Hello.
Welcome to The Own Your Health Podcast.
I'm Cyndi Lynne, and I can't wait to
help you step into your health power.
Now, today's topic is conflicting messages.
And if you're not sure what I mean by
that, maybe you'll recognize some of the frustration that
I hear from my clients in my practice.
Cindy, I don't even know what to eat anymore.
First they say something's good for you.
Then they say something's bad for you.
Or I don't know how much exercise I'm supposed to do.
If I just go for a walk, does it not make a difference?
Now, they say you have to do high
intensity exercises. And it's always the "they", right?
And the same could be
true even for spiritual practices.
If I can't meditate for 15 minutes, I can't sit still.
I can't do that.
I guess I'm not good at meditation.
I guess there's no point in trying.
So, I'm here to tell you that it's absolutely
normal to be confused by all of these messages.
It's also absolutely normal to be frustrated when you
set off to do something that you've been told
by "experts" is really good only to find out
it's not or it doesn't work for you.
And one of the first things I talk about
with my clients, one of the first questions I
ask them, whether they're talking about exercise or nutrition
I won't even say diet or spiritual practices.
The first question is, what is your goal?
And it may seem obvious if you're talking about
nutrition, you may have been on a diet of
some kind or another for the last 15, 20, 25 years.
I get it!
But when we start to talk about nutrition or
when you read something, when you start asking questions
about it, the information that you're getting may be
set up or designed for or works well for
someone who has a completely different goal.
So let me give you a really good example, a
nutrition example to start out with excuse me that I
get very commonly, and that is, I understand that I
am supposed to eat really well before I exercise so
that I have energy to exercise. Okay?
Now, that statement is true for some people,
and it's not true for other people.
It all depends on what your goal is.
So, taking this one simple example and I will
boil this down very simply obviously, the body's more
complex, and your goals may be more complex.
However, if you are exercising as a means to
burn calories and lose weight and the caveat here
is that nutrition is probably 90% of weight control.
But if you want body movement to contribute to weight
loss, then you'd want to exercise in a fasting state
because your goal is to use up energy.
So you want to exercise on an empty stomach.
Now, if your goal is performance during that
exercise, being able to run faster or run
farther or run for a greater amount of
time, lift more, build muscle, then you may
have nutrition, you may have food before that
workout because you're fueling performance, not weight loss.
So using this very simple example, you can probably
think of many things that you've read that always
say get a high protein snack right before you
exercise, carb load right before you exercise.
Well, if you're trying to perform, that may or may
not be something that works really well for you.
If you're not exercising for hours at a time
and you're not exercising for the performance itself, but
rather to get the results of the exercise, then
you're going to want to hold off on eating.
And not only hold off until after your exercise, but a
good half hour even after that, so that your body has
the opportunity to burn all of the glucose that's stored in
your liver, for example, and in your muscles.
So there's a lot of complexities to this.
And we can certainly do, if it's
something of interest, we can certainly do
other episodes on the specifics of those.
But right now I just want you to think about
the messages that you've read and we see them in
magazines, we see them all over where it says, oh,
this is how you need to fuel up for exercise.
Or it's better to exercise without eating.
It's better to fast for a little while afterwards.
And they're both true.
It just depends on your goal, okay?
And obviously owning your health
means owning your goals.
So you need to ask yourself, all right, if I'm looking
at a nutrition program, if I'm looking at a program my
friend has done or my cousin's done, or this person at
work who's in really great shape, has followed this nutritional plan,
are my goals the same as hers was? No.
If I'm reading an article and it
sounds fascinating and it sounds like, okay,
maybe there is something to this.
Is the stated goal for the nutrition
program the same as your goal?
And the next question that often comes up for
people when we're talking about it and they say,
well, I don't really know what my goal is.
I mean, yeah, I want to lose
weight, that's always a common one.
But I really want to feel better, I
want to be able to exercise better.
And we work together to figure out
what your goals for this nutrition is.
Now, I used weight as an example.
We also can have very specific nutritional plans.
If we're trying to heal, if we've had a chronic
or long term illness, or even if we're healing from
healing and recovering from surgery, that's a very specific goal.
If we're healing from a virus, if
we're in the midst of a virus.
All of those are different goals that would
allow you to choose different information to follow.
And once it sounds a little bit overwhelming, but
once you start differentiating, once you start looking at
an article, you're flipping through in a magazine and
it talks about run harder longer.
Okay, that's the goal of the
nutrition plan that they're setting out.
If running harder longer isn't your goal,
then that nutrition plan probably won't be
something that you even want to try.
And in fact, it could be
counterproductive to what you're trying for.
That nutrition overlaps with the exercise
and we can use some of the same examples here.
I often get the question, what is the best exercise?
What exercise should I be doing?
All right. So again, we can read we're inundated
with best new exercise 15 minutes a day.
You can get totally fit doing this exercise.
CrossFit is the best thing out there. No, it's not.
I don't care for it.
Running is easy.
Anybody can do it. No, not really.
It takes its toll.
And you could tell my bias in this here
because I work with people rebuilding their health.
But it is important for you to figure out
what it is you're trying to do with exercise.
So if you're really looking for flexibility, as opposed to stamina,
or as opposed to being able to walk a really long
way or be able to stand for a long time, if
flexibility is what you're looking for, then maybe yoga or Pilates
would be a good exercise for you.
Walking is good for most anyone who can do it.
However, if you have difficulty walking,
if your gait makes walking uncomfortable,
then walking more probably won't help.
So then maybe a stationary bicycle
would be a good option.
If you're working to, for example, build bone mass.
If you have a history of osteoporosis in your
family or you have osteopenia and you're looking to
build that muscle mass, biking probably isn't going to
be as helpful because it's not as weight bearing
as walking is or something like rebounding.
So it's very difficult for someone who
doesn't know you and doesn't know your
goals to make exercise recommendations.
And very often in my office practice doing MAT, I
see clients who have gone to a trainer and have
shared a goal that maybe wasn't communicated clearly,
maybe there was a misunderstanding, but the trainer
is trying to train them with the system
that they always use, and the person gets
injured because that's not their goal, that's not
their starting point, that's not where they are.
So can anybody do CrossFit?
I suppose, but what's the price you're going to pay?
Can anybody be a long distance runner?
Yes, if they really want to.
But for example, that's not something I recommend
for women because you will pay with your
thyroid if you are a marathon runner.
There's kind of no way around it,
and it probably sounds sexist and it
probably sounds antifeminist or whatever.
There's a lot of isms out there today.
But the fact of the matter is that our goals determine
what we want to do and then what we do with
our body is going to cause either positive or negative reactions.
Now, if you have always wanted to run a
marathon, you can certainly train and do that.
But then I would highly recommend that you have a
training plan for recovery and recuperation so that your body
can heal from that process of running a marathon.
Because you are doing a fair bit of damage
to your body in that kind of distance running.
The same is true with weightlifting.
And in fact, weightlifting by its nature
causes micro injuries in your muscles, is
what makes your muscles sore.
That also is what makes your muscles grow.
So when it comes to lifting weights, we
do want to lift heavier things and heavy
is a relative term depending on the person.
But that process is something that you want
to understand if you're trying to build muscle.
And building muscle is actually a pretty good goal for most
everyone, even those of us just going through life on a
day to day basis because we tend to be healthier and
more resilient if we have muscle on our body.
But what that means can be very,
very specific to each individual body.
So again, what is your goal?
The last area that I want to talk
about is spiritual practices because that's another
one that I hear a fair bit about.
I get the question, okay, I would really like to learn
to meditate, but I've tried so many times and I just
can't sit still and I just can't empty my mind.
And I get more frustrated and I get
more angry the more I do it.
So why would I do something that's supposed to help me
relax when all it does is make me feel more anxious?
So again I ask, what is your goal?
Is your goal to try something new?
If it is your goal to be able to sit perfectly
still for 15 minutes, then that's what you want to practice.
But that isn't necessarily meditation.
Emptying your mind isn't necessarily meditation.
In fact, there are many, many
different types and styles of meditation.
So in order for us to own our
health in starting a practice like that, the
question again becomes what is your goal?
What are you trying to accomplish?
For some people, meditation is a practice.
Actually, it's always a practice and some
days it goes better than others.
And I hesitate to even use that word
because we don't inherently want to rate ourselves.
But for the sake of our talking about a potentially new
topic here, these are the words I'm going to use.
But the practice comes in having yourself commit to
a behavior and then follow through on that commitment.
So regardless of if it's transcendental meditation, if it's
just a simple breathing meditation, and we explore a
number of these different meditations in The Heal Your
Life Community, but there's something about committing to yourself
that I'm going to take ten minutes a day
and if ten minutes starts too much, sounds like
too much, start with five.
I'm going to take five minutes a day and
I'm going to be still, and I'm going to
commit to whatever type of meditation meets my goals.
And maybe that's five minutes of paying attention
to your breath, inhaling and exhaling sitting there.
Five minutes, whatever comes up in
your mind doesn't really matter.
Bring it back to the inhale and the exhale
and we can explore different types of meditation.
If that's a desire. Absolutely.
Drop me a line at the link below.
But the point is that when we want to
own our own health, whatever practice, whatever exercise, whatever
nutrition, whatever spiritual practices, whatever habits we want to
develop, when we look for the best path, the
first question we always need to ask ourselves is,
what is our goal?
Because in order to pick the best path,
we need to know where we're going.
And that's the goal.
So I welcome you to spend a little bit of
time looking a little bit more critically at some of
the information that you receive in these areas or other
areas where you find frustration, where you read about studies
on supplements or if you read about the latest headlines
of what works and what doesn't work and you're ready
to throw up your hands and say, what's the point?
It's all conflicting information.
Does anybody know what's going on?
Yeah, a lot of people know what's going on.
You just have to figure out who those people are that
know what's going on for the goals that you want.
If I can help in any way, absolutely.
Let me know.
Until next time, let's own it.
