Today we are going to talk about exercise and movement, and this is something that I really feel was transformative for me. I talk about the true reason why we should exercise. I also talk about how much is optimal for good healing, especially so we can age gracefully! #fitness #agegracefully #strong
Episode 2 Transcript
Hey, Hey, thanks for joining me today. This is episode two of the pursuit of wholeness podcast, and I am really excited about our topic today.
So in these first few episodes, we are going to be talking about wellness basics. This is really what I talk about and focus on. All of my clients and it is what I really think is fundamental to transforming our health. And today we are going to talk about exercise and movement, and this is something that I really feel like was transformative for me.
So. I have never been someone who has been particularly athletic and very good at playing sports. I always feel like I was the last person picked for every team. When I was in college, I transferred from a college in San Antonio to a college in Austin, Texas. And when I was in San Antonio, my last one or two semesters, I can’t really remember.
I had the good fortune to be placed in a university apartment with three other girls and little did I know these other ladies were. Scholarship athletes on the university’s cross-country team. And this was really the first time that I was able to see women moving and exercising and doing something to feel strong and fueling their body.
To be fit instead of restricting and wanting to lose weight and being overly concerned about how they looked for any other reason than just to be strong. And so that was such a pivotal eyeopening moment for me that I really began my. Journey in that time that I lived with them with their inspiration, I actually started to run.
I went to a local track. I had my prince greatest hits on repeat. I just began, I really started to learn how to. Move in a way that was honoring to my body and I will forever be grateful for those ladies for really planting that seed. Last episode, episode one, I talked to you all about the basics of nutrition and food and why it’s so important for us to optimize our nutrition today.
I really want to talk about the finer points of exercise and positive mood. The why’s the what’s the how much, and hopefully I can inspire you just like I was inspired to see movement differently and to see movement as a practice of being strong and confident and what we practice is what we become. So let’s be.
With these recommendations, I’m really giving you a blueprint. We are all different in our preferences, our goals, our likes, our bodies. So adapt what I am saying based on what is right for you. Okay. So why should we exercise? A lot of people think about exercise as calorie burning. Um, how many calories am I going to burn in this class?
That is actually not the most important and powerful benefit of exercise. So. Before I jump in to the why of exercise. I really want to share with you my overall philosophy, everything I do and everything I recommend is through the lens of how it supports all aspects of the whole self, our body, our mind, and our soul spirit, everything we do should benefit and touch all of these areas.
And when it does, this is when we see true transforming. So with exercise, let’s talk about the body. First, first, let’s talk about metabolism, which yes is kind of how we burn calories, but it’s so much more than that. There is so much to talk about. When we talk about metabolism first, let’s talk about what is metabolism.
Metabolism is a chemical process that takes what we eat and what we drink and breaks it down into fuel for our bodies, for movement, for thinking, for talking, for feeling and so many factors influence. Our metabolism, our age, our sex, our hormones, our body composition, which is made up of our lean body mass.
That is our muscles, our bones, and then also our fat mass, which is the adipose tissue and then everything else. And, um, also our movement, uh, both purposeful movement. And then also just daily movement. We don’t have control over some of these things like age sex, but we can influence a lot of what impacts our metabolism, like our muscle mass or bone density, our fat mass, our movement, and even our hormones movement is the language of ourselves.
We evolve to move regularly. Our bodies respond and adapt to the movement stimuli that we get. For example, our bones mineralized in part, based on the amount of stress and pressure that we put them under, how strong they are is based on what we need them to withstand. If we are used to lifting heavy boxes or children, our dumbbells through exercise, our bodies build.
The muscles and bones that are needed to help you with that. Or if you sit for 90% of your time, then your body we’ll quickly get rid of all of that bulky, expensive muscle and bone. Our body is super efficient at maintaining what we need and only what we need. So the more we move, the more we left, the more our body will create.
Adapt to the stimuli that we give it, especially with muscle and bone, because it is very expensive from a metabolic perspective. So that’s why when we develop more muscle, our metabolism goes to. Another really important aspect of movement that really helps us stay healthy is how movement helps us regulate our hormones, all our hormones, but for the purposes of today.
So it doesn’t get too heavy and biochemistry intensive. I’m just going to focus on two hormones, insulin, and. So let’s talk about insulin first. Most of you have probably heard of insulin. Insulin is the hormone that our body needs to bring blood sugar into ourselves. So what is blood sugar? Blood sugar or glucose is just a simple sugar that our cells use for fuel.
So when we eat, especially high carbohydrate foods, like pasta, bread, potatoes, rice, the very high carbohydrate foods like cookies, candies, cakes. These are broken down to the smallest form, which is glucose. And then. Insulin is released by our pancreas to unlock ourselves, to allow ourselves to take in the glucose to further break down to.
When we eat or drink too many carbohydrates, even as kids, this causes too much insulin to flood the body. And this is a natural process because when we have too much blood sugar in our blood, it actually causes some things like scratching the lining of our blood vessels. It is very irritating to some of the very tightly.
Blood vessels in our kidneys, our nerve cells. So having too much glucose in our blood is actually very damaging to our blood vessels and so many other things. So that’s, insulin’s job is to go around and unlock these receptors. But the problem is when. Eat too much carbohydrate, especially high sugary things.
Cause that causes a big jump in blood sugar. Our bodies are constantly releasing. And this constant release of insulin kind of overwhelms the insulin receptors and these receptors have to downregulate to protect themselves and really protect our bodies. And over time, this causes our ELs to become. Less sensitive to insulin.
And so this is what leads to insulin resistance, and it’s thought that 80% of people are to some degree, insulin resistance. So why is this a problem? Well, as our body becomes less sensitive to insulin and we’re still eating the same amount of carbohydrates, our blood sugar continues to stay high. So our body has to pump out more and more insulin in an attempt to bring down our blood.
But the problem is, is that all of those receptors that the insulin is supposed to unlock and the glucose is supposed to go in are no longer working well. And so your body’s main focused is to bring down the blood sugar, because there are so many problems associated with having high blood sugar. This really becomes a vicious cycle.
And the thing about insulin is that it’s an anabolic hormone. That means a building hormone. So the more insulin we have in our bloodstream, because we are constantly pumping it out because our receptors are not quite as sensitive as they should be. The more we store what we eat into our stored cells, which are.
Not only does this make it harder to lose weight, but what they are finding now is that these fat cells, they used to think fat cells were just these little sacks of extra calories. But what they’re finding is that they are actually very metabolically active and they can be metabolically active in a way that is not really beneficial to our body.
But basically when we have too much carbohydrate and our bodies are releasing too much insulin, this will over time decrease the ability for us to really utilize the insulin that we’re making. And our body has to make more and more and more. And this. Cause rapid weight gain. It can also cause a new onset of type two diabetes and multiple different things.
So how does exercise. Well, one of the fundamental ways that exercise and movement helps is that it allows blood sugar to actually enter the working muscle without needing insulin, and then more long-term exercise and movement actually make us more sensitive to insulin through multiple different adaptations and how glucose is transported throughout the body.
And then also just up-regulating the receptors themselves, basically more movement. Through a variety of exercise, weight training, high intensity training, low intensity training. All of this helps to increase insulin sensitivity and the more sensitive we are to insulin, the less our body has to create to manage our blood sugars.
The more upregulated our receptors get in it. Is a happy story. So exercise is so important in managing how much insulin our body has to create. And that helps us with so many different things, weight loss, and then also decreasing inflammation, which actually brings us to our next hormone cortisol. So many of you have probably heard of cortisol.
It’s our fight or flight hormone. Normally released throughout the day, and this is completely natural. The problem is when we have too much stress, cortisol is constantly being released and cortisol is very important, like insulin and so many things. But when we have too much and it’s being released too often, it has negative consequences.
It increases fat storage. Impacts our immune system. It increases systemic inflammation and also impacts other hormones like our estrogen and testosterone exercise helps us balance cortisol. It helps us manage stress. It helps us manage our insulin and it really helps to get cortisol back to. It’s most helpful balanced position too much is bad, too little is bad.
And so we really have to find that middle ground balance is key and movement is really one of the keys that helps us keep cortisol imbalance. Okay. Enough of biochemistry, basically movement or lack of movement has a huge impact on our hormones. Truly exercise has a huge impact on all areas of our body health.
It helps us maintain our neural connections in our brain. It helps us grow blood vessels, maintain nerve endings, and it also helps us with our mitochondrial. I did say that I was going to move on past biochemistry, but let’s stop at the mitochondria for just a second. So mitochondria are these little structures in every cell and some cells actually have multiple mitochondria and the mitochondria are just the engines of the cells.
They utilize the glucose and they use the glucose to generate power blocks called ATP. And then. Cells use the ATP to do all the things that they are supposed to do. Well, when we have lots of mitochondria and the mitochondria is working well, we have more energy and our bodies are working correctly. All of the different cells from our thyroid cells to our immune cells, to our muscles.
And in fact, when things go wrong with the mitochondria, so many different things throughout the body are impacted, and scientists are beginning to think that a lot of the chronic diseases like Alzheimer’s. Cancer diabetes. These things have route in mitochondrial dysfunction. So mitochondria are actually very complicated, a little more complicated than even I can understand, but for the purposes of our talk today, I just really want to stress that the more we move, the more exercise we do, the more muscle mass we grow, we help to support our mitochondria.
And when we support the growth and the number of mitochondria, this really helps to rev up our metabolism. So basically our bodies are meant to be. Exercise and movement really creates so many positive adaptations from creating a strong skeleton to better nerve conduction, to even helping our livers work better, to help our livers detoxify our body better.
So my friends, I hope I have convinced you that the real benefit of exercise is not about calorie burning. It’s not about the 300 calories that your watch tells you that you’ve burned after that spin class. It’s the long-term improvement to your metabolism. That happens when we move consistently, we build stamina and we build muscle exercise and consistently.
Really makes everything throughout our body work better. Everything. There is not one thing in our body that thrives through inactivity. You may disagree with me whenever you start your new exercise plan when you’re sore, but really this soreness and this ache and pain that you will have really just means that your body is getting stronger and more stable to help you be more powerful throughout your day.
And speaking of stability. So earlier I said, one of the things we don’t really have control over that impacts our metabolism is our age. It’s true. We don’t have control over our chronological age, but we do have control over how we age and exercise really helps us age gracefully. It helps us build and maintain all the muscle mass and the connective tissue.
That will help us age gracefully, regardless of what our chronological ages. So it’s true that as we age, our bodies become less good adept at building and maintaining muscle mass and connective tissue and stability. So. If we want to age gracefully, we have to be really intentional about staying active and building muscle so that as we age, we not only feel good in our skin, that we’re able to do the things and thrive in our seventies, eighties, nineties, and beyond.
That we really want to do walking down the stairs, going for walks, maybe even running because what we do now in our thirties and forties really lays down the foundation for our health as we age. Okay. I talk all about. How our bodies are positively impacted through regular movement. Now I want to move on to the mind and soul part.
This part is really huge. Whenever I start with a new client, I am a dietician. So food is always very central, but sometimes I will start with movement because movement is really a very concrete way. People can start to affect change and it feels a little bit more. And empowering. Okay. So we’ve talked about the body.
Now. Let’s talk about the mind when I am talking about the mind. What I really want to focus on is brain health, cognitive ability and emotional health research has shown that exercise reduces inflammation. And increases growth factors, increasing neural connections, improving memory learning and improving neuroplasticity.
So what is neuroplasticity? Neuroplasticity is our brains ability to grow new neural pathways based on new experiences. The research has shown that exercise. Has some really substantial emotional and mental health benefits. For example, a recent study done by Harvard found that running just 15 minutes per day, or walking for one hour reduces the risk of major depression by 26%.
It also releases endorphin. Which are the powerful hormones that promote calm and wellbeing and really energize our spirit exercise is so powerful, not only for brain health, but also emotional health through all of the feel-good hormones. Next I want to talk about. The impact positive movement and exercise has on your soul and spirit though, as I talk about this, of course, this is my interpretation of what feeds your soul, feed your spirit and allows your.
Room to grow and expand, and all also helps to release ourselves from our emotional baggage and non-conscious constraints that will consistently hold us back. So I see exercise and daily movement as a huge agent for change. It’s a moment that we can take every day. To help us feel empowered and really help us practice being strong, powerful, and confident, and what we practice.
We become. So when we practice strength, when we practice confidence, we become stronger and we become more confident. And this really helps us build resilience. Exercise confirms that we can do hard things. When you are showing yourself that you can start and finish something that is hard and worthwhile, you are also spending time caring for yourself.
And this reminds us that this time is really well-spent. So a quick side note, next episode, I will be talking about mindset and this. Really where I will dig deeper into the, how tos of really shifting how we see the things that we do and what typically gets in the way of feeling strong, confident, and empowered.
So I will talk more about the, how tos next time. But for today, I just really want to make the point that. Exercise is really a opportunity to feel strong. And it’s an opportunity to learn how to speak to yourself in a way that feels good and really motivates you. Okay. So I feel like I have given you many different reasons why exercise is so powerful.
Now I really want to kind of dive in to the helmet. This is different for everybody. So what the current recommendation is is that we get 150 minutes of moderate exercise or 75 minutes of vigorous exercise every week. Um, Let me translate or let me tell you what I recommend. What I recommend for people is that you move daily.
Next. I want you to engage in purposeful exercise at least three days every week. So this could be running. This could be hit, which is high intensity interval training. Pilates yoga, cycling, walking, whatever works for you. Purposeful exercise at least three times per week, if he can do more great. I also really recommend weight training.
Building muscle mass is so vital for our overall health. Especially as we age, having more muscle mass, like I have talked about before increases your metabolism. So you burn more calories. Just by living your life. It also helps to regulate your hormones, increases your bone density. The stronger your muscles are on the outside.
The stronger your bones will be. And if your goal is weight loss or body change, having more muscle mass just helps you feel good. Being strong and looking. I think looks really good. And don’t worry about getting too bulky. This is actually something pretty much everybody says when I try to encourage them to add more weight training, as they say, well, I don’t want to get bulky as women.
You don’t have enough testosterone to really get bulky, like mental. If you see women who are very muscular, don’t worry. That actually takes a lot of time. And if you want to do that, go for it. But don’t worry about basic weight training causing you to look overly muscular. It will only cause you to be strong and fit and feel really good in your body.
Really work on adding some amount of resistance training to your weekly. Okay. So now for the main takeaways, first and foremost, the true benefit of exercise is not burning calories. The true benefit of exercise is. To have a really strong and resilient metabolism to regulate your hormones, to manage your blood sugar and to really build an increase your mitochondrial load so that you are as healthy as possible.
Next is to move daily, do something positive for yourself on a daily basis to get you closer to your goal of health transformation, whatever that means. Next add weight training into what you’re doing. Build some muscle mass, get stronger. This will help you with your running, your yoga, your cycling. It helps with all aspects of your fitness and your body.
And don’t forget to include some restorative exercise too. So these are things like yoga, stretching. Walking. We can’t always work hard. We sometimes have to do the repair work and stretching is so important, especially when you are beginning a new exercise regiment and then last, but certainly not least is have fun.
Exercise is supposed to be pleasurable and you are not going to stick with it if you are running because you feel like you should, but you really, really hate. And there are so many fun things to do. So make sure you have fun. And people always ask me what I do. So this is just me, of course. Do what works for you based on your goals.
I like to set periodic goals for myself, just to kind of mix things up. A few months ago, my goal was to walk 12,000 steps every day. That was actually really great. I really got into walking during the pandemic and I still continue to walk a few times every week. It’s very relaxing right now. My focus is getting strong.
Building more muscle mass because I want to age well, and I’m a lady of a certain age. And so that has really become very important to me. Strength training has never been one of my favorite things to do. So I have been very intentional with, including that more frequently in what I’m doing. So my basic workout plan every week is Monday.
I do some type of weight training. Tuesday, I run Wednesday. I do weight training and some yoga because I’m typically pretty sore for Monday, Thursday. I will do running or spinning Friday. I do weight training and stretching. And then Saturday, Sunday I do something fun. It could be spinning or walking with friend or kayaking.
It just kind of depends, but I do like to move every day. Because it really helps me feel good. So that is my plan. And this will definitely look different for you. And I would love to hear from. What are your goals? What do you like to do? What are your thoughts about what I talked about in this episode?
So head over to Instagram and let me know. I hope you have enjoyed this episode all about exercise and movement. And if you did like. Do me a favor and share it with a friend or someone who, you know, who is trying to make some helpful changes in their life and needs a little bit more motivation and finally check out my next episode in this wellness basic series, all about mindset.
This is an area of wellness that sometimes people don’t talk about. I will help you put all of this into practice, the nutrition stuff, and the movement piece. I will really help you learn some new skills and become more insightful about what could be getting in the way of you consistently making the changes that you would like to make.
This is really where I talk about. The gap that we sometimes fall into between knowing what to do and doing it consistently. So this will really be where I bring it all together and help you take some actionable steps towards your own personal transformation. So until next time, thank you so much for joining me.
And thank you for joining me in this pursuit. Hi.
