the 20 minutes, and then I'd have to move over to a different machine like a bike or a Stepper or a treadmill or whatever. And then that's how I did a lot of my training was just to cross train there. And I think one of the core advantages of it was that I got my cardiovascular endurance way up without putting so much stress on my knees, particularly running around Washington, DC. Where the pavements like granite. Oh my, yeah, it's not a fun place to run, even when I was in a safe part of the town.

[00:36:11.450] – Allan

But it was cold and it was hard, and I was like, no, I'm not going to do that too much. I did get out some and run, but for the most part, I did a lot of cross training and that was enough. That was enough to give me the endurance to be able to complete the run and my goal time. So I agree with all that. And I think one of the cores and things that you have in here is you're repeatedly thinking about the needs of the runner from the perspective of protecting their investment, protecting their body. So you talk about cross training, you talk about recovery and sleep and nutrition and all those different things. So I think it's a really good book for someone who does. You call it The Ultimate Guide for anyone who wants to run. Boom. That's exactly what this book is. Now, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:37:06.190] – Martinus

Oh, man. So let's start with the happiest. Right. I think when it comes to physical activity, a lot of people get into a comparison trap. They look at you, they look at me or whoever, and it's like, oh, I'm not where I need to be or I'm not where you at, and so on and so forth. And I think that one of the things that I've learned throughout all these years of running is that comparison is the thief of joy. It's the thief of joy and happiness. And one of the things I always like to tell the people that I train is that if your life doesn't depend on winning 1st, 2nd, or third place in the race, you're here and you're running a race to get a participation medal that you've already paid for. So there's no need to take yourself so seriously and get yourself so riled up for a race that A, you're going to get participation medal at the end of it, you're not winning. So you already know that. So you got to have something else that's going to drive you to run. So that's the first thing comparison is a thing for the journey. Fittest, being the fittest that you can possibly be.

[00:38:19.380] – Martinus

I think the best way to do that is through consistency. I think a lot of people underestimate the power of just being consistent, and this can be okay, I'm going to be active most days out of the week, which is, I say four days out of the week. Right. I think there's so many benefits that come with being regularly physically active that you'll get in your body even if you don't lose weight, that I think that there's still so many benefits to continue to be active. And I think that's another thing that a lot of people fail to realize as well is that we've been so taught to understand that exercise equals weight loss, right? So when people do exercise, they don't lose weight. They get all upset and sad and depressed and then stop exercising, not knowing that there's so many other benefits. Better A1C's, better cholesterol, better blood pressure, all these other things. The mental health benefit that comes with it that it's so beneficial that even if you don't lose weight, it's still a benefit, you still continue to do that. And I think that also rolls into the last part of the healthiest right by being regularly physically active.

[00:39:40.090] – Martinus

All of those markers that we look into or look at when we are going to a doctor, those markers get affected in a positive way when you are consistently being active.

[00:39:54.280] – Allan

Cool. Thank you. Martinus, if someone wanted to learn more about you, more about your Run Club and more about your book, Slow AF Run Club, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:40:05.730] – Martinus

You can go to slowafrunclub.com. That'd probably be the best hub to go there to get more information so we have information about the book there. The book is available wherever books are sold. And then we also have an app on iOS and Android. So if you download the Slow AF Run Club app on your favorite phone Apple device, you'll be able to find the app there as well.

[00:40:29.080] – Allan

Cool. Well, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/601, and I'll be sure to have the links there. Martinus, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:40:41.060] – Martinus

Thank you for having me, Allan

Post Show/Recap

[00:40:42.050] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:40:44.570] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. You know me. I love everything to do about running and listening to Martinus share his story was super motivating. His story and his run club, I looked up his Run Club and his website, Slow AF. It sounds like a really fun group of people. It's a really great community.

[00:41:03.570] – Allan

Yeah. And that's kind of one of the cool things. Again, it wasn't one story. I think that was what I really liked about the book, was that he really talked raw about the tough things that he went through, the chafe monsters, and being told he should get on the bus because he's not going to make it. And he knew he was going to make it, particularly because the guy on the bus told him to get on the bus and kept coming back and asking him to get on the bus. And so there's a lot of lessons in there about what running means, particularly for a slower runner. A lot of the things that slower runners have to put up with. He talks about shoes, he talks about everything else. But I think one of the big stories out of all of it was that running, it's a solo thing because you have to do the work, but it's also a very social thing when you let it be.

[00:42:04.460] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:42:05.450] – Allan

And so the Run Club thing, he formed that online run club predominantly because he couldn't find his tribe in real life. He was trying and he went out with a group and in a place where you would kind of expect a lot more tolerance and acceptance. And he went out to join the slow group and was informed, okay, they're running this trail that he didn't know, and they were going to run ten minute miles, which was about twice as fast as he would normally have wanted to run. That because his running is going to be more in the 15 to 18 range as a normal run, just for a marathon or any kind of longer distance. He wasn't looking to run ten minute miles. Now, he tried because that was the slow group. And then they left him.

[00:43:02.200] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:43:03.080] – Martinus

And as a result of being left, he turned to go back to the parking lot and got a little lost and then found two other runners that were trying to get back to the parking lot. So they all went back together. I only say that story not that you would avoid a run club because there's a lot of advantages. And I know, Rachel, you can talk a lot more about being in run clubs, forming run clubs and all that, but to me, the cool advantages of a run club is the social aspects of it, of having friends, having those peer groups. When we talk about motivation, there's a peer group waiting for you on Tuesday night to do the 07:00 run. You guys show up and do the 07:00 run, have your beer together, and then it's a social thing, but it's also a safety thing, especially if you're doing trails or doing areas. Running with other people is a huge safety thing. But it's not either of those things if the group is going to leave you. Because, again, now there's no social. You're alone on the trail and there's no safety because you just got left alone on the trail.

[00:44:12.930] – Allan

But there are run clubs out there. And if there aren't, you could form your own.

[00:44:16.770] – Rachel

That's right.

[00:44:17.600] – Rachel

And the great thing about Martinus putting his book together is that he is one of those back of the packers. He was a new runner. He made all the classic new runner mistakes and finally found his people. He found a group of people that he could form a club with and do their thing together, which is so important. And I want to point out a couple of things, is that a lot of people are afraid to start running because there are those fast people out there. There are people that run Boston, which those are only fast runners run the Boston Marathon.

[00:44:54.680] – Allan

But not only no, because again, if you read his book, you'll know that there are lotteries.

[00:45:00.860] – Rachel

Oh, yeah, there's charity, charity groups and.

[00:45:04.710] – Allan

There are lotteries where you can be picked for a lottery. Because he went through that process, too, of lotteries, because he's run some of the big ones, too.

[00:45:15.030] – Rachel

There's some races where you have to qualify, though, have a fast time. And Boston is one of those ones. And Allan, I've been running for 25 years. I am not a fast runner. I will never run the Boston Marathon. I'd have to shave 2 hours off my marathon time, which is not meant for me. But that's the intimidating part of running. And that's why having a run club with people who are not always the fast runners is helpful because then you get to be with people that are more your speed and more your ability and have the goals that you have, which are a little different than running marathons and setting PRs. So the problem with run clubs, though, is that there are so many run clubs. The Roadrunners Club of America has a website where you can look up running or run clubs in your community or nearby your community. And most of them have a website and they'll tell you what they run and they'll give you an indication of what type of club they are.

[00:46:19.280] – Rachel

Right here by me, there's probably, I would have to guess, five, six, seven different run clubs in my area. And I know because of experience, some of them are the fast ones. There's one run club in the city that I cannot even keep up with and it twists and turns through the city. So if I don't have my eye and look which direction the guy's turning, I'll be lost for the rest of the day, just like Martinus was on.

[00:46:45.430] – Allan

That just means you get to do more miles.

[00:46:48.610] – Rachel

As long as I can find my way back to start, I guess we're okay. But with my run clubs that I participate with or that I manage on my own, is we have a local trail. It's an out and back course. And when somebody new joins us, I ask them all the questions. How fast do you run? How far do you want to run if this is your first time out? We'll run a mile together. If you're an experienced runner, I'll tag you with the faster runners that are more experienced. So I kind of watch for people in my run clubs, but not all run clubs are that way. So it's important that you kind of pick and choose. Don't just blindly show up and then not be aware, just like what Martinus had experienced with his run club.

[00:47:31.230] – Allan

And so, you know, again, it's a really good book if you're a beginner, because he does tell the stories of the mistakes and the struggles, and that's actually a big part of why he runs. He runs because of the struggle.

[00:47:49.350] – Allan

Okay? And he runs because he's not supposed to run. He's over 300 pounds. You're not supposed to run when you're over 300 pounds. His doctor even said that. So just realize that you should run if you want to run. You should do what you want to do to live the life that you want to live. And again, as long as you don't have some underlying condition that you don't know about, which he didn't. He didn't have the underlying condition other than being a big boy, a very big boy, then it was, okay, now if I want to run, I just got to do it right. He went and got shoes, and he started, but still, lesson after lesson, the chafe monster got him on one bit. And then there was this getting lost when the run club left him, and that so there were a lot of lessons that hopefully you go through and you start your journey and you've read his book, you kind of have the idea, okay, Cotton is not my friend. Once I start doing more than about 30 minutes of running, just little things like that that don't seem like a big deal, can be a very big deal.

[00:48:58.800] – Allan

But that's what's so cool about running, is at first, you just need a pair of comfortable, sturdy shoes that are going to last a little bit, get out there and start going. Then you can start investing in better shoes. Then you can start investing in better clothes, and then you can start investing in all kinds of gear and stuff and goose and all kinds of stuff. But in a general sense, it's the easiest sport to start and then grow into.

[00:49:26.040] – Rachel

It is it's a great sport. You get out of it what you put into it. It's really all on you, and it's how you're feeling, how far you want to go, what you feel like accomplishing, but it gives you so much more back. It can give you your health. It can bring you to friendships in the run clubs. And that's why I love it so much. And I could drone on for hours about how great it is, especially how great run clubs are, but also back to run clubs. That is a good place to learn, because every single one of us runners has made all of these mistakes at one time or another. And this is how we can help you become a better runner by maybe getting you through some of these mistakes so you don't have to make them all. But it is a great place to be. And his book sounds really fun.

[00:50:14.080] – Rachel

Sounds like a great read.

[00:50:15.540] – Allan

If you're thinking about running or you're a beginner runner, it is a really good book. All right, well, Ras, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:50:23.370] – Rachel

Take care, Allan.

[00:50:24.490] – Allan

You too.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:52.390] – Allan

Hey, Ras.

[00:02:53.710] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:56.090] – Allan

I'm okay. Just okay.

[00:02:58.360] – Allan

I went for a long walk this weekend and it was really hot and humid and I think I tripped myself back into hypothermia again. Yeah, so I think my sodium dropped too low. And I have had a really tough couple of days.

[00:03:15.950] – Allan

Sleeping, a lot of it, but just trying to get more salt into my diet, more potassium into my diet and just try to get myself back on an even keel. But it's been a tough couple of days.

[00:03:27.160] – Rachel

Oh, that's miserable. It just feels bad. When those types of events happen, that's really a game changer.

[00:03:34.870] – Allan

Yeah, I just went out on my normal walk. I'm like, okay, do this. And I originally said, I'll just do 12 miles, you know, what the heck?

[00:03:42.060] – Allan

And I got to the six mile mark and I'm like, you know what, I'm feeling pretty good. I'll go ahead and go and make it more of a 13 point something walk.

[00:03:51.980] – Allan

I walked all the way to the sign that's at the end of the road, and then I turn our fence gate and I just turned around and.

[00:03:58.830] – Allan

I'm walking back and got to mile 10, and I'm like, okay, something's not cool. I gutted it out for the final 3.25 miles, but yeah, got in and I was like, I don't feel good. So I got a little bit of hydration in me, cooled myself down, took a shower, took a nap, thought, okay, that should do it. Went out to a celebration party, some friends were anniversary, and then we got back, it was like 05:00, and I'm like, Done. So I'm like, okay, going to go to sleep.

[00:04:28.610] – Allan

I slept for 13 hours.

[00:04:30.310] – Rachel

Wow.

[00:04:32.630] – Allan

And then got up and said, okay, I'm up. And I started trying to do a few things and then just crashed again.

[00:04:39.370] – Allan

So I took another nap. And then last night went to bed at 8:30 and didn't want to get up this morning at six, but I did. It is what it is.

[00:04:49.470] – Allan

I still got a lot of work to do. I fell behind on, but it's just my body hit a line and I know I have low sodium. That's one of the advantages of testing myself over time, is just knowing I run on that lower line and I just have something I have to be aware of. But I just pushed a little harder than I should have at that particular time and went over the line.

[00:05:11.410] – Rachel

That's the crazy thing about the hyponitremia is that that line is not always right in front of you, like a bright neon sign. The right temperature, the right amount of sweating, not enough sodium in your diet over the last few days. I mean, just all of that stuff, it's hard to see sometimes. And then it lines up and then there you are, and it just sucks the life out of your body. It's hard to recover from that. It really is.

[00:05:38.110] – Allan

Well, but I caught it. I think I caught it early enough that just adding sodium to my diet for the next couple of days should do it. The last time, the first time I got it, they had to put me on IVs for a couple of days to get me past it. But I think I can get by with just some higher sodium and potassium in my food.

[00:05:58.440] – Rachel

Yeah. Well, I'm glad you're hopefully on the mend.

[00:06:01.510] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:06:03.000] – Rachel

Oh, good.

[00:06:04.040] – Rachel

Last week I was talking with you. I was in Boston. Now I'm back home. It's nice to be home again. We had a great trip. Like you, we're having incredible heat right now here in Michigan. I was just out for a run this morning, and, man, I think I sweat as much as I drink. But as a runner, I always have my electrolytes with me. I don't usually run with just plain water. It's usually electrolytes. So I was fine, but it's hot.

[00:06:31.960] – Allan

Yeah. So got to watch that. Can be a big deal. So pay attention to the signals your body's giving you, because it is. You just have to listen.

[00:06:41.910] – Rachel

That's right.

[00:06:43.110] – Allan

All right, well, you ready to have a conversation with Kim Shapira?

[00:06:46.710] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:07:12.810] – Allan

Kim, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:07:15.380] – Kim

Thanks for having me. I'm so excited.

[00:07:17.570] – Allan

Well, I really enjoyed reading your book. It's called, This is What You're Really Hungry For: Six Simple Rules to Transform Your Relationship With Food and Become Your Healthiest Self. And I think one of the reasons I really got into the book early on, one, I look at the table of contents, I'm like, well, we might not agree there, we might agree here. I went in kind of I'm not going to say open minded, but I kind of said, okay, we're going to dive into this. But you said something really early in the book that I think we overlook it so much that.

[00:07:48.790] – Allan

We'll see a friend go on a diet or we'll read something in a magazine while we're standing in line at the grocery store, and it's like, wow, this person lost 30 pounds in three months. Now, the little fine print at the bottom says, these are not typical results but we think we should be able to do the same thing and get the same result, and it just doesn't work like that. And then you use the word. I think that's really important is then we feel shame for not being like someone else.

[00:08:20.060] – Kim

Yeah, it's interesting. I was touring the bookstore the other day and kind of reading as many different books as I could just for the fun of it, and I came across a book called Contagion, and it was saying that the most viral posts and emails that had ever occurred are the ones that gave people the feeling of awe. And it's really interesting is when you read an article or you walk past something or you hear your friend saying, I was successful doing this. It's that light bulb that goes off that kind of ignites some excitement in you that thinks, like, maybe there's hope and maybe I can do that too. But the reason why diets fail is because people don't deal with what triggers them. That takes them off the path. And so, as a registered dietitian, I believe the way that we eat makes our bodies well. The problem is people don't want to eat certain ways because they don't understand the call to eat things that aren't making them well. And so in the beginning of my career, I put everybody on diets thinking, you're going to want to eat kale because you know it's good for you and it has a bunch of different vitamins and minerals.

[00:09:28.990] – Kim

And the problem is, they were eating ice cream and cake after because they were eating the kale because someone told them it was healthy. They weren't eating it because they felt good about it. And what they really wanted was the ice cream and the cake, or so they thought.

[00:09:41.130] – Kim

But it was because they were restricted from it in their minds because they had been on a diet that is really what called them to even eat it to begin with. I know I probably just went off on a whole another tangent.

[00:09:51.690] – Allan

No, that's exactly what I meant. My story, okay, I went paleo because I hired a dietitian, and that was the hot thing at the moment. So she's like, oh, you've got it. Do you know what paleo is? I'm like, no. So she gave me this whole little notebook thing that she had made up all this information, all these studies, all this stuff. I'm like, okay, cool, I'll give it a shot.

[00:10:12.200] – Allan

And it worked until it didn't.

[00:10:15.350] – Kim

There it is. Did you get that line from my book?

[00:10:19.000] – Allan

No. Well, no, it's it's actually actually, I was thinking before we came on, I was thinking about Dr. Fung because in his book, The Obesity Code, he said all diets work and all diets fail.

[00:10:29.660] – Allan

And so it's like what I ended up doing was I was just tweaking what I was eating and I ended up transitioning into keto, and then the rest of the weight dropped off. And so for me, the paleo keto approach worked very, very well. And as I got to talking with hundreds of people in this field, because this is episode 599, I realized that there are 1000 million different ways to eat because there's a billion people plus on this planet, there's a way that you should eat that's very different from the way I should eat. And while what I did worked very well, for me, it may just be completely unsustainable for you. And so it's great to explore. It's wonderful to explore different foods, to explore different ways of eating and realizing, as you said in the book, this is about providing nutrition for your body.

[00:11:22.010] – Allan

this is not about saying, okay, food is this savior out there that's going to make my life more exciting and more fun and we'll be here bored because I got to sit here and answer this phone and it's not ringing. So I think I'll just go to the vending machine and buy a candy bar because that's going to be a lot more fun with a candy bar than just sitting here with no phones ringing. So it is that thing of it's really hard.

[00:11:49.220] – Allan

But if you can tailor the way you currently do things and make small adjustments with these six rules, this could be a very sustainable way for just about everybody to tweak who they are. What they're doing just a little, and make some substantial changes that are sustainable.

[00:12:08.370] – Kim

So what I really heard you say was, if you can be curious, which people don't know to be curious, and that is one reason why they fail. So they already assume they know what they need to do and they're also totally neglecting what they need to do. And I think it actually starts with being curious, which you are very curious. I mean, look what you uprooted your life, you take care of things, you pay attention. And the thing about I'm sure we're going to get into is rule number two, eat what you love, but make sure the food loves you back.

[00:12:38.840] – Kim

What I have found is that people have a hard time sustaining weight loss because they're not really eating the foods they love, they're eating foods other people love. They're not paying attention to the way their physical body feels. They already know this is going to be good for me, so I'm just going to eat it. Not paying attention to joint pain, digestive issues, things like that. They're not curious about specifically what's important to them. So they're focused on weight loss and they're not focused on weight maintenance. And I would say changing your relationship with food, the side effect is weight loss.

[00:13:11.620] – Kim

Changing your relationship with food, the side effect is weight loss. So instead of focusing on losing weight, changing the focus to changing my habits, getting curious about why I'm eating and what I'm eating. And the only way that a person, I believe, like you can begin this process is to go back to kindergarten. And that's learning the rules. So I know it sounds scary when.

[00:13:35.850] – Kim

I say eat whatever you love, but. Now it's the first time somebody actually has permission to be guilt free, shame free to eat what they love.

[00:13:44.660] – Kim

And then that opens the door for them to say, I didn't even realize that those were making me sick. That's why I don't feel good. I thought I loved ice cream. It turns out it's beating the crap out of me.

[00:13:56.140] – Allan

Right. And that was one of the initial disconnects I had, was like, no, please don't tell. Eat whole food.

[00:14:02.240] – Allan

Please just eat whole food. Stay away from the processed stuff. I know it's delicious, but they want you to eat more of it. And so I was thinking as I went into this and we're talking about relationships, and I'm like, okay, we all probably know someone in our lives that had a really toxic relationship.

[00:14:15.960] – Allan

I was one of those people, but I stayed in that toxic relationship. And so in your book, you talked about the four reasons we eat.

[00:14:25.270] – Kim

Yeah.

[00:14:25.910] – Allan

Okay. And some of these reasons, if you listen to it from a relationship perspective, you're like, that's the abusive girlfriend, that's the abusive boyfriend. That's the relationship you want to get out of if you're eating for that reason. Can you talk about the four reasons?

[00:14:39.840] – Kim

Yeah. And I just have to say, I was scrolling on Instagram this morning, and I ran past a quote that it said something about, before you go to sleep at night, call back all your energy. And I loved this because we put out so much energy in different places, and we take other people's energy. And the idea that we can call back and fill ourselves back up with our own energy is really important to me. So I always think in terms of, here I am in my physical body.

[00:15:06.500] – Kim

And I have an emotional self, and I have a physical self. Right. And most people are paying attention to their emotional self. They're thinking their mind is telling them what they need to do, not even aware that their mind is wired to help you survive in the most pleasurable way. And people are not paying attention to their physical body and all the signs and signals it's giving us all day long of telling us exactly what we need.

[00:15:29.240] – Kim

And so if we can kind of learn to separate, understanding that our emotions come and go every 15 minutes and moods last longer, but our physical body is always telling us when we have.

[00:15:39.630] – Kim

To pee, when we have to eat. I mean, nobody wakes up in the morning and thinks, oh my God, I have to pee six times today. Where are all those toilets?

[00:15:46.760] – Kim

Right? We trust that we will find a bathroom. It might get a little uncomfortable, but we trust it. And so we need to start trusting our physical body and paying less attention to what our emotional selves are telling us. And so the four reasons why a person eats is because, number one, emotional reasons. Number two is because the food is in front of us. Number three, because we're having cravings. And number four, because we're physically hungry. And the reason why I want you to read this book is because I want you to only be eating for physical hunger and to have a normal relationship with food. Which means sometimes I eat birthday cake on a Monday, but I'm not doing it on Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday.

[00:16:22.850] – Kim

Right. Food is fuel, and it only takes up one important place in our life.

[00:16:27.280] – Allan

Yeah. And that's why, again, with the whole food thing is like this is a building block. And so, as you talked about relationship, it's like interning yourself inside. One of the things that I've really gotten become a lot more aware of in the last few years is that there is this inner part of us that needs love, needs attention, and we're the ones not giving it to ourselves. We're not listening to our body, and we're not telling our body and showing our body that love.

[00:16:54.370] – Allan

And so as the result, we go out and we eat things that we know are bad for us, and we're not feeding ourselves. And so when you start changing the relationship with food, you start saying, well, okay, yes, I could have ice cream for dinner. I'm a grown adult.

[00:17:11.290] – Kim

Calories and calories.

[00:17:12.470] – Allan

Right?

[00:17:12.920] – Kim

Calories.

[00:17:13.940] – Allan

What I know is that even if it'S the good stuff, the Blue Bell ice cream or Haagendazs or Ben and Jerry's or whatever your poison is, that's fine. It's good quality stuff, but it's not going to nourish your body the way getting a good balance of vegetables and proteins and all of that is going to go.

[00:17:34.700] – Kim

It would be so cool if you stopped thinking about ice cream for dinner. And I think that's where we have to start is when we know we can have it and we put it on hold and we don't worry about it.

[00:17:46.690] – Kim

Right.

[00:17:47.010] – Kim

And the reason why diets fail. And this is a building block. This is the first building block, because now you're in kindergarten, right? You're learning how to play on the playground, because if you're trying to build a house on a faulty foundation, it's going to crumble. And that's what diets are. And so we are building that foundation.

[00:18:03.760] – Kim

Why are you eating? Is it because you're having an emotional need for it? Or because your physical body is needing fuel? And food is not anything other than fuel at any given time. It is always fuel. Your body is, like, so amazing and efficient. It takes up everything you're eating, and it's just checking in to make sure that it's the right kind of fuel for your body. But if we start telling people, don't have ice cream, or if we start saying it's unhealthy or we even call it bad, or we say shouldn't, what happens is then we're automatically assuming that we're bad. And that's what we're putting into our subconscious. Right. So if we stopped labeling food and we called everything a banana, what would happen? Allan, right now, if I handed you a banana, what would you do?

[00:18:44.310] – Kim

If I handed you a banana?

[00:18:45.810] – Allan

I would actually probably just set it down.

[00:18:47.860] – Kim

Yes. You would pause and you would say, why is Kim handing me a banana? Everybody pauses when they get a banana because they only eat bananas when they're hungry. And if we started thinking all food was a banana, we would put that space between the thought to eat and the action to eat. Right.

[00:19:03.460] – Kim

We need a pause. We need to say, Why am I thinking about a banana? Why do I have a banana in my hand? What's my body needing right now? Also, if you put that banana down, you would totally trust that you can come back for it.

[00:19:14.610] – Allan

Yeah, because I just had breakfast not 20 minutes ago, so it was okay. Well, great. I don't need this banana now. If I get a little hungry later because I've got a lot of work to do this afternoon, then, yeah, I might grab it and have it.

[00:19:27.830] – Kim

Right. But I have to just say one more thing. So sorry.

[00:19:30.900] – Allan

No.

[00:19:31.700] – Kim

If you never ever were given a banana and then somebody hands you a banana, now it's a treat. Now it's like, I'm going to have it because I don't know when I'm going to get it again. And if I said, you only have 30 seconds to eat a banana, you're not enjoying it, you're sneaking it, you're shoving it in. There are so many things. So if we slow down the whole process and everything becomes a banana and we become more mindful and we accept that we can have ice cream any time of the day, any day of the week, we no longer need it right now. And maybe days go by and weeks go by.

[00:20:05.600] – Allan

Well, an OD aside is the area of Panama we live in is where they grow bananas for chiquita. So there's a lot of bananas. They're going to run out of bananas or plantains. But you have a very important aspect to that foundation. You talked about the solid foundation.

[00:20:20.970] – Allan

And I think if you take a few minutes and you really look at this and you even said to it, I call it kind of a wellness audit, you called it a wellness wheel. Can you talk about the wellness wheel and the seven spokes and how we can use that as a tool to kind of check in with ourselves?

[00:20:37.390] – Kim

Yeah. So everybody is in the center of their own wellness wheel. Right. And what we're doing is we are attached to all the things that are important to us. And so they could be adventure, they could be our spiritual well being, our physical well being, our financial, our relationships, our career, and then there's a few more and what like environment. But what happens is, if we are disconnected from any one of these things, we are not moving forward in our journey.

[00:21:05.660] – Kim

We're stuck. And so it's paying attention, checking in, how am I doing? Am I connected to the things that are important to me? Have I stayed in my routine with sleep? Have I planned ahead to make sure that I know where my water is coming from and what food is available to me today? Have I booked my next adventure? Have I checked in with my friends?

[00:21:26.140] – Kim

If we're not connected to these things, then what happens is we become unwell because we overthink about where we are and how lost we are and how sad we are and disconnected. And so the first thing to do is kind of check in, where am I on this journey? What can I do to improve that? And then that's how you start moving forward. And we're all in different places, so there's no judgment. And we're all working by ourselves, making this all happen. So you might be further along in your fitness than I am, but I am not looking for perfection. Not that I'm assuming you are either, but I am working for progress. So now I'm open to learning from you and also checking in to see, what have I not done today? Where can I pick that up?

[00:22:09.350] – Kim

Right? This is how we become balanced. If you're tired, how many times do you think about how tired you are during the day? If you had an argument with your friend, how many times do you think about that argument? Right? These make us unwell. We have to get connected and stay connected.

[00:22:23.670] – Kim

And like I said, the reason why people fail is they neglect to do the things they need to do.

[00:22:29.250] – Allan

And I think one of the key things about what you just said is when you start to feel that shame or that loneliness or that boredom or any of it, most of us have been taught, well, food will make me feel better.

[00:22:43.640] – Kim

Yeah, well, that's a trained behavior, right?

[00:22:46.920] – Kim

So for me, it was about shopping. It wasn't about food. I totally trained my mind to think every emotion shopping was a great idea. I definitely needed something, even when I couldn't afford it. And so that's kind of where I started recognizing, oh, my gosh, my clients are literally eating the same way that I shop. And so being able to check in and recognize I want to well, let me go back a little bit so you can understand. Our mind produces about 60,000 thoughts a day. It's doing it all by itself. It's not like you asked your heart to beat or your lungs to breathe, right? Your mind is already doing this for you. We can write a book or we can have a conversation, and we're actually asking our mind to think. But all the other things it's doing is to make sure that we're safe. If we heard a loud sound, we would both stop exactly what we're doing, check in, make sure we were safe.

[00:23:34.910] – Kim

Before we would carry on. Our mind would also give us a few different ways to resolve the issue quickly and safely. And so if we've had any sort of emotional trauma, which every single person on this Earth has between three to 18 different emotions, that can be triggered, that cause them to become irrational. And so our mind remembers, the last time I felt that way, we ate and we felt better.

[00:23:57.930] – Kim

And we have to recognize that our mind is only doing its job and it's not always right. And that we can just say, mind, I'm safe, because all our mind wants to know is that we are safe. And so if we can say to our mind, I see you, I see you directing me towards the pantry, and I see you telling me that ice cream is good in my mouth, but I'm going to laugh right now, and I'm going to remind my body that I'm safe. I'm going to check in, scan my surroundings, confirm I'm safe, and then I'm going to carry on. What happens with most people is they think their mind got their best interest and their mind says, ice cream is a good idea. So they just assume that's their idea. And they end up eating ice cream.

[00:24:37.840] – Allan

And then like you said, when you put that space in there, you get that half step back and you can say, maybe ice cream isn't what I need right now. Maybe I just need some water and to go for a walk. Or in your case, it was, no, I really don't need that sweater. If I need that sweater, I can go buy it later. But yeah, 50% sale, it's beautiful. You don't really need it, but you got to have that space because the emotional part of you is like, I'm never going to get this deal again.

[00:25:02.930] – Kim

Yeah.

[00:25:03.590] – Allan

And you know, there's sales every single day I get an email, 50% off, 60% off.

[00:25:11.970] – Kim

Yeah, it's so true. But you're right and I forgot that part. So once your mind tells you food is a good idea, that's when you have to recognize your alarm is going off, just like any alarm.

[00:25:21.760] – Kim

And so notice that the alarm is going off. Turn it off. Take a deep breath, look at your mind, laugh at it. Okay, mind, we don't need that sweater right now. Let me scan my body and see even why that alarm was triggered.

[00:25:33.990] – Kim

And once you can recognize where the alarm came from and you recognize, okay, my chest is tight or my shoulders are tense or I'm recognizing that I just had this really uncomfortable phone call. Or maybe it is actually hunger, any of these reasons could set your alarm going off, right? Hunger is the most primal signal we have to keep us alive.

[00:25:53.380] – Kim

Hunger is the best signal we can get from our body. We would all run to the doctor if we stopped having to pee. We need to be hungry. We need to be hungry often, but we don't want to stay hungry. But we do need to recognize when our mind is giving us an idea. That is not a real idea that. We need to be doing right now. We need to take a deep breath. Scan our body, and if we're really stressed, then that's when we breathe again, emotions pass.

[00:26:17.110] – Allan

I have two questions in one. So first I got to start out with maybe it's the libertarian in me. But right now, I'm just not a big fan of the word rule.

[00:26:26.250] – Kim

Yeah.

[00:26:27.370] – Allan

And I think there's a lot of people like, I'm a rebel. I set rules for myself, and then I break those rules because that's what rules are made for. But I don't have a better word than rule. So we're just going to call them this, the six weight loss rules.

[00:26:42.860] – Allan

Can you just give us a quick rundown of those and why each one is important?

[00:26:48.130] – Kim

Yeah. So I'm all about staying uncomfortable. Buddhist said life is suffering, and I would say suffering in quotes, right. Like, we're going to either suffer by eating food that we know is going to make us sick, or we're going to suffer by not eating that food. Now, again, it's suffering. It's a little discomfort.

[00:27:08.080] – Kim

Our body does not like discomfort. It will never let us stay uncomfortable. It will always kind of come up with a more pleasurable solution. People are so triggered by the word diet, fats, calories. I mean, diet literal definition of diet is the lifestyle. The way that you eat. It doesn't say in the dictionary restriction. Right? So if we can reframe it and understand we have rules in kindergarten, right? We sit crisscross applesauce.

[00:27:33.860] – Kim

We talk when after we're called on. We don't over talk or speak over somebody else. We have rules, and they really do help the community be better. And so that's what we're doing here. Would you ever think of leaving the house in the morning without brushing your teeth?

[00:27:50.540] – Allan

Probably not, no. It's a habit.

[00:27:54.310] – Kim

It was probably part of something you were taught growing up, that you were trained, and that became a behavior.

[00:28:00.950] – Allan

My parents are going to go and they're going to say, go upstairs and brush your teeth. And then when they come in there. They're going to touch my toothbrush to see if it's wet. There was some police action in my house.

[00:28:12.670] – Kim

Yeah, that's funny. There's probably a lot of police action in a lot of houses. The thing is that the reason I use the word rules is to make you uncomfortable, because I want you to stop and I want you to think. And I want these to become so ingrained that now they're a set of values. You don't brush your teeth because your parents made you do it. Now you actually value it. And so once you start valuing these rules, they become something totally different. They become who you are and your lifestyle. And I could say to so many different people, define your relationship with food. What kind of eater are you? And they wouldn't have any idea. And what I want them to say is, normal. I'm a normal eater.

[00:28:52.740] – Kim

I'm a normal eater. In Italy, in Panama, in California. I'm a normal eater in this restaurant. I'm a normal eater next Thursday at dinner when I don't even know what I'm going to have. I'm normal because I follow these rules. And now they're inside of me.

[00:29:06.830] – Allan

So let's go through the rules.

[00:29:08.310] – Kim

Okay? Do you want to do it? Just kidding.

[00:29:11.710] – Kim

Okay, so rule number one is to eat when you're hungry.

[00:29:15.570] – Kim

These are non negotiable. Eat when you're hungry. So really find your mind and know what your physical body is needing. Take your normal portion and cut it in half. Now people are having visceral reactions, probably listening to this, oh my God, I don't know what hunger is. I don't know what my normal portion is. So your normal portion is whatever you ate the last time you ate.

[00:29:35.790] – Kim

It doesn't have to be what the chef is preparing. It doesn't have to be what is on the box. It is what you would normally eat. Cut it in half. And now you're going to wait 15 minutes to see if you need more food. So we know that it takes 15 minutes to get from our mouth to our stomach to get the signal that we've had enough food. And that's why we're cutting it in half and we're waiting 15 minutes. And the thing is, most people eat their food in two, three, four minutes, giving them eleven minutes of discomfort. And our minds hate discomfort and we'll just say, go ahead and eat it. And we need to remember, no, we're safe, we just had fuel. There's more right here. I'm going to come back to it and see if I need it. So really the trick is to slow down the pace at which you're eating, be more mindful, chew your food, really taste your food, and then let it last a little bit longer. So hard for people. Yeah. So that's real one. Do you have any questions about that?

[00:30:25.990] – Allan

Well, yeah, let's jump ahead in our plan here a little bit because I think this is really important. You put guidelines for hunger and you went from basically over full, Thanksgiving full, all the way down to starving.

[00:30:38.950] – Allan

Number one, there's not a lot of people in Western world actually starving.

[00:30:44.020] – Allan

You're not actually starving. You may be very hungry, but that's a whole nother conversation. It's a range. And we all probably can relate to being so stuffed that we are uncomfortable, really uncomfortable, beyond uncomfortable, all the way down to a point where we got blood sugars falling and our bodies screaming at us, eat anything. Why do we have so much trouble playing in that range of being just a little hungry and thinking we're about to die?

[00:31:12.540] – Kim

It's a good question, especially when your mind is telling you for every emotion you're hungry. I mean, I have 250 pound clients, 300 pound clients, 180 pound clients, everybody who wants to lose ten pounds, 50 pounds, who are telling me they're starving. They're hungry all day long.

[00:31:29.640] – Kim

There is so much confusion on what hunger actually feels like. Hunger is isolated to our stomach. It's actually not painful, it's not scary. It's just a hormone, telling you you're getting a little low on fuel. We need to eat something here. I think people are, again, totally primal. That people don't like to be hungry because it's basic survival. And I think people have to learn and get curious to see what does hunger actually feel like? And so what would happen if I just ate an apple, nothing else? Why is there so much fear in not eating anything else when the food is right in front of you? And so I think it's basic fear. People do not trust that they're going to eat again.

[00:32:12.750] – Kim

And we know historically, you had 21 meals last week and you can't remember what you ate last.

[00:32:18.220] – Allan

And that pantry is stuffed to the gills. Your freezer is stuffed to the gills. Your refrigerator, which also probably needs to be cleaned out.

[00:32:25.900] – Kim

DoorDash.

[00:32:26.840] – Allan

Yeah, there's so much food around us, you're not going to miss your next meal.

[00:32:32.350] – Kim

It's fear. Fear and lack of curiosity. Neglecting what they need to do, get curious

[00:32:38.860] – Allan

and listen. Listen to their body.

[00:32:41.010] – Kim

Yeah, totally.

[00:32:42.550] – Allan

Okay, let's move on to rule number two.

[00:32:44.720] – Kim

Okay, so rule number two, which is where I think you have a visceral reaction.

[00:32:50.790] – Kim

Eat what you love, but make sure the food loves you back. So I would say most people are walking around with headaches, clearing their throat, heartburn, bloating, digestive distress, gas joint pain, psoriasis, eczema, nausea, sleepless nights, itchy skin, yeast infections. I mean, tons of food related digestive distress. And then they're eating foods that are directly linked to this. I just remember I'm going to give you an example that you probably read about because I think it's a profound one. I had a ten year old client that was overweight, and they had a friday night dinner every single Friday night at this diner. And this kid always wanted a shake. And the parents said, when you finish your hamburger and French fries, you can have your shake. Now you and I are both hitting our heads going, hamburger and French fries? Okay, yeah, you finish those hamburger and French fries, which is exactly what he would do, and then he would have the shake.

[00:33:47.920] – Kim

And so we know that that's why. This kid was overweight, right? But because he had to finish his food to get the shake, that was the only way, and that's what he was going to do. And this is why diets don't work. And so when I finally convinced the parents, let the kid have the shake, they finally, after a month, let the kid have the shake.

[00:34:08.730] – Kim

And after two weeks of having the shake, the kid no longer wanted it. Because they found that it was not really satisfying and making them feel good, and they never had the shake again. And this is why it's eat what you love.

[00:34:21.540] – Allan

And so, yeah, it's like, well, the donut holes was another one. It's like, okay, yeah. What I found, though, is for some people. For some people, it's that trigger thing. It's like it's the macaroon that then has you craving, puts you back into another state of a reason to eat, is you're now craving this food. And so there are trigger foods that you don't think it doesn't love you. You just think, okay, I want it, I want it. I'm hungry. And so there are foods that I would say some people probably just need to try to avoid, even if there's no physical reason that they should avoid that particular food. Like, most of us are not allergic to donut holes, but the sugar is going to make us want the third one and the fourth one and the. Whole box,

[00:35:06.050] – Kim

and there's trans fats. When we're talking about health, we're talking about a lot of ingredients in the donut hole. But does that mean I can never have a donut hole? No, because everything in moderation. It's just what else did you have today? What did you eat yesterday? What are you doing? And so the truth is, that's why I say have the donut hole on a Monday, but not Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

[00:35:26.110] – Kim

And I remember when I tried cutting sugar out of my own diet just to experiment and see how it was making me feel. I went through a real tug of war with my mind because I loved chocolate, I loved butterfingers and Chips Ahoy. And there was like, now I'm contemplating a life without these things that I loved.

[00:35:45.320] – Kim

Made no sense to me. But when I came up with the idea that I was going to just get curious and experiment, how am I without it? What does my body feel like without it? I opened a door, and so I noticed on day five of not doing it, I only allowed myself five days for this experiment. On the fifth day, the idea of wanting a butterfinger or Chips Ahoy completely vanished. It left my body. I was no longer having physical withdrawals from the sugar. So sugar is heroin, and there's no way around it. It is literally causes us to have an addiction, and then we are spiraling, looking under every single rock for it. But if you tell somebody who loves sugar that they can't have sugar now, they feel suffocated, and that's not going to help them move forward. But if you can get them to understand how the food makes their body feel, don't tell them. Let them experiment and experience how the food makes them feel. Now, it's easy to say, oh, okay. I do love myself, and I don't actually think that that's what I want to have in the middle of the day or right before I'm going to sleep.

[00:36:53.430] – Kim

Right. Teach them to be in their own bodies. And, I mean, I do have sugar. Now, this was that experiment was 14 years ago, but I don't have it two days in a row because I'm aware of when my mind is sending me down this spiral, and I can say, oh, I had it yesterday. And this is only because I'm craving. Because I'm addicted to heroin again and I can walk away from it. But you have to get mindful. You can't believe every thought you have.

[00:37:18.490] – Allan

And that's another area I got to eating mindfully is probably one of the hardest things to do because we're so busy, we've got so much to do. It's like, look, I can do my accounting and eat. I can't record a podcast because I have to use my mouth, but I can eat during just about every other thing I do with my work. And so it's really hard to say. No, put the work down, fix yourself a plate, go sit at the dinner table, take a bite, savor the bite. Feel the bite, take a breath, take a sip of water, wipe your mouth with your napkin, and then have another one. That is hard

[00:38:01.290] – Kim

and boring. It's boring. And you know what? Our mind doesn't want us to be an uncomfortable. It's telling us, no, pick up your phone. No, definitely do something else. Our mind won't let us be suffering. I have a client who came home from work the other day, and his family had bought crumbled cookies, which are just like these giant cookies that are super thick. And in my family, we cut them into like, I don't know, eight to ten slices. And I said, how much of the cookie did you have? And he said, I ate half of it. And I said, what were you doing when you were eating the cookie? He said, I was watching the Bake off and it was 10:30 at night.

[00:38:37.190] – Kim

And I said, what time did you go to sleep? And he said eleven. And I'm like, hitting my head, and that's not going to help him if I'm hitting my head. So what did I say to him is, Where's the cookie now? Where's the other half? And he goes, It's in the kitchen. So I said, Go grab that cookie. And he was so excited, he grabs the cookie, it's a whole half a cookie. He sits down. I can see his salivary glands already getting ready for the first bite. And I said, okay, now cut that into quarters. So he did, and then I said. Now cut that into another quarter, each bite making another half. So now we had eight. And I said, now do it again. So we had 14 pieces of cookie on the same plate. It was like a small cookie. And all of a sudden it was like a whole plate of cookies.

[00:39:16.200] – Kim

And then I said, now take the first bite and just smell it. Don't put it in your mouth.

[00:39:20.590] – Kim

And you can see he was all excited and ready. I said, okay, now we've gotten our body ready. Now put it in your mouth, but chew it longer than you think necessary. Savor it because you think you love food. Let me see you actually love the food.

[00:39:33.720] – Kim

So he ate it, and it took him about 40 seconds to really savor it. And I said, now show me how you would normally eat. And he just pops in his mouth and 2 seconds later it's gone. I said to him, So you say you love food, but you're not even allowing yourself to really love food. Then I had him turn his chair around because we were on Zoom, and I said, show me every single thing in your room. Tell me all about the things on your walls and whatever you have. He spent five minutes giving me the entire higher explanation of all the things he loved in his room. He completely forgot about the cookie. He turns around, he's like, oh my God, I forgot about the cookie. Now I have like twelve more times. I get to eat it, right?

[00:40:10.130] – Kim

And I'm like, but are you hungry? He said, no, I'm going to put it away. Right. So he had the same experience with two bites as he had the night before. With probably five bites. We have to get mindful. Yeah. And that's the fail safe while he'll lose weight, right? Because he won't be eating the whole half. He doesn't need it.

[00:40:28.240] – Allan

Yeah. So let's run through the other four rules real quick.

[00:40:32.010] – Kim

Okay. Rule number three, eat without distractions.

[00:40:34.390] – Kim

So we talked about that. Motions are distractions. Having food in front of you is a distraction. Cravings and hunger. So make sure that you're hungry every single time you eat.

[00:40:43.170] – Kim

Rule number four is to get 10,000 steps every single day. The average American gets about 2500 to 3000. We really need 7000 to prevent sudden death and a bunch of different diseases. I found 10,000 really helps you sustain your weight loss. So if you're somebody who's getting two to 3000, just shoot for 500 more every day. Make sure you're getting seven, but really shoot for ten. We need this built in so that way by the time you're done losing weight, you're already helping your body maintain your weight. And you can do it through lifting weights, walking. I mean, I'm calling it steps, but it's really movement. And we need a variety of different types of movements for our body.

[00:41:24.250] – Allan

And this is something you can do with friends. And as you said, go with a walk for a friend. It doesn't have to be the full we're going to work out to probably close to four and a half to 5 miles. But get out with a friend for a little while. Spend the time enjoying nature with them. You have a little stepper in your room. I remember at one point I was in a hotel room and I was at like 9200 steps and I was like, crap, I got to get 800 more steps in. I'm literally walking around my bed, just doing laps around a hotel room bed to get those extra 800 in there, because I wanted that streak. Because for me, keeping the streak was something that was going to keep me motivated to keep doing it. I didn't want to fall short.

[00:42:03.430] – Kim

I mean, you can move your arms, you can do Arm things during commercials. You can do whatever, just keep moving. Yeah, it's really important. Our metabolism goes from 100% when we're moving to 30% when we're sitting. So we want to stay active. We want to keep those burners on.

[00:42:16.030] – Kim

Rule number five is to get eight cups of water. And it really does change, depending on your climate, what else you're eating, what else you're drinking, and how much weight. But a minimum of eight cups every single day will really help your body lose weight and detoxify every one of your organs.

[00:42:29.970] – Kim

And the last rule is 7 hours of sleep. The average American gets about six and a half. And if we're not getting at least seven, and we need between seven and nine, but if we're not getting at least seven, we're just wreaking havoc on our body and it's going to affect our adrenal glands, our hormones, our digestion and our stress. So we can't lose weight without sleep? We can't be well without sleep.

[00:42:51.340] – Allan

Yeah. So, yes, rules make me uncomfortable, but these are important. These are really good. And if you do these, you are going to lose weight and you are going to keep it off, because they'll just work.

[00:43:01.680] – Allan

They'll teach you a lot about yourself and they'll teach you a lot about food.

[00:43:04.920] – Allan

Kim, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:43:13.790] – Kim

Routine, consistency and confidence. That's what I would think.

[00:43:18.880] – Kim

You have to have a routine. It has to be non negotiable. So no matter what you're doing, make sure you're getting up early enough to move your body and plan ahead to get the things you need to take care of your body. I think you need to be consistent. So if you aren't perfect, you have the next day. So we're looking for progress, not perfection. I'm looking for consistency. As much consistency as you can have over time is going to help your body basically thrive and confidence in the fact that you can do this.

[00:43:48.980] – Allan

Thank you. Kim, if someone wanted to learn more about you or your book, This is What You're Really Hungry For, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:43:56.970] – Kim

Everywhere, please. Instagram is Kim Shapira Method. My website. Kim Sharpira Method. TikTok Kim Shapira Method wherever I'm always Kim Shapira Method everywhere.

[00:44:07.080] – Allan

Perfect. And I'll make sure to have the links there on our website at 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/599.

[00:44:14.740] – Allan

Kim, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:44:17.750] – Kim

Thanks for having me. It was fun.

Post Show/Recap

[00:44:19.410] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:44:20.840] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, I really enjoyed your discussion with Kim, and it sounds like she has a book that was really fascinating to read. I love listening to it. But let's just start off with her six rules. I like rules. I know you don't, but I do like rules.

[00:44:38.330] – Allan

There are some absolutes. There are definitely some absolutes. And so I think there are areas where you can have rules, but where you have rules, you have rule breakers. I would only put rules down on where, you know, this is it. You have to do this.

[00:44:59.680] – Allan

You have to move. You can't be sedentary and healthy. It doesn't work that way. You can't eat crap and be healthy. Even if you're eating less crap, you're not eating some food. If you're not getting the nutrients in your body, then you're not doing the right thing. So there are areas where I think you can write rules and say, stop eating crap smooth, then that'd be a lot. But just start with something. I think that could be a rule.

[00:45:28.180] – Allan

But when I say, hey, Ras, sleep more.

[00:45:34.410] – Allan

Then, sure, just struggling with my sleep right now. That's not always inside your control. So rules can be about the things that you control. Rules can't be about things that happen to you or outcomes.

[00:45:50.420] – Rachel

Right.

[00:45:50.820] – Allan

And so that's where when you start saying rules, I'm like, okay, here we go. I think there's just a whole subset of people out there that as soon as they see the term rule, they're like, oh, this is going to be hard, and I'm not going to want to do it. And so then now that there's a.

[00:46:08.740] – Allan

Rule, they're fixated on that rule versus actually trying to change their behaviors and lifestyle.

[00:46:16.060] – Rachel

Right. Well, I think that I do love rules, but I also prefer them as, like, rules of thumb. Like, for example, she said to drink eight cups of water.

[00:46:25.260] – Rachel

Well, I don't drink eight cups of water. I drink a lot of electrolytes, like I mentioned, and I I drink a lot of coffee and occasionally plain water, but not a lot. But, you know, it's just same thing with the 7 hours of sleep. I need eight or 9 hours of sleep. Rules of thumb, like be cognizant that you need more water. Be cognizant that you need more sleep. And then figure out what that means to you. How many hours of sleep do you really need? My husband can certainly live on five or 6 hours of sleep, and he does quite well. I need about eight or nine. So the seven hour sleep rule is not quite where I'm at, but I think that it needs to be customized or you need to be flexible with what works for you as an individual.

[00:47:09.240] – Allan

Yeah, because obviously, Sunday night I needed 13.

[00:47:16.570] – Rachel

Right.

[00:47:17.930] – Allan

And so seven would not have done it. And then even with 13, I took a nap that day and took a nap the day before.

[00:47:25.520] – Allan

So there was a lot of sleep in a 24 hours period of time to basically recover for my body to have some healing time, because that's what's happening when you sleep. So I agree with her that the things that are in her six weight loss rules are important considerations. If you're looking at losing weight, these are things that you really want to consider how you can apply them in your life. I'm just a word Smith. And when I see a word, I think about the emotional attachment that I and other people have to those words. And that's why I don't particularly like the word rule. But that said, the six areas that she covers are important, and if you follow them to some extent, you're going to be successful in your weight loss.

[00:48:11.130] – Rachel

The other part of your discussion that even you just mentioned is the emotional aspect. We do have an emotional attachment to what we eat. When we eat it, we live on the fact that we need breakfast, lunch, and dinner, but do we really need breakfast, lunch, and dinner? Do we really need that afternoon snack? Do we really need a giant bowl of cake and ice cream at every single birthday party? There is a lot of emotion, but even that is a good rule in that you begin to think and strategize, like, Why are you eating this? Do you really need this? And ask those types of questions. And if you did need to lose weight, if that is a goal of yours, then that's a perfect time to really reconsider. Like, why are you eating this? Do you really need this right now? Is this the best thing for you?

[00:49:01.580] – Allan

And I think that's what she got into is like, okay, we don't we don't actually ever let ourselves get hungry. Yeah, so she's in her book, she talked about a hunger scale from completely stuffed all the way down to starving.

[00:49:14.300] – Allan

Again, another word that I don't like. Because you're not actually starving, you're just very hungry. Again, words. Okay, but all that said, I think. Letting yourself get hungry and sitting in that for a little while is healthy.

[00:49:34.150] – Allan

Not that I encourage people to go into fasting, but if you know you're not hungry, don't put anything in your mouth because your body doesn't need it.

[00:49:44.330] – Allan

And then when you are hungry, when you start getting hungry, feel that hunger. And kind of sit in it for a little while and say, okay, this is just I'm hungry. Then go make a good decision on the foods that you're going to eat.

[00:49:58.080] – Allan

And satiate that hunger. That's why her half a plate rule, you literally take what you would normally eat, and you just eat half of it. I don't know if we really got into that rule a little bit.

[00:50:07.090] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:50:08.770] – Allan

Okay, so let's say you would have a whole chicken breast, and you'd have all this mashed potatoes and rice and all this you just literally say okay I can have all that stuff, but I'm going to cut it all in half, and I'm only going to eat half of it. Now, I know the other half is sitting in the kitchen right now, and I'm sitting at the dining room table. And I'm going to sit down and mindfully eat this, and then I can't go for the other half for 15 minutes. Again, you're giving your body that opportunity to talk back to you. You've given it food, you've potentially given it nourishment if you're eating the right things, and then it will communicate back. Yeah, that was actually enough. Wrap the rest of it up. And that can be a meal for tomorrow or tonight.

[00:50:51.090] – Rachel

Sure.

[00:50:51.970] – Allan

And so just as you kind of go through this process, like I said, all of these are valuable. If you go through the process of what she's talking about, it is going to help you build a healthier relationship with food. And that's really the crux of weight loss. It's all about your relationship with food. And your relationship with yourself.

[00:51:12.470] – Rachel

True.

[00:51:13.190] – Allan

And the point where you start loving yourself enough to not punish yourself or reward yourself, whichever way you're thinking about it, with food, then the better off you'Re going to be. When you see food as nourishment and energy, only eat enough of it to give you what your body needs, then you're on the track eating healthy and having a great relationship with food.

[00:51:38.960] – Rachel

Yeah. Oh, gosh, yeah, that sounds great. It was just really good discussion. Really interesting questions that we could ask ourselves.

[00:51:47.210] – Allan

Yeah. All right. Anything else you want to talk about today?

[00:51:50.390] – Rachel

No, that was great.

[00:51:51.670] – Allan

Great. Well, then I'll see you next week.

[00:51:53.650] – Rachel

Great. Take care, Allan.

[00:51:55.050] – Allan

You too.

[00:51:55.890] – Rachel

Thanks.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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Another episode you may enjoy

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Let's Say Hello

Rachel Discussion

Interview

Text – https://amzn.to/44eYf6C

Post Show/Recap

Post show with Rachel.

Music by Dave Gerhart

Patreons

The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Ken McQuade	– Leigh Tanner
– Debbie Ralston	– John Dachauer	– Tim Alexander
– Eliza Lamb

Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Signals that make your body get and stay fat | Dr. Richard Johnson

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:02:25.680] – Allan

Welcome, Ras.

[00:02:26.710] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. How are you today?

[00:02:28.510] – Allan

I'm doing all right. I'm doing all right. Pretty excited. Well, we still haven't gotten any rain. Much rain anyway over the course of the last few days, but things are going good. I'm feeling good. I'm healthy again and moving around and lots of sunshine. Just having a good time.

[00:02:45.960] – Rachel

Back to your long walks.

[00:02:47.680] – Allan

Back to long walks. It's slowed down at Lula's a bit because we're heading into the low season, so things just aren't quite as busy. So it gives me a little bit more time. Southern Miss is playing well in baseball. Nice. They're going to the Super regionals. By the time you hear this, the super regionals will be over and they'll probably end of the College World Series. But they're one step closer to getting into the World Series.

[00:03:11.700] – Rachel

That's exciting. That's always fun to watch. Very cool.

[00:03:15.140] – Allan

I enjoy the College baseball and football. A lot.

[00:03:18.500] – Rachel

Of course.

[00:03:19.960] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:03:21.540] – Rachel

Good. Same thing. We haven't gotten a lot of rain either. So it's hot summer, beautiful, great to be outside as long as you get out early. So yeah, just making our way through the summer.

[00:03:33.610] – Allan

Good. Are you ready to talk about physical therapy?

[00:03:38.160] – Rachel

Sure.

[00:03:39.270] – Allan

All right, let's do it.

Interview

[00:04:02.350] – Allan

Dr. Walters, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:05.300] – Dr. Walters

Thank you so much for having me. Excited to chat today.

[00:04:08.050] – Allan

I am too. This is a book. It's called Rehab Science: How to Overcome Pain and Heal From Injury. And there have been a couple of times in my life when I hurt myself really bad, usually doing stupid stuff, but having fun while I was doing it. And then I would find myself going to a doctor who knew a little bit, and then I would end up in the office of a physical therapist who knew a whole lot and did a lot of good for me. I turned my ankle really bad when I was playing volleyball when I was in my 20s. And I went into the first doctor, he's like, It's broke. And he took X rays and it wasn't broke. And he gave me this cast or this thing to wear. And so I try to put it on. I couldn't get my shoe on. And I'm walking around elephant foot for three weeks. And I'm like, Okay, I got to do something. So I go into a sports specialist doctor and he's like, Okay, cool. He says, It's broke. And I'm like, Well, that other doctor said it wasn't. So we did another X ray.

[00:05:02.880] – Allan

He says, Man, it'd been better if you broke this thing because you've done so much damage down there. And then I went into he said, I want you to go over to this physical therapist in the office and he'll take her. And I walk in, he's like, Why don't you have that brace inside your shoe? And I'm like, Look at my elephant foot. There's no way I get my foot in the shoe. He says, Well, that brace is supposed to work with the shoe. If you don't have the shoe on, the brace doesn't do you any good. And so here's a doctor, gives me something to do, to use, doesn't really know how to use it, so he doesn't tell me how to use it. I walked in, they did ice therapy, elevation, and constriction all in one move. Put me on the table, lifted my legs up, ice water on my ankle. They got my shoe on before I left that office 25 minutes later. With that brace, I was walking around. He says, You need to be walking around on it, not those crutches. Just throw the crutches away. You need to be walking on this.

[00:05:56.430] – Allan

You need to be moving. This is what the ankle needs to heal. It needs movement to heal. The exact opposite of what every other doctor had told me, stay off of it for six weeks. So I have a whole lot of respect. And to see you put this in a book where now it's in our hands to do our own prehab, rehab structure. I just really like that.

[00:06:17.600] – Dr. Walters

Yeah. Well, thank you. You hear a lot of stories like that, right? I have a very similar story. From high school, I was an athlete and had had knee surgery. It used to be more like that where doctors would immobilize people longer. And I think the treatment of these injuries is slowly getting better. But I had a very similar type of thing where I was immobilized and not really given much direction and ended up developing a contracture. I couldn't bend my knee past 90 degrees. It really atrophied and eventually made my way to PT. And that was my first experience seeing how I was an athlete. I knew I only really thought about exercise and movement at that time for performance, getting stronger, jumping higher, all the things I was doing. I was in taekwondo, so I was kicking. That was my first experience with movement and exercise in terms of just muscloskeletal health and rehabilitation. I think these things are slowly getting better. But yeah, that was a huge goal of the book. Just like you said, of course, sometimes it's appropriate to have a temporary period of rest, but too often people are just prescribed rest and without a lot of clear direction after that.

[00:07:32.790] – Dr. Walters

And they end up resting too long. And we know now that there was actually an article a couple of years ago published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine where they looked at what are the best interventions for managing soft tissue injuries. And immobilization is not one of them. And movement, though, protection, elevation, compression, movement, all these things are really important, of course, in the right amount. You have to be smart about the movement. You don't want to just sprain your ankle. I'm just going to go jog in two days. But that was the goal of the book was to take basically what we do in rehab and create programs that have three phases and help people navigate, walk them through the process, gradually exposing the system to more stress, going from less challenging mobility exercises more and then to transition to strength and resistance based exercises to help people get back to normal function, get rid of pain. Because so much of this stuff, if you have the right education, you can just do yourself.

[00:08:38.560] – Allan

Now, I think a lot of us understand that certain people feel pain differently than other people. And in the book, you got into it. And the term you used was bio psychosocial. Can you talk a little bit about pain being bio psychosocial?

[00:08:56.530] – Dr. Walters

Sure. Yeah. The first five chapters of the book are on pain. Pain science is a really important area of science for all of us humans to know a little bit about. And that was why it was the beginning of the book. Pain is the number one symptom any of us really go seek medical care for. And years ago, we used to look at pain in the physical body from a more mechanical standpoint. It's like you think about something's broken on your car, you go to the mechanic and you get it fixed. And that was how I was trained in pain and injury when I came out of physical therapy school. And how most people were trained. It was what we used to call the postural structural biomechanical model. So all pain was looked at from posture, anatomy, biomechanics, how you moved. So it was very mechanical in that way, very physics based. And what we realized over time in the pain science research is that there's a lot of people who have pain that can't be really linked to tissues in their body or how they move. It has less to do with physical forces and things.

[00:09:59.750] – Dr. Walters

And so those studies pointed towards other factors, like how you think, your thoughts, your beliefs, your emotions, stress, sleep, things that might promote inflammation in the body, social factors. We see that people who have chronic pain, for instance, are often more socially isolated. They laugh less. It just becomes more complex. And so the biopsychosocial model came out of that and really this concept of, let's look at all of these factors that go into pain. If we're really going to do anything about pain, because we know the medical system really isn't very good at treating chronic pain, chronic conditions in general. The medical system is great at you fractured your tibia. We can pin it back together, put you in a cast or whatever and fix that thing. But if you've got chronic low back pain, a lot of people that have chronic pain that just suffer with it, and nobody really has a great answer. The biopsychosocial model is, I think, moving us in the right direction of looking at the whole person and trying to figure out what are the primary factors contributing to their pain experience.

[00:11:05.070] – Allan

And I guess the way I thought through that is you've also got into the whole idea that just because you have an injury doesn't necessarily mean you're going to have pain. And just because you have pain does not necessarily mean you have an injury.

[00:11:17.270] – Dr. Walters

Exactly. Yeah, that's so important, that one for people to separate. Chapter 6 of the book, we really separate pain from injury and talk about that because most people do are under the assumption that if I have pain, I've injured something in my body. And just like you said, we have lots of cases where most pain things that people come to see me in physical therapy for are more just irritations. They didn't have a trauma, something cute, injury didn't happen to them. They just slept funny or they tweaked something a little bit. And it's not like something… If you did an MRI or an X ray, you wouldn't see any damage. There's nothing that would be inconclusive. There'd be nothing there, but they still have pain. So for sure, you can have situations where you have pain and no injury. And then you have people who have injuries and don't experience any pain. And a lot of the pain science research actually came from those situations. A lot of it came from phantom limb pain where people have lost a limb and still have pain. So the injury isn't there anymore. You'll hear of people who have pain in a foot, even though, and maybe they've had everything from their knee down amputated.

[00:12:19.470] – Dr. Walters

So their foot is not there anymore, but they still have pain in that foot like it's there. And so those cases and research really, in a lot of ways, started the pain science research. And some of the best examples for injuries that don't create pain are studies where they do MRIs on people who are asymptomatic, who have no pain. And they'll find lots of us, almost half the population, have disk herniations in their neck and low back, have meniscus tears in their knee, labral tears in the hip and shoulder, arthritis in various joints. Those would technically get classified as injuries. If you went in that had pain and had an MRI and say, Oh, you have this injury, and your pain would be blamed on that. But we're finding more and more that it's just complex and you have to think about everything as a piece of a puzzle and see how it all works together and try not to rely too much on what your physical body looks like on a picture.

[00:13:17.320] – Allan

Now, pain is important, obviously, because if it's a signal, it's telling us something's not the way it's supposed to be, even if that's not coming from an actual injury. But in the book, you talked, and you just a minute ago talked about chronic pain, this is one of the three types, but you mentioned the three types of pain. Could you go through those? Because I think these are important for us to understand, the treatment has to follow along with the type.

[00:13:41.240] – Dr. Walters

For sure. Yeah. So when you have pain, you can, in most cases, break it down into these three types. Most people are going to have… If you've had an injury, like you're talking about an ankle sprain, like you sprain your ankle, that's going to fit into the first type, which is the most mechanical type of pain. Sometimes it's called nociceptive because it has to do with these… In our body, we have nerve ending called nociceptors that detect danger and they relay danger to our brain. And so if you turn those on and it creates pain, then that's called nociceptive pain. And that's usually what happens if you break a bone or you twist your ankle or you do something that's traumatic to your body, then you'll have that mechanical pain. You could be picking something up heavy and strain your back. It's something that happens usually in a sudden moment, and it's very localized. It's obvious why it hurts in that spot because you notice that you hurt that spot. Then we have neuropathic pain, which is the nerve type of pain. It's injury to the nervous system itself. Most people, from a general population standpoint, will have things like sciatica or carpal tunnel syndrome.

[00:14:48.860] – Dr. Walters

Even if you hit your funny bone, you bonk your all nerve in your elbow, that's in a type of acute neuropathic pain. It's a sudden stimulus to a nerve. Those are the big ones that most people will think of. That neuropathic pain is the pain that we think of as radiating or traveling. You might even have, maybe you do have a disk hernia that's irritating a nerve in your neck or your low back, and then it shoots down one arm or down one leg. A lot of people are familiar with those. That's called radicular pain. Nerve pain will often travel along the nerves path. That's another type. Then the third one is chronic or oftentimes now we use the term persistent pain because chronic carries a whole set of negative meaning with it. People often feel like you say chronic pain, that means they have no chance of getting better. So the term persistent pain is used more. But that's a type of pain that's been around longer, usually longer than 3 to six months. And it's the type of pain that doesn't do a good job of accurately telling you what's going on in your body.

[00:15:55.220] – Dr. Walters

So it tends to spread. It's more vague. People might think about fibromyalgia or a chronic low back pain or neck pain that's been around for a long time, maybe years and years. And you know you don't have an injury, but it just gets set off. Maybe you get stressed out and it gets set off, or you had a couple of nights of bad sleep, or some people even say they get a cold, they get sick and then their back starts hurting. So you'll hear these things where it's a pain that's been around for a long time, but it's not really telling you something helpful about your body.

[00:16:27.060] – Allan

This is the weirdest thing. I know I read that and that must have put something in my head because I'm coming down with a bit of a cold and I was feeling sore in the back. And it's almost like that got planted in my head. It had to have because I don't have any back problems. It's just weird. Pain is a weird thing.

[00:16:46.670] – Dr. Walters

It's super strange. I think this happens. I've always been interested in this where you might read about… This happens to me often when a patient comes in with a particular pain problem, I will sometimes experience that pain for a day or two after they've been here. We do see… You think about visualization with athletes where you can think about doing a movement and it fires those same circuits in your brain. I often think that maybe when we read about something painful or hear about someone talking about it, maybe we fire some of those regions in our brain.

[00:17:18.280] – Allan

Yeah. You talked about dry needling. And in my head, I could refill the pain of going through dry needling sessions before with a therapist. And I was like, Okay. And so you're right. Yeah, you can feel pain for no reason whatsoever. And it's important to get to the bottom of that because I don't need surgery on my back because I have a little bit of soreness to my back today when I was walking over here. I know it's psychosomatic. It's just coming out of my head and it'll probably go away as soon as I stop thinking about it. Now, when we're going to go through the process of overcoming pain, I think this is important because there were three phases that you mentioned. And I think a lot of times we actually skip the last two. We get stuck and we do the first one and then we don't really follow through. Can you talk about the three phases?

[00:18:07.920] – Dr. Walters

For sure. Yeah. I'm glad you're high telling this because I do agree. I think a lot of times people do skip the last two. I think sometimes that they feel better and so you're just not motivated to keep doing those. Sometimes it could be your insurance ends and you're going to physical therapy and you just stop doing things. And that's where trainers and PTs are such good compliments to each other.

[00:18:28.480] – Allan

And this book.

[00:18:30.180] – Dr. Walters

Totally. Yes, exactly. That was something actually my co author, Glenn and I talked a lot about was using this because we don't want to tell people don't go to physical therapy. Of course, there are times when there's a lot you can do on your own. But if you're not getting better, then you go and the book can be a compliment to that. And it could be something that helps you continue when you're done. But when you look at those phases, the first phase is really about reducing pain and reducing sensitivity, helping the system calm back down, really desensitizing it so that you don't just keep it flared up. You want to try to get rid of that acute pain state and not prolong it. Maybe you've got an injury, you're moving on it too much and you're creating more inflammation, stirring it up. Maybe it's just a non inflammatory… It's a low back pain that you've had before and you just want to try and let your nervous system desensitize and calm down. Most people are pretty good about that. It hurts so you're going to try to do things. But then after that period, as it starts to calm down, the next thing that we'll look at in rehab is addressing impairment.

[00:19:34.590] – Dr. Walters

So trying to resolve impairment, which are really things that would limit your function. So maybe a mobility loss, maybe your joint, you can't move it as far because of that pain. Maybe you've got a strength deficit, maybe you have a balance or appropriate receptive type deficit. So a lot of it in phase two, that second phase, a lot of it revolves around mobility and control, how well the person moves, the quality of their movement. And we really want to work on mobility early because… Your ankle sprain example, right? You don't want to let someone be totally immobilized for too long. And my knee example, because people can get stuck, their joints can become stiff. And as time goes on in the area of heels, it's much harder to gain that range of motion back. So we really try to start right away as soon as pain is coming down to work on mobility and movement control. And then the third phase is all about rebuilding capacity, which is really focused on resistance training. Any good physical therapy program should ultimately turn into a resistance training program where you're using your body weight, maybe external tools like dumb bells, bands, barbell, whatever you do that you eventually get back to where you are loading the system externally and building strength.

[00:20:49.250] – Dr. Walters

And that will help your tendons, your muscles, your ligaments, your bones, everything. A lot of times in the PT world, we'll talk about increasing capacity of the system. And that typically means by strengthening it with resistance training, because we know your musculoskeletal tissues are physical tissues. We're putting load and stress on them all the time. So the stronger they are, they're naturally going to be more resistant to tearing and being injured.

[00:21:14.750] – Allan

Yeah, I know this from experience because I asked for a tore rotator cuff about six years ago. And I mean, tore tore, it was not a partial tear. It was a tear off the bone. Bad, bad one. But I kept training. I kept exercising, I kept lifting. I just told my personal trainer, strength trainer at the time, I said, okay, I can't do pressing movements right now. That's just not going to happen. I can't do presses, particularly overhead. We tried some different things, and that was just a no go. The pain was there, and I knew I was just compensating too much with everything else, and I really wasn't getting any work on my chest of any substance. So I didn't do any pressing movements, but I continued to do lap pull downs and rows and dead lifts because that didn't impact that injury at all. But as a result of doing that work, I felt like I felt less pain. So there's a tie to exercise and pain that even beyond resistance training, just even you mentioned in the book, aerobics and everything else. Can you talk a little bit about that?

[00:22:13.250] – Dr. Walters

For sure. Yeah, we talk about this a lot with pain that movement and exercise are one of the most powerful modulators of pain. A lot of people probably will recognize this. Sometimes when you're really sedentary, maybe something's come up in life. Maybe you're on a vacation or on a plane or whatever. When you sit more, often people will feel worse. Once they get out and walk and just move, there's something I think our nervous system really craves, movement. Like you said, it doesn't have to be resistance training. It can just be active mobility work, whatever. It could just be going through range of motion exercises. Just moving tissue tends to really be helpful in terms of pain. What was the second part you asked on that?

[00:22:53.180] – Allan

Well, the connection of the two. I just felt like I didn't feel pain the way that I would have felt it because a full tear of a rotator cuff and you're moving in a gym doing stuff, you would think I would be in intense pain, and I wasn't. Now, at other times, I did certain movements that would cause pain. But at the same time, I was out running, I was out lifting, I was doing things. And in the end, it actually worked out great because doing those lap pull downs and those rows, the range of motion in my shoulder after the surgery was exceptionally better than it would have been if I had just put it in a sling and sat at my desk for three months while I was waiting for surgery.

[00:23:36.450] – Dr. Walters

Yeah, it made me think. Yeah, exactly. There's a couple of things there. I think we're often trying to encourage people, and I think this has been a change in maybe the last 10 to 15 years, but just that exact idea of keep training as much as you can. So if you've got an injured shoulder, you injured your rotator cuff, you found all these things that you could modify your workout and keep strengthening. And we know that people, like your example, where if they're working on mobility and getting stronger and they do end up having surgery, they recover faster. And we see that people, say you can't even work that side, working the other arm and your legs. We've seen in the research with resistance training, there's this cross transfer effect where actually people lose strength less if they keep training, even if they're not even working the side that's injured, if they work the other side, it transfers over. And I think the other cool thing about movement, especially when you start looking at more chronic, longer lasting back pain, such a good example. A lot of times it doesn't have to be real fancy specific exercise for low back pain, for example.

[00:24:37.930] – Dr. Walters

Things like Pilates, yoga, walking, aerobic exercise, just stretching programs, resistance training, they all have been shown to have a significantly positive impact on chronic low back pain. So I think sometimes people get in this mindset, again, because of probably outdated narratives, but I've just got to do core strengthening if I've got back pain. And really the research is saying more and more, you just need to move, just find something that moves. And if you do have some of the exercises that do target the low back area, that probably is good to add in. But a lot of times it's just moving. Just try to move and find something that you enjoy and isn't threatening to your system. A lot of times when we're talking about pain, that's what we're trying to help people with is you don't want to just blow past your pain, past that flair up line. You want to find something that challenges it, goes up to that line. But it's not considered really threatening by our nervous system. And over time, you can desensitize the system and help get rid of that pain.

[00:25:36.280] – Allan

But do no harm. Don't continue to injure yourself. Do what you can. Like I said, twist your ankle. You're not going out for a jog two days later, but you are walking around with compression socks or compression brace and doing the right things to help that heal.

[00:25:52.780] – Allan

Dr. Walter, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:26:01.780] – Dr. Walters

Yeah, I would say in thinking about this one, the three that I would focus on right away would be sleep. Sleep is… We know there's so much research on sleep, and it definitely applies to the musculoskeletal system. Our musculoskeletal system remodels while we're sleeping. And whether you're looking at performance in the musculoskeletal system or healing from pain and injury, just getting enough sleep should be the foundation, in my opinion, before you even think about these more physical therapy based exercises and interventions. Sleep, and then I would say exercise movement. And like we're alluding to, I always say exercise movement because we just talked about how powerful just basic movement is. So it doesn't always have to be you're getting your heart rate up or doing something that's strength based. It could just be range of motion exercises or activities of daily living that you might do around your house, just moving. But then, of course, exercise, especially aerobic exercise and strength training, can have huge benefits for helping to reduce your chances of having an injury and helping with all kinds of different pain issues. Even just aerobic exercise for people with chronic pain has lots of research for reducing inflammation and sensitivity in the nervous system.

[00:27:14.610] – Dr. Walters

Sleep, exercise, movement. Then the third one, I would say, really revolves around how you think in your psychology. There's a huge degree of stress, fear, and anxiety that comes with pain and injury. That really goes back to that bio psychosocial model. We've been trying to spend a lot of time educating people about pain and injury, the differences between them, what's going on in their system, how their pain system works. And you see lots of studies where the fear of injury, the fear of pain is almost more limiting than what they're actually experiencing. And a lot of times when you're looking at pain, fear and anxiety can actually ramp the nerve system up because you're basically telling your brain that there's something to be worried about, that you need to be threatened. There's something threatening going on, there's danger. Your brain is going to tap into that and be more likely to output pain because it thinks it needs to protect you. That piece, trying to figure out, learn about pain as a strategy for reducing fear and anxiety. Then if you don't have a lot of fear and anxiety around pain and injury, then I would say stress management, which goes in that same category.

[00:28:27.690] – Dr. Walters

Just trying to maybe it's meeting with a PT, maybe it's implementing meditation, mindfulness based things. Even just laughing, trying to find something that makes you laugh. Injuries suck. Nobody likes being injured. You see a lot of people who with true injuries like ACL tears or something, your likelihood of being reinjured is higher if you're fearful of that injury happening again. So there's a lot to be said for, I think, that your mindset and your mental framework than how you look at pain and injury.

[00:29:02.420] – Allan

That's why this book is really helpful because you have the protocols in the book where you can somewhat, let me say, self diagnose, but if you know you have an injury, you're working with a PT, or you're through working with a PT and you want to keep working to work your way through these three phases of recovery, all that's in the book set up exactly like that. So you say, okay, I hurt my shoulder. What can I do to strengthen, to resolve this problem over time and make sure that I'm at least as good, if not better for it? And it's all in the book. The book is called Rehab Science. If someone wanted to learn more about the book or about you, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:29:42.510] – Dr. Walters

Yeah, thank you. So yeah, the book, like you said, Rehab Science, how to overcome pain, heal from injury. The best places are usually Amazon and Barnes & Noble. If people are in the United States, there are groups for international individuals. Black Wells is a bookstore in the UK that's useful. And then people can always message me. I'm at Rehab Science pretty much everywhere on social media. Instagram and YouTube are the big platforms where I'm the most active. But people can always reach out to me if they have a question or want to know where to get the book or how to navigate it because there's a lot. There is a lot of content in there. And I think, like you said, most people are going to come to this for the programs because they're looking for a program, they've got some pain and they want to see some exercises they can implement. My hope is that that will then motivate them to look at the first 10 chapters, which are the science of pain and injury, and then that will give them that framework we talked about because it is so… It's like putting an armor on yourself.

[00:30:37.650] – Dr. Walters

I think if you have that education, you're probably going to have pain or an injury again in the future. The book covers the 50 most common. They're all the things that most of us humans get. So if you have that framework, that toolset to know how to approach a future pain or injury, it just makes it that much easier and it helps reduce some of the fear and anxiety about it. So my hope is though people will be interested in the science, and we try to write it in a way that we were thinking really about the regular person, just somebody who doesn't have a rehab background that wants to learn about these concepts. Of course, I think movement and medical practitioners will benefit from it, too. But we were thinking about both of those groups. And a lot of people asked me, it's not just for practitioners. It was really at the beginning just for the regular person.

[00:31:22.370] – Allan

Well, I'm going to have a copy on my bookshelf.

[00:31:24.960] – Dr. Walters

Thank you. I appreciate it. Thank you.

[00:31:27.730] – Allan

You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/595, and I'll have the links there. Dr. Walters, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:31:37.640] – Dr. Walters

Thank you so much for having me. This is awesome. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:31:49.290] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:31:50.780] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. Right off the bat, I have to tell you, I think having a physical therapist is just as important as having a general practitioner doctor. They can play such an important role, especially for people in my running community. We get injured a lot, so we'd rather be back on the run, and a physical therapist is the guy that's going to get you there.

[00:32:11.530] – Allan

Well, yeah, I go with the concept of fit for task. And as you try to be fit for task, if you injure yourself, guess what, you're not until you get it fixed, until you actually get out there and say, Okay, I'm going to do something about it. And it's unfortunate that most doctors don't necessarily want to stay in their lane on some things. If you're a general practitioner, I apologize, but you're not a physical therapist, and those guys can work magic. And so I don't mean anything when I say my general practitioner let me down. I just went to the wrong doctor. It wasn't until I said, Okay, this isn't getting better the way he said it would. I've got to go to an expert. And I went to a sports doctor. The sports doctor knew more but still didn't know how to fix me at that point because I wasn't in his world broke.

[00:33:07.890] – Allan

He was effectively a carpenter and there was nothing to fix. It was just, Okay, we've got to get the swelling down. We've got to get this boot on. We've got to have the pressure. And so it was just, okay, now you got to do this contrast therapy and all the things that probably are outdated today. But what I did back then, and so it was just a function of getting to the right person, which was the physical therapist when it was all said and done, that knew the thing. Same thing when I tore my shoulder, it was okay. Not playing around with this. I did not go to a general practitioner. I went straight to a sports doctor, told him it was broke. He told me it was broke. He said, Let's get an MRI. We got the MRI, it was broke. He goes in and does his carpentry work and staples me back together, shaves off a little bit of bone and says, Okay, just go do physical therapy when it's time. And I thought, Well, no, he didn't really say when. So this was Thursday. I made an appointment with a Division 1 football physical therapist.

[00:34:17.450] – Allan

He'd been with the Division 1 football team the year before. So he had seen breaks. He had seen stuff like this. And I told him, I said, I don't want to just recover. I want to be back to exactly where I was before this all happened.

[00:34:32.090] – Allan

And he helped me do that. So yeah, they are among my favorites. But what I really liked about this book was it does allow you to do some self work.

[00:34:44.550] – Allan

When the injuries not as bad as what you would require physical therapist. And if you have a physical therapist for an injury, this is going to be additional aid that will help you because you can pull this book out and sit down with them and say, here's this injury. What do you think about this workout? Because they're going to give you a little Xerox piece of paper that's grainy because it's a copy of a copy of a copy that's been around for 15 years and say, Here's your prescription for homework. Here you can say, well, this guy recommends this training. What do you think about it? And the physical therapist will say, Yeah, that'll do the same thing. But you'll have it in your hand. And so if it's a minor injury, you'll know how to recover from it. Well, if it's a more major injury, then I would say go seek medical attention. Don't be your own doctor.

[00:35:39.190] – Rachel

Yes. Well, I want to just highlight that section right there because we all go down the rabbit hole of googling this symptom and that symptom, and you can get 20 different answers of what your ailment or injury could be. And it is really important just to go straight to the doctor, the sports ortho, or if you can get a consultation with a PT and get the test done and get a proper diagnosis and then do what needs to get done because you're not a doctor, I'm not a doctor.

[00:36:10.510] – Allan

But I want to flip that a little bit. You still are the CEO and their advisors. So if you know there's something wrong and the doctor says, Well, you're just going to have to live with it, that might not be the answer that you want to hear. But get a second opinion. Or if surgery is the only way that, Oh, well, it's a partial tear of this or that. Surgery is your best option. Let me cut you open, please. No, let's take a step back. Is there a way for me to rehab this? So go get the second opinion. Have some conversations. Understand the risk, understand the likelihood that that's going to pay. I knew with my shoulder it was a complete tear. There was no not getting a surgery. I wouldn't have been able to scratch the top of my head ever. So I needed surgery because I would not have been able to lift my arm up over parallel from the floor. And so from that perspective, I knew I had to get the surgery, got it on my own terms. And when it was the right time for me, I did live with it for three months.

[00:37:15.210] – Allan

And I also did a spartan with it, and that was part of it. I didn't want to miss the spartan for the surgery. I was like, I can't tear it more, so I'll go in when it's time to go in. I kept moving my arm. I didn't brace it and hold it and nurse it. I was careful not to hurt myself because I don't like pain anymore than anybody else does. But it was just this concept of, I know I'm going to need the surgery. I'll fit it in when it makes the most sense. And then I'll do the physical therapy like a madman to recover as quickly as humanly possible.

[00:37:51.250] – Allan

And my range of motion was great within a few weeks. Reality is the strength took a lot longer to get back to the strength I had before. Now I'm a smarter man because I know there's no reason for me to be lifting that much weight over my head with dumbells. My shoulders are just not going to be able to handle it. And I assume whatever happened on my right shoulder could invariably happen on my left. And I don't want to have to go through that again. So I'm just a lot more careful. But I still weight train. I didn't stop training because, oh, I might hurt myself. I still want to be fit for task. And that includes scratching the top of my head.

[00:38:31.580] – Rachel

Yeah, that's important.

[00:38:33.290] – Allan

When it itches. When it itches. So make health care professionals your partners. They're your advisors. Put them on your team. Anytime you learn something about yourself. It's an illness, it's a cancer, it's a this or it's a that. Get some professional advice. Dr. Google is fine for you to get some base information. But if you get on one of those forums and someone says, Well, I just made this tea with ashugandha and all this other stuff in it and that cured my cancer, maybe. But that's just a bit of information. That anecdotal post out there on the internet is not a study. They might be right. But again, take it under advisement and do what you feel is right for your health care, for your well care, so you can be the person that you want to be.

[00:39:22.630] – Rachel

Absolutely. And a PT is a good guy to have on speed dial.

[00:39:26.520] – Allan

And this book is like having someone like that. So I would trust what's in this book over anything you're going to search on Google because this guy knows his stuff.

[00:39:37.650] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. Great interview. Great book.

[00:39:40.530] – Allan

I'll talk to you next week.

[00:39:42.490] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:39:43.600] – Allan

You too.

[00:39:44.420] – Rachel

Thanks.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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The following listeners have sponsored this show by pledging on our Patreon Page:

– Anne Lynch	– Ken McQuade	– Leigh Tanner
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Let's Say Hello

[00:03:17.230] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are you doing?

[00:03:19.200] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:21.230] – Allan

I'm doing all right. Just got back from the United States and is usually the case, at least in the last few years when I travel, because I'm not traveling all the time. I got a cold. And so, yeah, I'm just now getting a little under the weather and hopeful that my voice will hold out long enough to do what I've got to do this week as a podcaster and recording and being on other podcasts and all that. But anyway, so I have a little bit of a cold. If I sound a little nasally, I apologize. And I'll probably a lot of my intros for the next few weeks might sound a little nasally because I've got to record those as well. But how are things up there?

[00:03:57.130] – Rachel

Good. Almost the same, though, because the news calls it sneezing season. We're in the peak allergy season right now, and although I've been getting the allergy shots, I'm due for one, and they've been working really well. You just can't escape the pollen and the irritants in the air. So, yeah, I wouldn't be surprised if you got a touch of the pollen while you were here in the United States and maybe your body's reacting. But yeah, you know that we did time of year.

[00:04:24.420] – Allan

We did do that. We went out with one of her uncles and aunts to a place, the bar. They were having karaoke, and we walked up and the sign said, this is a smoking bar. And I didn't even know those still existed.

[00:04:36.060] – Rachel

No, me neither. Interesting.

[00:04:39.220] – Allan

So, yeah, we literally sat there for two or 3 hours in a bar where everyone is at a smoking bar. Pretty much everybody that's at a smoking bar smokes. So it was horrific hell on earth. And so it might just be that my sinuses are telling me that was stupid things you do for the people you love. So it might be that or cold, but I'll take care of it one way or another.

[00:05:07.030] – Rachel

Yeah, getting my allergy shots tomorrow. I'll be fine soon, but yeah, it's beautiful.

[00:05:11.590] – Allan

All right, well, are you ready to have a conversation with Satyen? 

[00:05:18.030] – Rachel

Sure. 

Interview

[00:05:44.730] – Allan

Satyen. Welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:05:47.560] – Satyen

Thanks, Allan, for having me. Looking forward to chat with you today.

[00:05:50.480] – Allan

Yeah. So the name of your book is called Accelerated Evolution: The Revolutionary Transformational Method for Clearing Problems, Achieving Your Goals and Accelerating Spiritual Awakening That's Sweeping the World. I'll have to blatantly admit I'm not someone who's really gotten into a whole lot of the spiritual. I'm going to call it touchy feely. Okay. For just lack of a better word, I kind of grew up old school. You take care of yourself. You take care of those around you. You form a good community. You form a good family. And we kind of work through that. But I think I see more and more where traumas and things that people have gone through are adversely affecting the quality of their life today. And so I think any tool that can help someone achieve clarity and get through and get past some of these things is at least worth a listen. So I'm glad to have you on the show where we can have this conversation. Thank you.

[00:06:47.830] – Satyen

Allan, what you shared regarding old school, that is the foundation you got to take care of yourself. So what you just shared is exactly what accelerated evolution is about. It's about getting solid with yourself, then getting solid with your family, getting solid with your contribution to society and how you flow with everything. And most people try to focus on many things out there, but when you start focusing on yourself first so I think you actually might be further away, further down the road of this than you might even realize, my friend.

[00:07:18.810] – Allan

Perhaps. Perhaps. But I know I still have a lot of work to do to be the guy that my dog looks to as I kind of saw that written on a sign somewhere. I just want to be the man that my dog thinks I am. So you talked in the book, and I've seen this, they look at the blue zones and they look at a lot of other things about why people live a long life, a long, good life. And it usually comes down, one of the key ones that they'll talk about their movement and their sleep and all that. But one of the big ones and one that often gets passed up is purpose. And in the book, you call it Dharma, which because I kind of knew that was really more from yoga than anything else, but from where I caught it from. But can you talk about Dharma and purpose and why that's important?

[00:08:08.830] – Satyen

Certainly. And because I'm 56. Just recently, last week. Fitness and health has been really close to my heart. Wellness of being. I started out as a therapist, very young shiatsu therapist doing body work, massage, that type of stuff. And Chinese and Japanese healing arts. And then I dove deep into martial arts. That was my base and still is now 43 years plus. And so fitness and well being, I recognize, is multidimensional. It's physical. Of course, we all know about that. The physicality is our vitality. But it's also mental. If we got a lot of mental noise in ourself, self limiting beliefs, we're putting ourselves down. Or our mind is looping around negative thoughts like, I'm not good enough. I'll never make it. And those can be many of them can be unconscious. Right? Then we need to have mental fitness as well. We also need to have emotional fitness of being. When we're all overwhelmed, filled with struggle, filled with tension of the day, of the era, of the time, of everything that we've got going on, then we're not going to be emotionally free to have emotional freedom, the capacity to be light, buoyant, joyful, loving, gracious, magnanimous rather than irritable, intense and filled with anger and vitriol and judgment.

[00:09:27.250] – Satyen

And all of this, when we have emotional fluidity in our being, our whole health goes through the roof. And then spiritual health is a connection to our soul, our heart, a connection to our higher purpose. Dharma, as you said. Now, whether you're religious or not, to me, spiritual means recognizing and getting clear that we actually do have a higher purpose here. We have a purpose of contribution in some way. It might not be world level contribution, it could be just contribution in our neighborhood. Don't ever underestimate that you are here and that we are here for a contribution. And contribution to me, is the pathway to our spiritual essence. So to me, fitness and well being is physical, mental, emotional and spiritual. And when we awaken all that within ourselves, we become unstoppable. Our health and fitness goes through the roof and we become magnetic. Success comes to us rather than us chasing it.

[00:10:22.020] – Allan

Now, one of the reasons, I guess, my purpose, if you will, of what I do is trying to help people get healthy and fit. That's why I started this podcast. That's why I coach people online. And the main reason that a lot of people say that they're coming to me is that they lack motivation and they struggle with motivation or staying motivated. Sometimes they get started, but then they fall back and they just can't keep that motivation going. In the book, you share the prime theory of motivation. Could you kind of go through those five elements of the prime theory and why those are important and how they can help us?

[00:10:55.410] – Satyen

Okay, so I'm going to give you the essence of all of that motivation. Those five boil down to one. Okay? What it is, is there is a plethora of knowledge, we all know that, on how to get well, how to be fit. You can go on YouTube, you can see tens of thousands of exercise videos, all for free all of that. Why we're not motivated is we have three main reasons we're not motivated, and it's all unconscious. Number one is limiting beliefs. We have beliefs about ourselves. I'm too old, I'm too young, I'm too fat, I'm too thin, I'm not strong enough. I'm to this, I'm too that. And we gain these. We pick up these limiting beliefs from challenges in our life. When we were earlier and someone said, hey, I don't know if you can do that, and you say, you're right, you bought into it. I don't know if I can do that. Every time we bought into these lies about ourselves, we created a false image about who we are, a limited image. And then we start thinking out of that mindset. And you can see that in a lot of people and even in ourselves, that if we listen to those limiting beliefs, we'll remain a prisoner, a slave to them.

[00:12:06.550] – Satyen

So that's the first thing we got to get in touch with, how to heal and transform our limiting beliefs. That is one of the main areas that holds us back from being fully motivated spontaneously, naturally, without this. Gregarious willpower right. The other number two block we have to being fully motivated and inspired to be fit and well is traumas. Traumas are negative or heavy duty things that have happened to our lives that we couldn't process or deal with or absorb or digest in the moment. And so that intensity of that experience is suspended in our images, in our mind, thoughts that we have, emotions that we have, and body sensations. So traumas get lodged in our whole psyche, our body, in our breath, in our being, and we don't even realize we're walking around with these traumas. It could be emotional ones, things that were just not right, that were overwhelming for you when you were wrong, that you had to defend yourself with or brace yourself. And that unconscious bracing is still inside. Traumas also can be physical. I remember years ago in a martial art injury I had, I was always nervous to do anything with my legs.

[00:13:22.920] – Satyen

I sprained my knees, hurt my knees multiple times. So I had this trauma in my knees and I felt if I do anything and I didn't know I was holding myself back because of this fear of if I go a little too far, I might hurt myself. This is an unconscious trauma that holds us back from our full engagement with our health. So number one is limiting beliefs. Number two is traumas. And the third part that holds us back from being fully motivated and engaged are unconscious family loyalties. We have loyalties to our family members. My father lived till like this, till 70, and I'm going to live till 70. Or we see a pattern. One of the interesting patterns is seeing family patterns of health up and down and seeing how my clients mirror those family patterns. Why? Because there's an unconscious loyalty to the good and the bad that's gone on in the past. So we got to find those, excavate them and heal them. So in our body of work, accelerated evolution, what we do is we find what those limiting beliefs are. We find what those traumas are. We find what those unconscious family loyalties that are not healthy, there's some that are healthy.

[00:14:35.390] – Satyen

We find what are not healthy. And deeply, rapidly and very fast in a rapid way, we clear them, we transform them. What would have taken months, years in therapy or traditional methods we're able to do in minutes when that unconscious loyalty is healed, when the limiting belief is transformed to one of great belief in yourself. And when you've removed the traumas, that energy that was stored in you now goes into your vitality. Now you become an unstoppable motivation machine, but in a natural way, not in this Gregarious willpower which will only burn out.

[00:15:11.490] – Allan

Now one of the big areas and it was kind of, I would say the last area for me in focusing with my health and wellness was stress. I initially started movement because for me that was the easiest one to start and then I moved into managing my nutrition and then sleep and so I ended up with still in a very stressful job at the time and it was just the stress was chronic. It was always there, the bear was always chasing me. How can we use this method to address stress?

[00:15:44.600] – Satyen

That's a great question. Well first of all I want to just really get this across that stress is the real pandemic that's across society now that is in ourselves, that's lurking in our mind, lurking in our emotions, lurking in our body. And stress first of all is an accumulation of importance. I need to do that now, I'm not here so far. How am I supposed to deal with all of that? All these incompleted communications, all this stuff that we stuffed down in ourselves, things that we wanted to share but we don't feel we're going to be heard. We feel that we're not understood. We feel that we're not gotten or loved or appreciated or valued enough. This all causes stress. The craziness of the demands of work nowadays tends to be extreme. We're being asked to and even within ourselves to do far more work in less time with better results, with more efficiency. No wonder we're killing ourselves with stress. Stress causes all these stress hormones that just bring our body down. It makes us hard to get up at. We need more rest, more sleep and we never get it. So we're burning ourselves out.

[00:16:57.170] – Satyen

And when we burn ourselves out, many of us are burned out or close to being burned out or over running being burned out. We're burned out already way back. But we're caffeinating ourselves, drinking ourselves, sugaring ourselves to run on top of the accumulated stress. So first of all you got to get that it's killing us and you got to get real with us. We got to get real with ourselves and not just put it aside and say one day I'll get to it because that one day will never happen. It'll never happen. The way we deal with it with accelerated evolution is we find where that stress is and we go to it immediately. Rather than circling around with long histories and talking about my background and for hours and hours and maybe after the third, 4th, 5th session with the therapist, you get to the stress or ten in less than an hour. We can get to the core of why you're creating the stress in the first place and what you're doing to reinforce it. And we go right to it, we transform it, we open it, and the stress then turns into wisdom, like right in your mind, right in your consciousness, you get to the core and you heal.

[00:18:03.590] – Satyen

That's not just the stress you heal why you are getting yourself in continuously stressful situations? Because dealing with stress on the outside, relaxation, therapies meditation, contraction, relaxation, herbs or supplements to comet, that's all on the external. It's not dealing with the cause. The cause is the excess importance, the excessive importance that we put on things that we should really back off and smile a bit and enjoy a bit. But it's hard to do that when we're wound up. So that's why we like to heal people in one session rather than take weeks and months. Everyone's too busy nowadays. We need a method and a way to resolve really this death knell march that we're doing as a society off the cliff with stress. We need to recapture our energy and focus on what's most important in our lives, our health, our well being, our families, our joy, our happiness. Stress then becomes a motivation and inspiration, not something that destroys us.

[00:19:11.330] – Allan

Thank you. So now another area where I think a lot of people will see some value from this is because, again, they're hiring a personal trainer. They want to lose some weight. They know that they got there predominantly from overeating. And so this method can be used to kind of get to the root of that too, right?

[00:19:28.790] – Satyen

Absolutely. If we look at the conditions, like being overweight, being overweight, because we're eating more than we need to, and you can get all the advice on, hey, stop this, lower your calories. But what about your emotions? Do they want you to stop eating? What about your inner mindset that hurt young person inside or the one that's lacking love inside of yourself? And the only way you can feel love is when you're eating food and getting that rush and feeling that fulfillment in your belly and eating that sugar. So we know mentally it's not well being, but emotionally it's fulfilling us temporarily. Until then, we go, what did I do? And we go down that spiral again of beating ourselves up and judging ourselves and okay, now we're going to get vehement and get healthy again. This is a crazy cycle that so many people have been on. The root of overeating is because we're trying to fill ourselves with love and connection and fulfillment and freedom. And since we're not getting it the real way through human connection and wholeness, we seek it through artificial, superficial, unhealthy ways. And so what we do with accelerated evolution, we get to the core of why we are seeking these unhealthy ways of being full.

[00:20:48.640] – Satyen

We reorient that. We reprogram our subconscious, we heal our subconscious mind. And now we're geared and training ourselves to seek true fulfillment from relationship rather than from the stuff that knocks us down.

[00:21:03.940] – Allan

If someone were going to go through an accelerated evolution session, what would that process look to them?

[00:21:10.940] – Satyen

It's really simple. A coach, a guide, first of all, will ask you what's the main challenge you've got going on that you'd like help with? What's the main thing that's bothering you? So come with honesty and realness. Okay, this is the thing I want most transformed in my life. It could be personal, could be professional, could be health, could be your food, it could be your weight, it could be your exercise. Whatever is most clogging you up, bring that honestly and directly to the accelerated evolution guide. Then, rather than taking a long, long case history, they're going to now say, okay, they're going to get you to take a few breaths and relax and get in touch with the disharmony. They're going to get you to feel the problem, not just talk about it. They're going to get you to quiet and feel how that affects you, how that's limiting your life, how that's hurting you. And you're going to feel where it is in your body, how it feels. And then the guide is going to take you through this beautiful process that step by step guides you within, that you'll actually feel it within minutes, how the tension, the self hate, the loathing, the contraction inside yourself starts to open and become lighter and freer and spacious.

[00:22:25.620] – Satyen

Then ultimately you're actually going to be in this place of joy and true freedom and inner insight. Then the guide will say, once you've got to that place and you've released the tension and the trauma and all that limiting beliefs that keep you in that stutt state, this happens very quickly, very quickly. Then what happens is they're going to say, okay, now how do you want to live this in life? They're going to give you guidance, support and insight on how to live this way so that the new way you're being is translating into life in a good wholesome way. And that all happens in under an hour.

[00:23:01.370] – Allan

I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:23:09.490] – Satyen

Okay. Number one is to recognize that your limits are a portal to your strengths. Number one, make a list of where you feel unwell, where you feel not fully happy, where you feel that you're not joyful enough. Don't hide from that. Make a list of the top three areas that are holding you back that you feel bad about or you feel guilty or shameful or not on about, and get real with them. That's number one. Just three. Don't make a list of 100, just three. Is good.

[00:23:47.460] – Allan

My list would be pretty long, too.

[00:23:49.060] – Satyen

Okay, start with the top three. We all have that, right? But if you make a list of 20 things, you're going to get depressed, you're going to go, I'll never get to top three. Number two, make a commitment that you make a commitment that you're going to go through any method, any ways, any means. And if accelerated evolution is inspiring you, come and experience that. Make a commitment that I'm not going to let those things keep me down. I'm going to use those as a slingshot and a doorway, a portal to my fullness, because every accelerated evolution guide or anyone who goes through it, they get to recognize my limitation is actually a gift. That actually is a powerful gift inside. So you got to do that. That's number two. Number three, make a commitment to a new narrative of your life. You'll change so rapidly within a short period of time, you now have to let go of the old story of how you used to be, and now you got to create a new story for yourself without the old baggage of yesterday. The new story is, now that I'm clear of this, here's how I'm going to live my life.

[00:25:00.660] – Satyen

Here's my morning routine I'm going to give myself as a gift. Here's my eating routine I'm going to give myself as a gift. So you start visualizing a new path, a new life, a new way of being. So I'll summarize. Number one, get real with your obstacles. Number two, be willing and vulnerable, doesn't matter who you are, and commit to doing the work to transform those limits into power. And number three, create a new narrative, a new visual, a new vision of how you live your life that's congruent with joy and your highest harmony and your highest well being.

[00:25:38.360] – Allan

Thank you for sharing that. Satyen, if someone wanted to learn more about you and learn more about Accelerated Evolution, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:25:45.890] – Satyen

Well, we have a gift for everyone here, and that's a live experience of accelerated evolution. And so go to the URL, the website acceleratedevolutiongift.com. acceleratedevolutiongift.com. This will give you the direct experience of all that I'm talking about. Come to that session. You'll see it's all online. It's exactly guided by myself. And then have the transformative experience yourself so you know what I'm talking about. You know this is real and not some pie in the sky thing. And then I'd love to hear from you. You'll have information on how to chat with me and how to continue.

[00:26:27.640] – Allan

you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/593, and I'll be sure to have the links there. Satyen, thank you for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:26:37.540] – Satyen

Allan, it's been a joy. Thank you so much for your kind, caring, the good work you do in the world.

Post Show/Recap

[00:26:51.010] – Allan

Welcome back. Ras.

[00:26:52.460] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, that was a really interesting interview and a couple of things that stuck out in my head when he said limiting beliefs. I have heard that and I felt that a few times. Having recently turned 50, I'll be 52 this summer. Just once I let it slip out like I'm too old for this. As soon as I heard myself say, I'm like, okay, no, I am not too old to be doing what I'm doing. I just need to reframe that. I'm working really hard, I'm getting really sore, I'm getting really tired. There's a lot going on. But yeah, I can see how limiting beliefs can really change your mindset.

[00:27:29.990] – Allan

Yeah. Again, I didn't go through one of his sessions, so I really can't opine on what those sessions are like. You would have to experience it yourself. If this is something that resonates with you, by all means, get the book, read through it, and you can get a free session with them to see if this is something that would work for you. But the core basis of it is if you believe that your life is hell, then it is. And if you believe that you have ultimate capacity to heal and grow, then you will. And so there is this idea that our brains can do things that you just wouldn't even believe. I'll give you a perfect example interview that's going to come up in a couple of weeks with Dr. Tom Walters. And in his book he had a concept where he said, our brain tells us something or our body tells us something, and it's not even really true, but we just react. And so the example he gave was your back might like you had low back pain at one point. You might have low back pain when you get a cold.

[00:28:34.930] – Allan

And so I'm walking over to the office and I'm feeling kind of achy in my lower back. And it didn't occur to me that I had like, something subliminal. It must have been in my head because there's nothing wrong with my back. I didn't do anything to my back and there's no injury, but it just felt a little achy as I was walking over here. And I'm like, you know, he put that in my head.

[00:28:58.830] – Rachel

Yeah.

[00:28:59.870] – Allan

And so there is a mind body thing, and where the brain goes, the body can go. If the brain doesn't go there, the body won't go. And so if you believe in things and you really put your faith in things and then you work, it's still going to take work. It's not something even though he says 1 hour and you might be able to do amazing things in 1 hour. But the reality of it is if you don't believe that something's going to help you or you don't believe you can resolve the pain or the trauma or the stress or whatever, then you obviously won't. And so a big part of stress management a big a part of some of the things that are out there that are big hold back problems, the limiting beliefs, the eating, relationships with food, all of those are about the way you're perceiving the world. And if you can change your perception, you can change your outcome.

[00:29:54.280] – Rachel

Very much so. I feel like if you could just be open to what you're experiencing and maybe even take a minute to ponder what you're doing, whether it's a relationship with food or relationship, what you do for exercise, I mean, ponder for a second, like I said the other day, I'm too old for this. And truly, if I had stuck with that mindset, I wouldn't do a lot of the things that I do. And I'm really pondering that a lot these days. What can I do? I guess the flip side of that is my opportunities are almost limitless as to what I can do. An age is just a number. It's kind of irrelevant. It's not like your body shuts down at a certain age or something. But if you really did take the time to evaluate what's troubling you or what's not serving you and find a way to fix it, as long as you're open, I guess, to the ability to fix it, it really is a lot about your attitude and what you want to accomplish.

[00:30:55.420] – Allan

A perfect example would be cupping or acupuncture. For me, I just look at those and say, not for me, I'm not going to believe it's going to work. So therefore I'm not interested,

[00:31:08.950] – Rachel

why waste your time?

[00:31:10.380] – Allan

So I'm not going to waste my time. But on the other end, some people do, they get acupuncture, they get different things done that you'd be like, okay, maybe there's something behind it, but I don't see it. But they say, no, I go and get acupuncture once a week and it helps with my pain and I feel great, I'm like, awesome, keep doing it. So if it's working, keep going. If you're open to it, then be open to it. Because if you sit down with a session and any of those things and you say, I don't believe this is going to help me, then it won't. So just realize who you are intrinsically and look for solutions for your problems that make sense for you based on how you're currently wired. Now you can rewire yourself, you can change some of those things, but it's not something where you can sit there and say, I believe cupping is going to solve my problem.

[00:32:01.880] – Allan

If you really don't believe cupping, so you go through a couple of cupping sessions and it does nothing for you other than leave those purple circles. Okay, did it solve your problem? Well, no, because you didn't really go in believing that it would. And so just as there's placebo effect and the nocebo effect, those are real, those are real sensations in your brain. Things are happening, the wiring and so if this is something that appeals to you, then I think you should check out his book. I think you should check out that free session he offered.

[00:32:33.410] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. Yeah, sounds really great.

[00:32:37.250] – Allan

All right, well, Ras, I'll talk to you next week.

[00:32:40.550] – Rachel

Take care, Allan.

[00:32:41.750] – Allan

You too.

[00:32:42.600] – Rachel

Thanks.

[00:32:43.380] – Allan

Bye.

[00:32:44.200] – Rachel

Bye.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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Another episode you may enjoy

How to train your brain for a better life with John Assaraf

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:03:21.050] – Allan

Hey, Ras, how are you?

[00:03:22.780] – Rachel

Good, Allan. How are you today?

[00:03:25.020] – Allan

I'm doing okay. We're getting packed up for our trip and heading back to the States for the wedding, Summer's wedding. So this is daughter number two. All kids married out. Two are going through divorces already. But the cycle of life.

[00:03:44.310] – Rachel

It happens.

[00:03:45.600] – Allan

It happens. It happens. And they'll be happy with it when they get done with it. But it is what it is. Anyway, so we're headed back. We'll see family. We'll do the wedding stuff. And then Tammy and I will spend a weekend together in that whole three week period of time traveling around doing stuff. And then we'll head back. Hopefully, it's just an uneventful get in a rental car, drive around, see everybody, have a good time, and then I'm back.

[00:04:14.790] – Rachel

That sounds wonderful. Yes. Well, it'll be nice to see your family and celebrate the wedding. It'll be a lovely time to make those connections again and then go back home to your retreat.

[00:04:29.920] – Allan

Yes. Beautiful place. And so this weekend we adopted another dog. There was a guy, he got married and they want to go on a long honeymoon, like six months, seven countries. And he had this dog and they were posting a picture of the dog. The dog and the dog looks, on the picture, it looked almost identical to our dog Buster. Angel passed not long ago. Buster's been by himself, the only dog. And then so we look at this dog and it could be Buster's little brother. I mean, it's just weird how close together these dogs look and how much they act alike and the whole thing. So anyway, we brought him over. His name is Love. Love will be with us six months or maybe forever. It's just when the guy gets back, or I guess at some point he'll decide if it's just better for Love to have a home, a steady home because he's going to want to travel, is what he was saying. So he was just like, Maybe can't. So we might have Love permanently or part time, but however it works, he and Buster initially were not seeing eye to eye.

[00:05:34.350] – Allan

They had a few doggy conversations and now they're getting along a lot better.

[00:05:39.930] – Rachel

Good. I'm glad they're getting along. That's awesome.

[00:05:44.410] – Allan

How are things up there?

[00:05:45.950] – Rachel

Good. I mentioned last time that I had hit menopause, and that my…

[00:05:53.180] – Allan

It's not as… You've been running this ultra marathon for 50 some odd years. And then, yeah, you thought you were going to finish line.

[00:06:00.680] – Rachel

Yeah, I need a T shirt to celebrate this with.

[00:06:04.970] – Allan

Yeah. So my guess is who's got my kid, dude, where's my kidney?

[00:06:09.840] – Rachel

Yeah, exactly. But it's part of this. My thyroid is broken and so I've been taking this medicine for my thyroid. And I told you that I have to take it in the morning and then wait 30 minutes before I can eat or drink anything. And if you know me, coffee goes in my body the first time in the morning. If I wake up, coffee is going in. And so this 30 minute leg time is quite a challenge for me, to put it mildly. But I decided that I would start doing yoga in the morning for that 30 minute period. And truthfully, it is difficult. It's a hard habit to break, but I have started doing yoga as soon as I get up and I feel great. It feels really good. I really need the stretching. I need the gentle way to wake up and the movement, and it's really hard to change habits. I'm not even going to kid you, but I am making changes and seeing progress, and it feels pretty good.

[00:07:06.850] – Allan

Awesome. That's outstanding.

[00:07:08.560] – Rachel

Yeah, thanks.

[00:07:09.940] – Allan

Great. Now, there's one other thing I wanted to say. I was on a podcast episode recently because I told you guys I was doing some of this. Well, the name of the podcast is called direction, not perfection. And the host of that is Lindsay House. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/lindsey. That's L I N D S E Y. And you can hear my episode, which was 225. And basically we talk about Fit For Task. But I give a lot of tips in that. And so it's again, it's the name of the podcast is direction, not perfection podcast. You can find it anywhere that you like to listen to podcasts. But if you'd like to go to a link where I have it on the web, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/lindsey.

[00:07:55.040] – Rachel

Cool. That sounds good. I love that Fit for Task stuff. That would be great.

[00:07:58.850] – Allan

All right. Well, Rachel, are you ready to have a conversation with Katy Bowman?

[00:08:03.050] – Rachel

Sure.

Interview

[00:09:12.930] – Allan

Katy, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:09:15.890] – Katy

Thanks for having me back years later.

[00:09:18.240] – Allan

Years later. I did miss a book. I apologize for that. But interestingly, we were having this conversation before. You're in Costa Rica and I'm in Panama. So quite literally, we're probably not more than 150 miles away from each other at this point. So it's interesting where you find yourself. The name of the book is Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement One Part at a Time. And I love movement and personal trainer and nutrition coach and doing all that thing. But what was really interesting about your book as I got into it was it was completely backwards to everything I've ever been coached or told in my entire life.

[00:10:06.250] – Katy

Wow. I want to know more about that.

[00:10:10.080] – Allan

Because everything else always starts from the ground. And works up. Your book started from the top and worked down. And at first I was like, okay, I'm really interested in why Katy would do that. Obviously, I've read the book, so I know why Katy did that. Will you tell me, why did you start from the top and work down rather than the floor and work up?

[00:10:38.730] – Katy

That's the first time I've done that. I usually always do it the other way, like so many other people. But to mix things up a little bit is like the general answer reading is such a sedentary activity. I knew the reader was going to be engaged with this material for the next few days or weeks or however long it takes you to read a book. And I wanted to start off right away with a movement that could be done in volume while you are reading the book to make my point that movement is something that transcends the experience of exercise. It can go on to an activity like reading. And that movement was the head ramp. It was a head and shoulder adjustment. And so for that reason, I decided to go from the top down.

[00:11:28.780] – Allan

Yeah. And that's what was so cool is you literally were changing my behavior while I was reading your book.

[00:11:35.930] – Katy

That was the plan.

[00:11:39.360] – Allan

Okay. Your evil plan came true. Or actually not evil, but… Okay. Why is body alignment so important?

[00:11:49.710] – Katy

I do think we tend to think of posture as something that affects how you look. The reason that you do it is for how you present to the eyes. But alignment is different than posture in that it's about the way things work. And so our body, not to get too overly mechanistic, is not a machine. It's biological, it's organic, it grows, it responds, it adapts, but it still operates similar to machinery in a lot of different ways. And so the alignment of our body is important for the same reason. The alignment of our car is important, or the reason that you don't run your coffee maker on an angle counter to 30 degrees is because the orientation of things affects the way things work. And that goes for your car and that goes for your coffee maker, and it goes for your body as well. And that's why alignment matters quite simply. That's the most simple way I can explain it is there's a lot of things happening in the body. There's a lot of physical experiences not so pleasurable. The way we view aging, a lot of times has more to do with the orientation of our parts, the way we've organized our body relative to gravity and the frequency with which we do that, it can have negative outcomes.

[00:13:19.730] – Katy

Just knowing like, oh, you have some options here when it comes to the orientation of your parts, that's the message that I'm trying to get across.

[00:13:27.870] – Allan

Yeah. Now I'm on an island and we get a lot of surfers and hitchhikers and whatnot. I watch them walk. As I'm walking to work, I'm around them, I see them. I know you're a people person, watch your person too, because it's like fascinating to watch how people move. I'm watching them carry a very heavy pack on their back or a very heavy pack on their stomach or both. They're like camels walking through the streets. But one thing I've noticed, and this is very young people, I'm not talking about people in their 40s and 50s, but people who are in their 20s and I'm thinking, Wow, you keep doing this and 20, 30 years from now, this is going to be fantastic in a terrible way. But this is this thing called tech neck.

[00:14:15.130] – Allan

Where they're at their phone or on their phone so much with basically their shoulders hunched forward, their chest is compressed, their elbows are down, their head is down. And it creates this thing technique, I guess, is what it's been classed as. Can you talk a little bit about that and how someone who… Well, quite frankly, we almost have to be on our phones because that's how we communicate with everybody now. And nobody shows up where they're supposed to. My generation is like, Hey, I'll meet you at the restaurant at six o'clock. We all just showed up at the restaurant at six o'clock. We didn't think about it again. Now it's like, No, let's go to a different restaurant. Now there's a whole chain and we're all going to go somewhere else. And we never make it to the restaurant we were originally going to go to. That's quite normal. So as we get older, we're still doing this and we're changing our head structure, our neck structure, and the whole kinetic chain. Let's talk about tech neck and what we can do to manage that.

[00:15:12.600] – Katy

Well, tech neck is just a rebranding. It feels like a rebranding to me. That posture is old posture. It's an upper body forward curve and a neck. The upper body rounds forward. It's called hyperkifosis. But the neck really bends back in the opposite direction. It's like hyperlardosis. So you get this deepening of the upper back and the neck curves that is similar to what we would have found in older populations over a longer period of time. That wasn't tech neck, that was just hyperkifosis and hyperlardosis. But we are seeing that body position now not show up when someone is in their late 80s. We're seeing it in teenagers. We're seeing it in 20 year olds who are otherwise active. Maybe that's why it gets a rebranding because it's no longer associated with age or a particular level of physical robusticity. It's just a shape that is brought about when you look down at a device quite a lot, you get that same set of curves. And to go back to that first question, why does it matter? Is it simply about how it looks? And no, not really. It's about I in the book, I try to show swallowing is affected by this position.

[00:16:31.100] – Katy

Space for the lungs to deploy fully is affected by this. Spinal loads to the disk and to the bones of the spinal column are affected by this. Shoulders and the way that they can move are affected by this position. This position, this tech neck, forward head, position of the body ends up reducing the total amount of movement of things like your shoulders and your head. And it's not talking about the fact that you just drop into the position. It's when your body strengthens and stiffens in this position and you can no longer stand up straight. You can no longer slide your head back because everything is so stiff and tense and habitually in this position that it ends up affecting how things work from the head to the rib cage, breathing, swallowing, and then the way things feel, achy in the upper back, achy in the headaches and things like that. So it's important to realize that the environment that we're choosing to be in quite often is setting us up for some of these issues. But as I try to point out in the book, your phone doesn't require that you stand like that.

[00:17:53.730] – Katy

That's just the way we use our phones mindlessly. So that's another one of the early exercises also. I figure you're going to be spending a lot of time reading this book right now and also if you're like most people on some device. So you can adjust those curves quite simply. It's not required. We're just not being thoughtful about positioning our body when we're on the phone, like we might be thoughtful about positioning our body in other situations. We have mindless phone tech use habits, and it goes all the way into the body. So it's just developing more mindful physical practice around all the things that we do, including when you're using your phone. You're going to do those same upper back and head adjustments. And then you might have to hold your phone up a little higher, but so be it. It makes using your phone better for you.

[00:18:45.420] – Allan

I want to take one step back because, like I said, you changed my behavior by putting the head and neck in the front and then working your way down. And you gave us this exercise in the book of basically bringing your head back in alignment. Can you talk us through that?

[00:19:04.890] – Katy

Sure. It might be easiest for folks to try it against a wall for those listening. You don't have to have a wall, but standing against the wall helps. And if you reach your hand back behind you and if you feel where there's a part of your rib cage, the middle back where a heart rate monitor strap would sit or a bra strap sits, that goes against the wall. It's touching the wall. So your upper middle back is against the wall. And for many people, that would mean their head is now off in front of them. So the exercise is to keeping that middle back touching the wall. Low back doesn't have to touch, just the middle back. Sliding your head back towards the wall as well without tipping your head back. So you're not tipping your head back where your chin lifts. It's sliding the head back. But because of the way the vertebrae are shaped in the upper back and the neck, sliding your head back also means sliding your head up. So if you think of lifting your head up towards the ceiling, that often brings your head back on its own. So you're doing two directions.

[00:20:14.610] – Katy

You're actually doing three, but we'll just make it easy. Your head is going back and your head is going up towards the ceiling at the same time. And then what that does is it reduces that excessive curve in the upper back and it reduces the excessive opposing direction curve in the neck or what's called lardosis. You get two curve adjustments for one movement, which is, again, why I led with it. It is such an impactful, simple move that requires no equipment that you can do no matter the activity you're doing. So why bury the lead? Put it in chapter one. Put it in the first part of chapter one.

[00:20:52.180] – Allan

And unlike your grandfather, you'll be taller for it.

[00:20:55.270] – Katy

And that's right. My dad. That was my dad.

[00:20:57.320] – Allan

Your dad. Your dad. That's right.

[00:20:59.780] – Katy

So yes, and showing how this changes height. The book is done in essays, so you can really drop into it wherever you want. You don't have to read it through. But if improved swallowing or addressing why maybe the shoulders aren't functioning isn't that motivating. You can go simply through, you'll be taller by the time you're done with this exercise.

[00:21:20.170] – Allan

There you go. I love that. Now, you wrote a sentence in your book, and then you actually re-repeated it because it's probably the most important sentence that's ever been written for someone who's really looking at the way to maintain their body, maintain their joints. And I think this should be printed out and put in every gym in America and around the world because it is such an important statement. I'm actually going to probably end up saying it twice myself. The ligaments are not the breaks of the joint. The muscles are.

[00:21:55.860] – Allan

Could you take a moment to talk through that? Because when I read that sentence, it was the same thing. I was like, Whoa, that's important. This means something. And so many people are going through pain of movement because they don't understand this fundamental thing.

[00:22:16.400] – Katy

Right. We're not really taught movement. We're not modeled moving well. And so it's no wonder. But yet we are still fairly dynamic. As sedentary as we are, our bodies are our vehicles, our vessels are moving around from point A to point B. So what that statement means is, what's the best way to explain it? You're using your joints all the time to pick things up and set things down. Talking about your arms, your legs are also essentially doing the same thing as your arms. Only the thing that it's picking up and setting down is your torso weight and your arms, the rest of your body. Musculoskeletal muscles are contracting and relaxing. And when they can do it with control, when you're able to generate enough force to move you and to lower you, well, the muscle does the work throughout the entire arc of, let's say, a movement, getting up out of a chair, walking down a flight of stairs. Different muscles are doing different things at different times, but some are holding and lifting parts, some are slowly lowering parts and gently setting you down. That would be the optimal situation where your muscles are able to carry, yes, your total body weight, but really the way muscles work is that each set of muscles are carrying the weight of various segments to and fro.

[00:23:44.850] – Katy

So you might be able to be like, look, I can stand. I can carry my body weight. I can move across the floor. Yes. But if you're walking with a really heavy landing, like every foot strike is a thunk or a thud, you've probably read it many times, walking is just controlled falling. I disagree with that. I think that a lot of people are in a controlled falling state, but that would be an example of your muscles are not strong enough to carry you through a gait cycle. So there's these heavy landings. And instead, what you're using are the ligaments. You're using more passive connective tissues. And some connective tissue like fascia can generate a little bit of force, but it's not in the same way that you don't want to use your connective tissue in lieu of your musculoskeletal muscle. You want to be using that as a primary force generator with everything else supporting. Right now, we're getting a lot of crash landings in all of the movement that we do. And that means that these tissues that don't have the same adaptive property as muscle… One of muscle's amazing defining properties is that it adapts to load and gets bigger.

[00:25:01.400] – Katy

It gets more voluminous. It's like, what are you doing with your body? How can I assist? Let me feel that. Let me increase in mass so that you do that better and more safely. We're rarely using our musculoskeletal system. We are using the more connective tissue that does not have that same, let me feel what you're doing and adapt and change. It has to take it. So like a seat belt in your car, if you're going fast towards the wall, the best thing for the car parts and the body inside of it is to apply the brake. That's the musculoskeletal system. What we tend to do is hit the wall and depend on the seat belt to stop the impact. And if you imagine doing that in a car over and over again, not only would you total the car, which is a joint, so to speak, the seat belt, the ligament, begins to after a repetitive load in that way, and it does not have the properties to adapt like muscle does, you begin to thin or fray or otherwise damage the ligament, loosen, however you want to think about it. And then there's some people who have connective tissue issues or disorders who already have connective tissue that is more lax than others.

[00:26:30.840] – Katy

And that group tends to use their ligaments for deceleration. So in a culture where people are so sedentary or when they do move, it's so repetitive, everyone, whether you have a ligament issue that already gives you loose… Loose is the easiest way to understand it. Or you've already done some damage to ligaments. In either case, learning how to use your muscloskeletal system better with more control over a greater range of motion will benefit not only your musculoskeletal parts, your joints, the part that tend to hurt, it also makes you more metabolically healthy. You end up addressing those metabolical reasons that we are moving more when you approach it that way. So yeah, thanks for bringing that up because I do love that sentiment.

[00:27:25.330] – Allan

And the way I broke this down myself was I see people who know they have a problem with their knees, and so they do quarter squats or half squats. And that's using the ligaments as breaks. And that's part of the reasons why they're still hurting. They want to do something. They want to squat. And they're like, just get down into the squat. Keep your weight reasonable, your load reasonable. Get down below parallel. And now it's your glutes that have to fire because they're the only breaks left. And it's a lot easier to do that than to really focus on your quadriceps or the breaks because, again, you end up with the ligaments taking the brunt of that. And the walking downstairs, I liked how you went through the process of explaining how we can drop our hip and basically, again, use our glutes as the primary muscle that's the break and then holding us as we bring the other foot forward. So can you talk just a little about that, about how we can focus on those muscles and use them the right way. In the book, I think you did it brilliant, and you did a little exercise you called the pelvic lift.

[00:28:37.360] – Katy

List.

[00:28:38.000] – Allan

List. Okay. Can you talk just a little bit about that?

[00:28:42.580] – Katy

Well, culturally, we share a lot of movement habits. The biggest one is that most people listening to this, grew up in a culture where chairs are fairly ubiquitous, which means we're not really comfortable dropping our hips down below the height of our knees. Our cars, our desks at school, our desks at work, the chairs in our home, getting down to the bed, our toilet, everything is at the height of the hips getting to the same altitude or elevation as the knee. So what's happened is we are a culture that is stronger, more used to using the front of the thigh. We don't really use the back of the thigh. We don't use our glutes, we don't use our hamstrings, nearly to the same degree that we use the front of our body. You can see it in standing posture is when the hips rest forward, we're even standing at rest. We're using the muscles on the front of the thigh to hold us up, and the back of the thigh and the glutes don't do much for our entire life. And so for many people, knee pain is going to resonate. And also knee pain while taking the stairs, usually going upstairs, but downstairs is usually the killer.

[00:29:58.750] – Katy

A lot of people can go up, but they can't come down. And I'm trying to flesh out why that is. It's because when you're trying to lower your body down something, we come with all these joints to share the work distribution over our body. Well, we don't share it. When you think of the human skeleton, think of the pelvis. Think of the… If you've never held a femur, which is that upper thighbone in your hand, it's massive. And it's massive because it has to be able to withstand the tension that is placed upon it by these musclesthat can carry our body weight with every step, but have never really had to do it. We've given it to the quads, and the knees are like, I can't carry you down this hill. I've carried you every other step that you've taken in your entire life. And I'm sorry, we don't go downhill anymore. That's a little cartoon, but that's really what the narrative is. We can't do it. That body part is tapping out of going downhill, which is fine because that's not really your downhill primary mover. You've got these massive lateral hip muscles that have really great leverage that come with strong bones that could have strong bones.

[00:31:12.670] – Katy

If you would use this piston like action, I'm using my hands because we can see each other, but those listening can't. There's a piston action to your size. When you have one leg that's free and you drop one hip when your pelvis lists to one side, that is an easy way to get your heavy mass, adults are heavy, down something without having to use the knees. And so a large part of what I do is say, let me reintroduce you or introduce you for the first time to large parts of your body that have been pretty much unused most of your life, even if you're already an active person. I have Olympian athletes who will come and go through this same process of having these major sedentary spots within their otherwise fit and active body. So you can be full body sedentary or you can be part by part sedentary. And learning how to list, again, is one of the most important things we can do to preserve our knee joints, but more importantly, to preserve the activities we'd like to do with our legs that our knees are tapping out of.

[00:32:27.380] – Allan

You mentioned earlier the chair. Some people might argue, the best invention ever, because I get to sit down and it's easy and then I can get back up. I can watch what I want to watch and do what I want to do, sitting there comfortably for hours and hours. And then you mentioned my favorite workout implement, I think it might be yours too, the floor.

[00:32:51.120] – Katy

The floor is great. It's right there. It's just right there. It's always underfoot.

[00:32:55.780] – Allan

Yes. Let's talk about the floor and how this can be a big part of your overall fitness and movement. Just getting.

[00:33:04.240] – Katy

Down to it. Again, it's one of those things. It's always around for the most part. We've done a disservice to ourselves by putting all of our understanding of movement on this thing called exercise, where you go to the place and you use the thing, the equipment, and that's it.

[00:33:23.410] – Allan

And usually sitting there, too.

[00:33:25.470] – Katy

Oftentimes, a lot of times people will take their exercise sitting down. Again, because they're not paying attention to the fact that the legs have lost the ability to hold up the body for a long period of time. And the idea is, but I'd still like to exercise, which is great, but functionally speaking, there's a lot of experiences that you carrying yourself around on your body weight opens up. And so because we've pulled fitness a lot of times out of the practical because we see it as something I need to do 30 minutes for my heart or my lungs or for my cholesterol or for my resting blood pressure, we forget that movement is a feedback loop of when you move your body in a certain way, you become more able to move your body in that way. And that exercise is great medicine in that if you can't currently carry your body well on body parts like your legs or your arms, you can't use your limbs. They're not able to carry your weight around. You can use movement as a tool to restore that ability in many cases. And that's a much richer definition of movement versus using it, taking it and sitting down.

[00:34:42.480] – Katy

So anyway, to go back to your question about the floor, it's very practical to get down to the floor and get back up again. That is a major exercise, if you will, in that it mobilizes multiple joints. It challenges the muscles of many parts to be able to get back up. It's a very nutritious food, so to speak. There's a lot of nutrient density to that move, and yet it's very hard to make us do something like that. So floor exercises are great because there's always this period of time where you have to get down and get back up. But just getting to the floor and getting back up can be an exercise itself. Just getting down to the floor, sitting in three different positions while you're down there and getting back up is equally an exercise that you adapt to, just like anything else that you're calling exercise that uses similar muscles. So get more familiar with the floor, not only during exercise time, but during non exercise time. If you take in entertainment in the evening, get down on the floor while you do it. Once you're down on the floor, you will feel just the pressure.

[00:35:56.260] – Katy

Chairs aren't only problematic for their geometry, that they reduce the full range of motion of our parts, they're often usually covered in fluff, which means we are missing out on pressure. Pressure itself is another movement our bodies are not only accustomed to throughout the human timeline, but need. We have all these sensors all over our body that need physical pressure, and we've made the world quite soft. So get on the floor and just roll around on the floor, roll from your back to your front. It's very similar to what happens when you're getting a massage. It's not as enjoyable, I'll be truthful, but it uses more of you. It's tenderizing your body. It's breaking up. Same thing that you do to other meat when you're trying to break up some of that overgrown connection that's happened between parts. We need movement, we need pressure to be able to deal with that. Yeah.

[00:36:49.960] – Allan

And you said functional, and I think that's why I really like this is because I can tell you a story. My wife, at the time, she's my girlfriend, her son was dating this woman who had a daughter. And for one reason or another, the daughter was just terrified of me, just terrified. And I wanted to fix this. And I'm like, Okay, how do I fix a relationship with a child? And I'm like, Well, I'm not going to fix it by being an adult. I'm going to fix it by being a child.

[00:37:21.390] – Allan

And so I literally took my laptop and I put on Sponge Bob, which I knew was her favorite. And I went over on the floor and I set my laptop down. I started watching Sponge Bob. And she came over and sat next to me. And we sat there and watched a few episodes of Sponge Bob together, and it changed everything. And so when you start looking at, Okay, what if I fall? What if someone else falls? What if I want to get on the floor and crawl around with my grandchild or me now, I've got some dogs and one of them has hip dysplasia, and so she can't move around a whole lot. I make a point once a day in the morning while my coffee is brewing to go sit on the floor and just hang out with Angel. She loves it. It's like, I'm at her level. I'm down there with her. And it's a tile floor. It's not comfortable. But it helps because what I found is that I can just get down and I can get back up and then I can get back down. And so it's not exercise, it's movement, it's function.

[00:38:21.880] – Allan

And me having a great relationship with my granddaughter or having a great relationship with my dog or just knowing if I found myself on the floor, it's no big deal to just get back up. I think that's really important. And so I am glad the floor is there, and I think people should use it more.

[00:38:40.640] – Katy

I agree.

[00:38:41.830] – Allan

Katy, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:38:51.280] – Katy

Well, I imagine that the easy answers would be intake excellent dietary nutrition, regular movement, and good sleep. Those are the three, but I imagine those are three are given all the time. So I'd want to modify those three. And one would be… I mean, I want to modify one of the three movement because that's my field. And one would be get movement every day, but one, make sure some of it's outside. Expose yourself to some nature through your physical movement. That could be doing your exercise outside. That could be just taking a walk outside. That could be gardening. It could be spending time with animals or kids outside. It's this idea that you are consciously going, I need to move my body outside a little bit every day, which is just a level up from move every day. Another one would be to add community, to add some community to your physical time. You're going to be most supported. You're going to be able to move more when you try to overlap your need for movement with your need for others. And the pay off is, like you said, there's more to movement than just health.

[00:40:14.350] – Katy

There is the relationship aspect of it. And when you get down to the floor and invite other people to get down there with you, you're changing the movement culture a little bit. And then the third step for me is I like to be grateful. I always am most grateful for my health when it's poorest, when something hurts, if I've injured something is when I long most for when my body felt really capable and felt great, which seems like it was just yesterday or three days ago, whatever it was from the time of the injury. Those moments remind me to check in daily with appreciation for all that you can do. It's really easy to focus on all the things that you can't, what you feel like you've lost, this way that you feel that's bad. We need to give more attention and awareness to how much of us feels good and how capable and able we are. Even if we're not choosing to use it all the time, it's a form of gratitude practice. It's just giving a little bit of gratitude to yourself every day. I'm so glad that I don't hurt today or make my back hurts.

[00:41:30.090] – Katy

I'm so glad my shoulders feel so great. Let me just move them around a little bit. That little gratitude for your physical capability, totally able to be scaled to what you can do, I do think is a part of our whole wellbeing, physical and mental.

[00:41:45.100] – Allan

Thank you. Katie, if someone wanted to learn more about you and your book, we got lots of books, but your current book, Rethink Your Position, where would you like for me to send them?

[00:41:55.230] – Katy

You can go to rypbook.com or your local bookstore. And you can get it any place books are found. But if you come to my website, I think there's a discount code for podcast guests.

[00:42:08.920] – Allan

Okay, well, we'll get that offline and I'll make sure to list it in the show notes. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/590, and I'll be sure to have a link there. Katie, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness,again.

[00:42:23.470] – Katy

Thank you for having me. I'm 40 plus. I love it.

Here is a discount code for 25% off Rethink Your Position if purchased via nutritiousmovement.com.

Code: RETHINK25 (active 5/1/23-12/31/23)
Direct link to book: 

Rethink Your Position: Reshape Your Exercise, Yoga, and Everyday Movement, One Part at a Time—PAPERBACK

Post Show/Recap

[00:42:36.400] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:42:38.800] – Rachel

Hey, Allan, I love listening about posture. It's such an important reminder because I do spend quite a bit of my own time hunched over. When I eat, I eat hunched over. When I do dishes at the sink, I'm hunched over. And of course, I'm on my phone like everybody else, hunched over. So it's good to have the reminder to be a little bit more cognizant of my posture periodically.

[00:43:03.880] – Allan

I have the workstation, it's a movable desk. It rises up and goes down and I have my camera. So if I'm on a call, it's up high above the monitor. I probably could put a little higher and it would be better. But basically I'd like the monitor up. And so right now it's generally at eye contact level. And so that helps a lot. But I do read a lot and I'm on my laptop a lot. I'm not on a phone a lot. A lot of people get on their phones. I don't like reading anything on a phone. I just don't.

[00:43:33.360] – Rachel

It's too small.

[00:43:34.250] – Allan

I don't like typing on a phone. I can type about 120 words per minute. So when I get on a phone, it's like I feel like a caveman. And so I okay, Allan, you are a caveman because you don't want to use the phone. Go back to your computer, caveman. But it's easier. It allows me to have a better posture, a slightly better posture than I would if I was on the phone. Given the amount of time that I spent, if I was going to read a book, a digital book, and I'm going to read the heads down. And so it was just funny when she first starts the book, it's like, I know you're going to be hunched over reading this book or looking at it on the screen, like on your Kindle or something. And so I want you to do these exercises. Suddenly, your whole… You just change. You're like, Okay, crap. Now I've got to do this crap. And as I went through her book, I did, which was great. And it was just interesting that she and the Starretts and Jill Miller all came out with books around the same time because it's a similar topic.

[00:44:34.660] – Allan

Our bodies were made to move. They were made to move certain ways. And if we move the right way, we're doing the right things for our body, we're going to be healthier and fitter as we age. And things that you see happen to other people, particularly when it's posture related, you see it like the hunch back women and the old rickety men that can't straighten their legs. There's a way to age that way. And if you're spending a lot of time on your phone, you're probably already experiencing some of that. If you get headaches, if you notice, okay, there's backache, it's probably a posture problem. So working on the posture is going to go a long way towards eliminating pain or preventing it in the first place.

[00:45:20.060] – Rachel

Well, she mentioned standing up against the wall to realign and feel where your head and neck are sitting. And you had just recently mentioned about maybe getting on the floor instead or on a workout bench or something.

[00:45:32.320] – Allan

Yeah, I can tell if I've been reading a book on my laptop, it's about 6 to 10 hours that I have my head lunch down because my laptop is sitting on a desk and not raised, I notice I go to lay down on the bench and my head doesn't immediately just go down and rest on the bench. There's a little gap there. I'm like, okay, I've been looking down too much. I need to go to my office, raise my desk up and spend more time looking up. It might be more uncomfortable to type that way, but so be it. I'm reading a book, I'm not typing. So just look for ways that you can change your work, change your posture, change your movement. It's going to go a long way.

[00:46:15.960] – Rachel

Well, like Katy had mentioned, too, with the tech neck, with that forward leaning head and your shoulders hunched over, she mentions it's not good for swallowing. It compresses the lungs, so you're not giving deep breaths. And with the shoulders in, which I do also, I have my shoulders in quite a bit, it just restricts your movement. It just doesn't feel very good. And just notice, be body aware and feel when this is happening, and then just make the cognizant change to do something about it, to stand up straight or stand against the wall or lay on the floor and try and get yourself real aligned. Yeah.

[00:46:53.480] – Allan

Well, there's a productivity trick or hack called the palmodoro method. W hat the Palmodoro method is, is this concept that we really weren't designed to sit and focus on something for hours and hours and hours. Our brain isn't wired that way. Our bodies aren't wired that way. We're wired to move and look for differences and keep moving. So if you're going to find yourself sitting and working, what this palmodoro method is, is where you would set a Timer for 25 minutes and then you would focus. You wouldn't take phone calls, you wouldn't answer emails. You don't do anything but focus on that one task for that 25 minutes. When your alarm goes off at 25 minutes, you get up and move around for 5 minutes.

[00:47:40.670] – Allan

And what they found is that you can get more work done in an hour taking 10 minutes off to five minute rest breaks. You get more work done in that hour and it's higher quality work.

[00:47:55.370] – Allan

So when you say, I don't have time to exercise, I don't have time to do stretches. You do. You just have to structure the way you think and work a little bit differently. And the Palmadoro method is a great way to say, Okay, 25 minutes, focus, get this done. You may not get it all done, but 25 minutes over, stop and get to moving. Stretch out, move around, do something, walk. Just get yourself out, work on all that, and then come back and focus on that task and you'll get it done. But you'll get more done in that hour than you would have if you just sat there and tried to grind it out.

[00:48:31.430] – Rachel

That sounds awesome. That sounds like a good reminder.

[00:48:35.030] – Allan

Yeah. And there's even apps you can put on your phone or on your computer that every 25 minutes just runs the numbers for you. So you go through your work day, you're like, yeah, I've got to sit here for eight to 10 hours. Well, set your Timer, set your alarm, do your 25 minutes. What's the task? I got to get done. Focus on the first one first and then just run through them and just look for ways to do shortcuts. I've got another one for you here. It's an application I use every day, every week. Sometimes it saves me hours a week. And it's called Text Expander, and it's an app. You do have to pay for it. It's on my computer. And what it does is if there's something I type a lot, like my signature on an email, or maybe there's just a phrase like when I'm going to invite someone to the podcast, I have a template that I use. Or when I'm going to do my show plan, I have a template that I send out. Instead of typing all that stuff up or going and finding it and copying and pasting, I just do hot key stroke.

[00:49:33.800] – Allan

So I've got a little system where I know what those key strokes are. And so three or four key strokes and it types the whole thing. And so because I'm not having to type it each time, it's saving me that amount of time that it would take for me to type it. And so each week, I get a report from them. This week it was you saved 24 minutes, and this is 60 weeks in a row of using this app. And so this app has saved me hours and hours and hours over the course of the last year plus just not having to type the same things or going and finding it on another document and then copying and pasting just to save the typing. And so it's a lot fewer key strokes, a lot less time on the typewriter or on the keyboard. Yeah. Again, caveman. But it's just a lot less time doing that stuff. And so I can get a lot more done. And it's really up to you as how much memory you have in your head as how many key strokes you'd use. You can leave a cheat sheet somewhere.

[00:50:36.780] – Allan

This is like, okay, here's all my codes. Here's the things. So I know my hot codes to do. But literally, once you get it set up, every time you find yourself typing the same thing again, you can just make it a text clip and text expander will do the work for you. And so that's just another one where you're saying, okay, it's hard for me to get enough time to do something. Well, if this thing saves you 24 minutes in a week, well, that's a workout.

[00:51:05.980] – Rachel

Yeah, that's a lot. That's great. Super cool. Yeah.

[00:51:10.770] – Allan

All right. I guess with that, I'll talk to you next week, Rachel.

[00:51:14.640] – Rachel

Sounds good. Take care.

[00:51:16.210] – Allan

You, too.

Music by Dave Gerhart

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Thank you!

Another episode you may enjoy

Dynamic Aging with Katy Bowman

Less...

Let's Say Hello

[00:03:19.710] – Allan

Hey, Ras. Long time no see.

[00:03:23.870] – Rachel

Right. How's it going, Allan?

[00:03:24.920] – Allan

Yeah, it's going again because I'm taking the trip back to the States and there might be some disruptions of when I can record when I can't. We've decided to record two of our sections at the same time. So we were just talking a few minutes ago and now we're here again. So we're going to go ahead and jump into this episode with Marjory Wildcraft.

[00:03:45.930] – Rachel

Perfect.

Interview

[00:04:06.190] – Allan

Marjory, welcome to 40+ Fitness.

[00:04:09.110] – Marjory

Hi. Thanks Allan. Appreciate you having me on.

[00:04:12.120] – Allan

The name of your book is called The Grow System. True Health, Wealth and Happiness Come From the Ground.

[00:04:18.860] – Marjory

Yeah, I actually have a copy look at that.

[00:04:24.050] – Allan

What was really interesting in it is I've had other people on, we talked about growing our own food and the value, some of the value of doing that, but okay, fine. I do a little bit of herbs in my kitchen window sill and that's great. I can throw that on my food. The step of saying that I'm going to produce a large percentage of what I eat, it can kind of seem a little overwhelming. But I think your book does a really good job of breaking down that process of how we get there.

[00:04:52.690] – Marjory

Yeah, well, there's this prevailing myth. It's almost like a story that kind of like a lot of the other stories that are going around throughout the human population that are just not true. And one is that it's really difficult to grow food or only migrant workers do it or whatever. I actually had a podcast series with several dozen extremely high level, high level executives with divisions of 2000 people or high tech entrepreneurs with 25 and $50 million budgets. And the characteristic was that they all grew some of their own food and every one of them said that was the most pleasurable part of their day, every day. So it's a myth and that you, you know, or you're going to work really hard and all you're going to get is a tomato. You can actually produce about half your own food very easily in a very reasonable amount of time. So we'll talk about that some more.

[00:05:47.300] – Allan

Yeah, we absolutely will. Now, one of the interesting things you put here is you say the five keys to true wealth. And these were interesting to me because I don't think people think of farmers as being wealthy. So if I quit my day job and started farming, I don't know how far that would get me. But you have a great point. Can you talk about the five keys to true wealth?

[00:06:12.860] – Marjory

Sure. When I talk about wealth, most people immediately are thinking or stocks and bonds or gold or financial instruments, the equity in my home. And that's actually one form of wealth, but it's really the least significant form. And the number one, you're going to appreciate this with the Fitness Over 40 podcast. Your number one form of wealth is health. Your health, right? Let's say you've got billions of dollars but you're tied to an oxygen IV thing and you can't move. Like what good is money? So health I would say, is your number one form. Your whole worldview comes through the health of your physical body. So if you're sick, no matter what's going on, that overlays all of your experience. But if you're healthy and vibrant and happy so that, I would say is the number one form of wealth. The second form of wealth and people don't I think people started to realize this during the COVID experience and that is your family having people that you have been involved with all of your life or all of their life. In the case of your kids that know you from up and down and when you were married and from when you were divorced and from when you did this and then can help you through all those years and remember or piece that together or be there for you in the 04:00 in the morning when something happens.

[00:07:33.220] – Marjory

Or to share that graduation, or that you just got a blue belt in Jiu Jitsu or whatever. To share your celebrated wins and your losses. That family is a form of wealth. You can't buy that. You can't buy that anywhere, right? In fact, that is a big problem for people who are extremely wealthy. It's finding someone who can genuinely be in their life for them, right? Another form of wealth is an extension of your family and that's your community. So if you have people in your life, your neighbors one of my favorite stories is about some families that we all really hung out together and we formed a group and I was as comfortable in every one of their kitchens as I was in my own. We spent that much time together and did that much stuff together. And one time I got a big laceration on my leg and I mean it was just one phone call and we had people there to watch the kids while my husband got me to the hospital. Or one time I got a trailer full of tomatoes and I mean it was only 15 minutes and I organized a whole group where we had a bunch of us canning those tomatoes up and everybody went home with two cases of tomato sauce.

[00:08:44.710] – Marjory

And again, it's an extension of family and the birthday parties and the trading of good things. You've got extra eggs, they got extra squash, taking on challenges of like city hall says this but we're like we want that or whatever it is, right? Having community that you deal with, the fourth form of wealth is actually doing meaningful work. And this is even regardless of whether you're retired or not, that's kind of irrelevant. I think all of us want to work. There's no such thing. I think if somebody just sits around and does nothing or I don't think they're going to be alive much longer if that's what they've been reduced to, doing something really meaningful. I've one time had an acquaintance and he was an elder gentleman, and he went to work for the IRS. And I'm like, Ian, you got to be crazy. Like, what are you doing? It's a survival job. And I said, there is no ever any need to do a survival job. You are totally destroying your own dignity by doing that. I said, that's ridiculous. You should never do a survival job, right? Even if it's a job you feel like you have to do for money, there has to be some are you helping your coworkers?

[00:09:57.300] – Marjory

Is it benefiting the world in some way? And the more you have work that's meaningful that you feel you're contributing, then the more fun it is, the less it is work and the more it is why you get up every day. And that is a form of wealth. Again, that's something that just can't be bought. Sometimes that takes a lot of soul searching. Sometimes in our midlife, we lose track of one thing that was real important and then we're in this free period for a while before we find the next thing that is it. But having something that really is me. And again, I really appreciated, regardless of the COVID experience and what that really was, it was a great wake up call for a lot of people. Like my accountant, they got really shorthanded. And I said, what's up, Don? And he says, well, you know, some of our team realized they just didn't really want to be accountants. God bless them. Hopefully they're doing what it is that they truly want to do. So the fourth form of wealth is doing meaningful work. So we have health, your health, your family, your community, doing meaningful work.

[00:11:02.550] – Marjory

And then the fifth one is almost an encompassing of all of it, and that's living a life of purpose. And so, yes, we all go through changes and different things, but knowing why you're here and living purposefully, this also starts after 40 we start looking more at legacy. What are we leaving behind? What have we done? What have we contributed? And more and more we start to live a life of purpose of every day I get up and I'm like, what is my purpose today or in any situation? What can I do here to better this situation? And again, that's not something you can't buy any of those things. And I will note that growing your own food in a backyard space fulfills all the five forms of well, first of all, you're going to get healthy. Growing your own food. And it's not just eating the high quality, high nutrient, vibrant foods, but the process of growing food, I say, is even more health giving than actually eating it. Family, I've been reviewing a lot of baby boomers. I say, what's your favorite memory of your grandparents? And it was never, oh, they took me to the skating rink, or we saw a movie.

[00:12:15.090] – Marjory

It was always something of like, well, I went with Grandma and we collected eggs from the chickens. Or one of my own memories of one of my great aunts was she had an apple tree in her yard, and we made applesauce. It always involves food harvesting and preparing, gathering, collecting food, every single one of them. Community, there is this myth of the lone survivor and the whole survival preparedness movement, of which I happen to be the female leader. Oh, my God. Anyway, guys think they're going to get their guns and head way off in the hills and survive this, and that is a complete disaster. You'll never make it. We need each other. And growing food and sharing food. The holidays, they always center around food, except for a couple of places where they fast and they're not really holidays. Those people are miserable, you know, and meaningful work. I mean, what more meaningful work? When I had my kids at home, we were homeschooling, and I was growing not all, but a significant amount of food for the family. I'm going to tell you, that is some incredibly meaningful work. When I knew that I was producing food that was going to have my children and my husband have the most vibrant and healthy bodies that they could have, incredibly meaningful work.

[00:13:35.560] – Marjory

And then the purpose, it's an incredibly purposeful activity. Also, I think my father in law, Pops, he has a variety of tomatoes. We were in Central Texas. Texas super hot in the summertime. Tomatoes do not grow in the superheat. And Pops had managed to find a variety of porter tomatoes that were very, very heat tolerant that he had actually developed over the years. Now, we won't say they were super tasty, but when it's July and August in Texas and you got any, tomato is better than none. And, you know, that variety of tomato is something that I certainly keep, the rest of the family keeps. We'll be passing that down for generations and generations and talking about pots and telling stories about pops. I mean, that's something you can do in your backyard, and that is a true legacy. There's lots of other ways to achieve those five forms of wealth, but growing food is something you can start doing right now.

[00:14:30.070] – Allan

Now, you've touched on a little bit of this, but I'd like to dive in a little bit deeper about why growing and raising your own food matters.

[00:14:40.210] – Marjory

Yeah, well, the largest destructive force on this planet is commercial agriculture. There are dead zones around every coastline of every continent. The Gulf of Mexico is a gigantic dead zone because of the agricultural runoff. Let's not go into all the soil erosion. Let's not go into all the toxicity. We used to say, be a perimeter, shopper at the grocery store. And now I'm like, just don't even go in the grocery store. There's nothing in there. Over the decades, the nutrition in the food has just been dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping and dropping. Like, for example, my mom lived to 94. She was born in 1920, back in 1920. And when her body was being built, there was real food with real nutrition in it. And she kept to the old ways for most of her life, eating whole foods and sourcing the best quality food. That's why she lived in 93, 94. That's why all these centenarians that they've been interviewing, they live that long. The kids born after 2000, even the CDC is saying, like, one third of them are going to have diabetes. Now, wait a minute. One third of kids are going to have diabetes?

[00:15:49.210] – Marjory

Like, what kind of life are these? Kids are not going to live to a 90. They're not going to live to 70. If they live to 50, they're going to be miserable because they're going to have all that stuff that comes with diabetes, of blindness, swelling legs. See what I'm saying here?

[00:16:02.600] – Allan

Yeah.

[00:16:03.320] – Marjory

You got to be growing it's like, way past time to be growing your own food. If you're interested in your own health, which you should be, because that's the number one form of wealth that you have, you really need to be growing your own food.

[00:16:14.570] – Allan

And just another aside, and I don't want to get political here it happens for why it's happened, but with inflation just in the last few years, and my wife and I go back to the States, it's like, food is so much more expensive than when we left four years ago. And so it's a huge contrast for us. It hasn't been this slow drip, drip, drip that I know a lot of people are experiencing up there. But just to go back and realize, wait, this used to be $25, a grocery store bill. Now it's 50 to buy the same stuff, and you're like, Holy moly. But if you've managed the seeds, you've managed the animals, you've managed the things that you need to manage this next round of crop or all, it doesn't cost you a dime more. It's the same ten minutes that it was. So you're basically giving yourself a raise.

[00:17:11.530] – Marjory

It's an investment. I was telling somebody, like, look, why do you have you have these 50 gallon drums full of beans and rice. Why are you doing that? I'm like, because those beans and rice a year ago cost $300, and now they cost $600. It's an investment. We have a thing called de dollarization coming along, and there will be the inflation is only going to get exacerbated to the point where, I mean, let's talk about Weimar Germany is going to happen in the United States, all the fiat currencies around the world. We're in that time frame, and we don't need to go into that in this podcast. Here the other thing and most people are not watching global crop production because why would we? But global crop production has been down everywhere, and there's not a lot of hope about it coming back around in the foreseeable future. So we have a constraint on supplies happening. And then we also have a financial system that's imploding. I'm here because I love the positive message of it's healthy and it's fun and it's the most rewarding activity you can do. But there is definitely a survival angle to this. Absolutely.

[00:18:26.770] – Allan

My wife has always said she has a black thumb. Can't grow anything. But it's kind of actually easy down here in Panama because you pretty much plant something and it grows. And we usually get plenty of rain, so it grows fast. But how can someone think about it? I've got this little backyard I want to get started. How does someone go about just making those first steps?

[00:18:52.270] – Marjory

So I, too had a black I mean, my first degree is in engineering. Later on got into business. I wasn't exactly, like, born in some hippie commune knowing this stuff. Right? Because I learned it all right. And you can learn it all. I would like to point out people often think about growing food and they immediately think of a garden. And I would like to say that actually animal products. And there are lots of ways for this to do it for the vegans. I don't want to alienate all the vegans, but animal products by far a lot easier and more prolific in terms of calories and nutrition than gardens. So even a backyard flock of six laying hens is what I recommend people start out with. It's 1500 eggs a year, which is basically three egg omelets you have for the entire year. So you have breakfast covered, and then you'll have 33 dozen eggs left over to barter or trade or give away or use in other recipes. And you can get that up and going in just a couple of weeks. So it ends up being about 95,000 calories, which I know historically the calorie has been a bad word, but the calorie is about to become the unit of currency.

[00:19:55.630] – Marjory

But let me go also address the black thumb thing. But I did want to preface that conversation with animal products are another great way to produce food. It doesn't always get outside of the garden bumps. The secret to a green thumb is actually the soil. And I know most of us are used to like, you wipe your feet, get that dirt. I don't want that dirt in my house. It's just dirt, right? It's dirt. Get it off your clothes. We don't normally think about how important soil is and a really vibrant, healthy soil with a lot of minerals and a lot of life, a lot of microbiotics going on there with either bacteria or fungi in it. The plants will be healthy and strong. Insects and disease, just like for animals, are the predators of the plant nations. If you are weak, then you will get sick, right? It's a fundamental thing. And if your plants are weak, they will get sick or have tendencies to have insect outbreaks. The way that plants get nourished is having adequate sunlight and water, but also soil the relationship in the soil of their roots with the microorganisms, the roots of the plant can't break down the rock and get a mineral.

[00:21:13.610] – Marjory

The roots of the plants have these relationships with soil microorganisms that break down and get them the minerals that they need. And in return, the plants will make types of carbohydrates that it exudes out of its roots to feed the microorganism. There's a whole lot more going on in there. So my advice is to get the highest quality soil you can and your garden will be way more forgiving of your erratic watering schedule. It'll be able to hold water better, you'll have way more nutrients and minerals and more life. Your plants will be healthier and stronger. And really having great soil is the secret to a green thumb.

[00:21:53.950] – Allan

And then in the book you do share some other things about how you can get into composting and things like that that are going to help you keep that soil. Because you can't just keep planting and taking you've got to put back in.

[00:22:09.200] – Marjory

One of the other wonderful things about this is it's also circular. And we're used to living linear lives. And when you start growing your own food, you start becoming very much in touch with these circular and relationship, which I think we're talking about relationships with other species, which is a real broadening of your interactions. And your backyard starts to become a whole ecosystem that you're involved with and participating with and helping. That's another thing that makes it so magical and wonderful.

[00:22:39.370] – Allan

Well, right, because just two things that would come out of that. One is if you're composting, you're throwing less away, which means the landfills get less and your food is right there in your backyard. They're not having to truck this stuff in from Mexico and all the fuel and everything that that would take to get the food to you. And you don't have to drive down to the grocery store to get it either. It's like literally walk out there, clip off your greens. It's going to keep growing. Pick some tomatoes, some cucumbers and make yourself a really great salad.

[00:23:10.710] – Marjory

You'll get it at the peak of freshness and the peak of nutritional content and the peak of flavor. By the way, if I could dovetail 1 second for those that go, oh, I got a homeowners, I can, or the rules or whatever. So the city of Austin is a great example. When I moved there 25 years ago, having chickens in your yard, people were like, you just lowered the property values. It was like Bubba Bill, you can't have chickens. Hated it. And there was a group, actually, a gentleman named Selwyn Pollock really said, hey, wait a minute, these things are great. Fast forward 15 20 years, the Austin chick stuff, they go crazy. And they now have a tour called the funky chicken coop tour because people build all these crazy chicken coops and they go nuts with it. But the city of Austin also regularly has classes on how to have a backyard flock of chickens, and they will subsidize you buying a chicken coop, and you might say, why would the city do that? And it's a very practical reason is they found out that people who had chickens had like 34% less waste that they were putting into the landfill.

[00:24:22.150] – Marjory

And they did a big cost benefit analysis, and they found out that if they had everybody in the city owning chickens, they would have this way less. It made more sense to subsidize the chickens in the city than it did to keep trying to fill up the landfill.

[00:24:38.790] – Allan

So, again, we're part of this ecosystem. We just get to choose a little bit about how we approach it. Now, you mentioned earlier that it was in our best interest, if we're looking at doing this for food, is that we're going to get a lot more bang for the buck with animals. And in the book, you got specific on the laying hens, the chickens and how to go about that. And you also talked about rabbits, because, again, I think of a farm or food. I'm thinking a cow and a pig and got to live by a river so I can fish and but let's talk about chickens and rabbits.

[00:25:09.710] – Marjory

Yeah, I want to live there, too, but the truth is most of us don't live there where we can have a pig and a cow and go fishing by the river. So, yeah, the book is really designed for the average American with the resources they have. And I have by the way, I visited Cuba to interview a bunch of the people that went through the government calls it the special period, actually, economic collapse. And they raised pigs in their backyard. What's? One woman this time, she raised a pig in a bathroom, like, oh, my god, the plumbing didn't work anymore, so why not? But, yeah, you don't really want to do that. That's just an extreme case. Rabbits are great. There's a distinction between an herbivore and an omnivore. People like, why don't you raise chickens for me? And actually, my family did that for years. We'd get 100 baby chicks, and we'd raise them up as a three month project, feed them, take care of them, and then the whole family, over a couple of weekends, we process them all, and then we had organic free range chicken in the freezer all year. Wonderful project, but it requires a lot of food.

[00:26:11.420] – Marjory

Chickens are omnivores, and basically they like to eat what you like to eat, right? Grains and vegetables and fruits and they're omnivores. They will eat some greens and things, too. Absolutely, yeah.

[00:26:22.810] – Allan

But I'm not a big fan of mice, rats and insects that they'll eat. But they are going to eat some meat.

[00:26:29.590] – Marjory

Yeah, they will eat that, too. But rabbits are pure herbivores and they're easier to feed. I'm coming from a survival and preparedness background, and when the grocery stores close, the feed stores are going to close too, right? You're not going to be able to buy animal feed. Rabbit, rabbit hoods, when you can grass and landscape trimmings and in the northern climates, bark in the wintertime, so you can much more easily and sustainably feed rabbits. You can basically take a lot of greens and a lot of forage that you can't eat, and the rabbits will turn that into protein and fat for you. They breed like rabbits.

[00:27:12.070] – Allan

Like rabbits.

[00:27:14.010] – Marjory

You get a lot of them, right? You can produce a lot of them in a small space.

[00:27:18.540] – Allan

Yeah, I learned so much in this book. I didn't know you could eat acorns, and I was like, Holy crap, I can't remember how many times. It was just so many acorns. I lived in a house in Massachusetts in the trees, and it was such a pain to rake up the acorns, rake up all the leaves. Leaves are a little easier because the rake works. But the acorns were the ones you just rake, rake, rake, rake, rake. If I'd known I could eat those things, man, that saved me a lot of time.

[00:27:45.450] – Marjory

They're really good and they're not that hard to process, and they're oh, my goodness. That angema pancake stuff is complete awfulness when you've eaten acorn meal pancakes. Oh, my God. So delicious. Real food. Yeah. There's places in Austin the homeowner tell you a funny story. So she had this big five oak tree in her front yard and she had this concrete sloping driveway, and it was perfect because all those acorns would hit that driveway and then roll down to the intersection where the edge where the street was, and I was like, oh, my God, let me just see. All you had to do is shove it in a bag. You didn't even have to rake it up. And I was out jogging one morning. I was actually in Austin on a business trip at some marketing conference or something, early in the morning, out for a run and saw these Acorns, and I had a bag, and I'm like and the woman who was the homeowner comes out on her porch, and she's looking at me, and she's got her hands on her hips. And I thought, oh, no, she's going to be mad because I'm taking her Acorns.

[00:28:48.270] – Marjory

And I said, oh, hi. And she goes, you want those things? Yeah. She says, take them all. Thank you.

[00:29:06.030] – Allan

But it just goes to the fact that how much we've lost touch of food, of what food is and where we can get food and how we can grow our own and raise our own. So that's something I really enjoyed about this book and the things that I was able to learn just with this little introduction.

[00:29:22.070] – Allan

Marjory, I define wellness as being the healthiest, fittest, and happiest you can be. What are three strategies or tactics to get and stay well?

[00:29:30.580] – Marjory

Yeah. Well, of course I'm going to tell you to grow your own food because that leads you to all the five forms of wealth. And actually, pretty soon, growing your own food is going to make you money too. Growing your own food is like printing your own money. I also really enjoy being physically fit and active. And then I think for me, the other most important thing for me is just to always be following my heart. If it's time to stop doing something, I'll know, and then I honor that, even though it kind of looks kind of crazy, or if it's time to start something, just following your heart and really trusting, there's a lot of wisdom.

[00:30:05.960] – Allan

Thank you. Thank you for sharing that. The book goes into a lot of detail, but it's kind of one of those things where the more you know, the more you know, you don't know.

[00:30:15.970] – Marjory

Really. I'm not even an expert.

[00:30:18.190] – Allan

Right. But you've put together a webinar called You Can Grow Food. And what I did was I went ahead and just set up a little link for that so you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/grow. And I'll have a link to that webinar because I think that's a really good first step for folks to get out there. Can you tell us a little bit about what we would learn on that webinar?

[00:30:39.810] – Marjory

Yeah. So I'll go into a very simple three part system that will show you how you can grow half of your own food in the size of three parking spots. Like, oh, you can do this. And I'll show you the calories it generates, what it looks like, what those meals look like. And the time is really less than an hour a day. I'd say about a half an hour a day. So this is something you can easily integrate into your life. You'll come with a plan for getting those three going, which will be getting you producing half of your caloric need, and you'll have a plan of how to get started today, regardless of where you live. And then what are the next steps to take. And once you implement those first three, which are the simplest and easiest to go for anybody, then the whole world opens up to you, and we talk about all other ways to grow food or produce food and just basically go through those introductions, answer a lot of really great questions people have about growing food. And it's just a very empowering class. Again, I do have that whole survival and preparedness background, so I always have this pitch toward, you might be in a grid down situation.

[00:31:46.850] – Marjory

And then a lot of people I really appreciate this audience is probably fitter than most, but this is also targeted for people who maybe they're overweight or out of shape or older, which makes the rest of us he's like, oh, great, that's easy. So they'll come away with a whole plan of action, what to get started with today and empowered on how to grow half of their own food.

[00:32:11.480] – Allan

Awesome. You can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/grow and find that webinar. And it's a free webinar, right?

[00:32:18.800] – Marjory

Yes, it's a free webinar.

[00:32:20.290] – Allan

Awesome. Marjory, thank you so much for being a part of 40+ Fitness.

[00:32:24.290] – Marjory

Well, thank you, Allan. I really appreciate you. And we'll come on some other time and a lot of other topics. Fun to talk about.

[00:32:30.400] – Allan

There are a lot of other topics. Thank you.

Post Show/Recap

[00:32:33.330] – Allan

Welcome back, Ras.

[00:32:34.650] – Rachel

Hey, Allan. That was a really fun discussion. I would just start off with health as the first form of wealth. Even when she said it, it caught me by surprise, even though it's something that I think about all the time is how important our health is. We could have all the money in our retirement fund or all the money in the bank account in the world, but if we're not healthy, there's no way to enjoy it.

[00:32:55.960] – Allan

Well, even being on that, if you're spending money on curative health care for chronic diseases. So that's high blood pressure, that's high cholesterol, that's heart, that's blood sugar, that's all of that stuff. Every time you write that check, every time you pull off that credit card to pay a copay, every time the insurance comes out of your paycheck, that is an indication of your investment or payments that you're making to keep yourself alive. And if you don't take care of yourself, you'll be on more medications than you would have otherwise. If you're not doing the right health care things, health style lifestyle things, you'll be spending more money for health care. I think I read that a person with diabetes spends $22,000 more per year on health care than someone who doesn't have diabetes.

[00:33:52.980] – Rachel

Wow, that's a lot.

[00:33:55.240] – Allan

It is a lot. And maybe you don't financially see it coming out of your pocketbook because you have a good insurance program or something like that, but invariably the money is coming from somewhere, and it's going to be coming from us directly or as a pool, but it's still coming out. And if you notice that your premiums go up every year, maybe your employer takes on a big chunk of that that's great. But they still see that as a chunk of your compensation. And so rather than them being able to write you a bigger raise, they're now paying it out in healthcare costs. And so you're getting less of a raise if you're missing a lot of work because you're sick. I was a hiring manager, and I can tell you the person that shows up every day, I like her, I like him. Okay, they're going to get the promotions first, they're going to get the raises first. And you can say, well, that's not fair. I was out sick. I shouldn't be penalized. It's not fair, but it is what it is. You're not there. You're not contributing at that point. And it's just unfortunate, but that's what it is.

[00:34:57.540] – Allan

And so when you start looking at what you could make, what you could do, or what you are spending, your health and lifestyle, they actually are part of that formula. And you want to be healthy when you're older. You don't want to be sickly. You don't want to be put into a home earlier than you need to, right? So the things you do to take care of yourself from a fitness and a health perspective are really, really important. And so what Marjory is talking about is if you're eating good quality food, and you know it's good quality food because you raised those chickens, you raised those rabbits, and you were the one who got the soil together and planted those plants and kept them and fed them and did what was necessary. You know, the quality of what you're eating is good and so much fresher and better than what you would ever get from any store or even a co op. And so it's just this opportunity for you to have complete control over what you eat, what you and your family eat. And granted, she said 50% was a good, steady goal for sustainability, but she's talking about someone who just has a backyard.

[00:36:07.950] – Allan

It's not someone who has acres, because you definitely feed your whole family practically with acres and maybe others, but just in your backyard, because the chickens will take up about a parking space, the rabbits will take up about a parking space overall, and then the plants are just the space that you choose to plant. And the way she looks at it is, she's doing planters that are maybe 8ft long and 4ft wide, which allows her to easily manage them. They're raised beds, and so you can plant as many of those as you want. She recommends one to start and then the second one. And at that point, with just two of these planters and the chickens and the rabbits, you could be growing half of your own food.

[00:36:50.050] – Rachel

That would be so awesome. Now that we're back in Michigan, where we've been for about four years, we've been trying to work on our own gardens here. And I'll tell you, I have a black thumb. I just kill anything I touch. My husband and my daughter, they're the ones with the green thumbs. They're the one that makes it all work. But when we have our own garden, we plant the foods that we want to eat. So we'll have tons of tomatoes and we'll have lots of onions. My daughter's experimenting with different lettuces right now, and sometimes it's a process. We also have rabbits and groundhogs and deer that like to eat our food before we get it. But we have to learn. We're learning how to adapt. And I'll tell you what, when you raise your own tomatoes, there's nothing that tastes better than having your own tomatoes. And that's probably one of the easiest things to grow, too. And then if you have a bumper crop, you can can them and use them in the winter for chilies or soups or whatever else. It's just a wonderful thing to do, and not to mention the chance to be outside during the best time of year.

[00:37:53.900] – Rachel

So it's a wonderful thing to do.

[00:37:56.230] – Allan

And that's the other part of it. She's like, you're going to spend more time outside, but not a huge investment of time. I mean, she's literally talking about ten minutes for your garden. Once you get it going, you're out there for ten minutes tending to it per day. The chicken is kind of the same thing. You're out there checking their food, checking their water, just making up the eggs, and then you're out with the rabbits again, just checking their food, checking their water, making sure they're taken care of, sometimes rotating them around the yard so they're getting different parts of the yard, rotating that around. And then she did the raised beds as a way to help eliminate some of the rabbits and things getting into your garden and cross contaminating your soil. Because if one of your neighbors has been using pesticides and herbicides and fertilizers and stuff on their yard, that runoff could be in your yard over years and years and years. You don't necessarily want to use that for your food. So she encourages you to buy soil, do the raised beds, and then you have complete control over the environment that your plants grow in.

[00:39:04.030] – Allan

And she agrees to start small. Her webinar is going to be a great way for you to get a good exposure to what she's talking about. The book is great, too, but the webinar, I think, is going to be where it really will make a lot more sense, and she'll be able to answer all your questions. So if you go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/grow, that's going to put you into that webinar and you'll be able to go through that and watch that webinar, it's going to be really cool and a lot of value there. So even if you think maybe I want to grow a few things, I'm not necessarily into the rabbits and having to kill them and eat them. And maybe chickens are okay, but she says you don't have to have a rooster to lay eggs. So it's not like you're going to be disturbing your neighbors with this rooster or yourself with this rooster every morning. You don't have to have the rooster. So she talks about that, getting your laying hands, how you'd organize them, how you'd set up. She puts all that together with the resources. But I think the webinar is going to be just a really good concise way for you to get a really good idea of how her growth system works, because it is a full ecosystem, so it's all encompassing.

[00:40:12.760] – Allan

If you're doing all four of these things, basically, plus foraging and maybe hunting, you set yourself up to basically be getting almost all of your own food at some point, and that's kind of cool.

[00:40:26.100] – Rachel

That would be awesome.

[00:40:27.160] – Rachel

I love it. Might have to check out that webinar myself.

[00:40:30.120] – Allan

Again, you can go to 40plusfitnesspodcast.com/grow to sign up for that webinar and learn a lot more about Marjory Wildcraft and then her book, which is called The Grow System: True Health, Wealth and Happiness Come From the Ground.

[00:40:46.370] – Rachel

I love it.

[00:40:47.320] – Allan

Yeah. All right, well, Ras, I will talk to you next week.

[00:40:51.080] – Rachel

Take care.

[00:40:52.040] – Allan

You too.

[00:40:53.060] – Rachel

Thanks.

[00:40:53.860] – Allan

Bye

[00:40:54.730] – Rachel

Bye.

Music by Dave Gerhart

Patreons

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