Proven Not Perfect
Proven Not Perfect
Navigating Wellness and Longevity: A Tapestry of Women's Health Insights for 2024 with Coach Angela and Dr. Christina Tszilinis
As we usher in a new season of life in 2024, the spotlight shines on the power of women and the vital importance of sustaining their health. Sharing from my own journey, I've come to recognize that self-care isn't just a luxury, it's a necessity for maintaining the harmony in our lives. This episode is a vibrant tapestry of conversations with Coach Angela and Dr. Christina Tszilinis, weaving their expertise into our narrative as we explore the life-altering insights from the transformative book "Outlive." We tackle the essential matter of keeping life-threatening diseases at bay and the role metabolism plays in our health span, all while integrating self-care practices that don’t disrupt our daily lives or those around us.
This particular conversation isn't your run-of-the-mill health talk; it's an intricate dance between medical science and proactive personal health strategies. We explore the delicate equilibrium where medical intervention meets sustainable lifestyle changes, guided by a case study that illustrates the critical moments when health coaching becomes pivotal in preventing irreversible damage. It's an eye-opener to the uniqueness of each health journey, discussing why moderate exercise and stress management can be as impactful as any extreme measure. The insights from our guests underscore the importance of a well-rounded approach to wellness, destined to carry us through the years with vitality and grace.
To wrap up, this episode isn't just about the dialogue; it's about the flourishing of gratitude and wisdom that comes from it. Angela and Christina don't just share their knowledge; they're actively shaping a new baseline of health for the generations to come through their global platforms. Their stories and strategies, shared here, are treasures that promise to inspire not only our current listeners but those yet to step on their health journey. Join us for a heart-to-heart on longevity, where we embrace the blessings that come from caring for our well-being and the well-being of those we love.
Drive, Ambition, Doing, Leading, Creating... all good until we forget about our own self-care. This Village of All-Stars pays it forward with transparency about misses and celebration in winning. We cover many topics and keep it 100. We are Proven Not Perfect™️
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Hello, proven, not perfect, community, welcome to 2024. I hope that you tied up 2023. That's what I said Tied it up. I didn't say tied up good, I didn't say tied up strong. I just said tie it up, it's over, it's behind us. Hello, it's a wrap. So, whatever was waiting for you in 2024, we're open to it. That's what I'm talking about. We're open to it.
Speaker 1:And so I've been sort of teasing this new season to start 2024, which is all about you, all about me, all about health, full disclosure. I feel like 2023 and 2022 tried to give me some health swerves and, by the grace of God, really yes, really, by the grace of God the swerves literally were just that a swerve, and I truly believe in my heart that the experience that I had was to bring forward the ever important topic of health, health matters for women. Okay, now I know my listeners are not all women and trust and know that all are welcome here, but just also know that I'm pretty clear that I'm rocking with the women here and I'm trying to help those stretched mommies, wives, corporate executives, business leaders, entrepreneurs, artists, scholars, academics, all the things. Nonprofit leaders I can keep going. Church leaders I can keep going. We are called to do some massive and amazing things as women, and one of the things that resonates for me as I go into 2024 is that we are anchors in the places where we inhabit. We really are.
Speaker 1:Whether you think about that community service group, or you think about church, or you think about home or you think about the office, really give yourself a second to step back and think about how you show up and how often that is as an anchor what? Yes, we are anchors. So if we are an anchor, we need to make sure that we are anchoring to soil that is deep and rich and solid and strong to hold us as anchors sometimes get a little loose and rock and move. Well, guess what happens? If the anchor rocks and move, everything connected to it does as well. Right, yes, you know this. I'm not telling you anything that you don't know, but what I am bringing to mind is how important it is for us to step into 2024 thinking about our own selves. Now I am not naive to understand that there are season in our lives and trust and know that I intimately know what I talk about where we increase as caregivers for others and it can feel really, really hard to make space for our own self when we increase as caregivers for others. But it is at that time that we actually need to pour into our soil for anchoring even more, so it doesn't have to be massively big.
Speaker 1:You guys, when I would wake up early in the morning, like 5am, with three babies in the rooms down the hall and know that I needed to get up and get ready to go lead an organization, I knew that turning the lights on would start a regimen that I was not ready for, but I also knew that I needed to anchor myself. Thank God for the cell phones now, because it's a little bit easier. You don't need a flashlight in your Bible under the bed. You can actually pull out your Bible, turn on an app and be in the dark pouring into your spirit right there in the bed with no disruption to anyone else in the house, and then leave and, cooler, you can reach over to your nightstand where you left a 16 ounce bottle of water the night before and you can drink it all before your feet ever get the floor. And then, just as cool, you can ease on down to the floor and you can stretch out and start stretching your limbs what all of that and look if you're really still feeling like, okay, I can do this, you can start doing those bicycles, you can start doing those crunches, you can flip over and you can start doing those push-ups. What I'm trying to say is that our minds try to take us out and tell us that there's so much going on for us, the weight of the world is so heavy that we just can't take care of ourselves at this moment. But the reality is, first and foremost, if you're a Christian, you know, like I know, that weight isn't ours. That weight we are to give, we are to turn over, we are to rest in giving it away to Jesus, who is right there waiting arm stretch to take it. That's the first thing. The second thing is, if you actually get on the ground and start doing the things, man, you will just feel it roll away. You might even sweat a little bit. Okay, that's my message Pre this amazing launch of 2024 Conversations on Health.
Speaker 1:Today we're talking to Coach Angela, health Coach Angela. I had her on in 2023. She's a former world-class bodybuilder. Yes, that's right. She has a fantastic story. So if you haven't heard that story, please go back in 2023 and take a listen.
Speaker 1:The other guest is Dr Christina Zelinas, who is an OBGYN out of Naples, florida. She is a rock star, frequently listed as one of the best doctors. She is the best doctor, and, yeah, so we're. And also, if you want to hear more about her backstory, there was a podcast that was done with her in 2022. Yes, 2022. So you can get the backstories on both of the people.
Speaker 1:But today we're going to talk about a book called Outlive. You might be familiar with this book. It hit the shelves in the last year or so and it just ran across my screen and it pulled me in. This doctor is a trained medical doctor and he's offering his perspective on longevity and long life, but what really struck me is he doesn't just focus on the fact that you know, of course we all want to live a longer life, but we want to live long lives that are quality lives, and how do we start to retrain and reframe to support those things? So I'm not going to say anything more.
Speaker 1:Enjoy the podcast, please, please, please, let me know what you think. Hit me up. Social media, Sean Trappell. Underscore proven, not perfect. You can DM me. Let me know what you liked, what you didn't like, when I post about the podcast, please feel free to weigh in your thoughts. I'm looking forward to being in community in this journey, this health journey. I just got off the peloton, so what did you do? All right, enjoy the podcast. Hi Angela, hi Christina, hi, hi Y'all.
Speaker 1:I am excited about this podcast. First of all, this is only the second time that I've had two people at the same time on the podcast, so I think I'm okay at it. But I do find that in the group podcast conversation just like it does when we add one more girlfriend to the kitchen table, when we're like cooking and talking and doing all the things it adds more layers to it right, and so I'm super excited about that. We'll just let it flow. We'll just let it flow right and the people will decide. The people always decide.
Speaker 1:So today we've come together to talk about this book. That really grabbed me. I'm trying to even think back to when I first was exposed to this book. I think I was just kind of flipping through maybe a health podcast journal or whatever, and they mentioned this book, outlive by Peter Atea, being an influential book for them, and I was like, huh, outlive, what could that possibly mean? Outlive what. So I downloaded it on Audible, started reading it during a business trip and then I think I had brunch with you, christina, right after I started it, and I was like, oh, my goodness, I'm reading this book, we need to talk about it.
Speaker 1:And then you were like, yes, we need to talk about that and we've got to bring in Angela. I feel like I have the match pair. I've got the medical physician, I've got the health coach, who understands functional nutrition and exercise and all the things. So we got the right team here and you got me, who just wants to know, wants to know how to do it, right, right. So I don't know the most important factor, right, like, I just want to know. I want to know.
Speaker 3:You're like, you're like the reality check button.
Speaker 1:I think maybe right.
Speaker 3:Or or yes, here you are.
Speaker 1:For Dummies version? I don't know, but you guys know, first and foremost. What did you think about the book just before we even go in? Did it hit for you or was it a miss for you, christina?
Speaker 3:Okay, I think it hit for me there was maybe a little bit of overzealousness on his part.
Speaker 3:You know he gets maybe two, two into certain things, but it's definitely a thumbs up because it's a really it's becoming a more and more important topic. People are starting to pay more attention to it as we see our older friends and relatives and as they need more help, like memory care, rehab facilities, nursing homes, long term care places and you see people living really long lives and it's not just doctors and nurses who see this, but everybody sees, everybody has some kind of experience with this, be it with a friend, a family member or a patient. So it's aging is a big deal and I think he had a big task ahead of him the author trying to tackle all the components of aging. Yeah, and some of the components he went into maybe too much detail and some of the components not as much detail for some people, but the overall topic was like very, very good and I think everybody wants to know what he's getting at. You know and and try to make life better for ourselves and for our you know, our friends and family. That's what I think.
Speaker 1:So your thumbs up? All right, angela. Thumbs up, thumbs down. In the middle what?
Speaker 2:for me it was thumbs up to. But yeah, there are certain things because it's like my profession and he had like the medical part in a book where he built really deep into it and I think it really hits you. It's like a wake up call. So when you go through the first chapters you're getting like, oh my gosh, I was like this, that's me. Oh my god, is this coming at me? It's like I really. And of course you have family members who went through this and like, oh my god, my, my dad or my grandma, and oh my gosh, is this like genetic or something?
Speaker 2:And he explains the in real detail and where I think he could have gone a little bit deeper. But this is because it's what I'm doing. That's the nutrition and workouts part where I because I live it every day and I work with clients every day, so I'm way more detailed in that part and he addressed just a couple things. But it was very, very good. And I liked also that he mentioned his personal story in the book and that makes you understand way better why he wrote the book and how he got to this and the whole take on how he approaches it in his professional career and his private life. So, yeah, I definitely liked it.
Speaker 3:But it's intense.
Speaker 2:I thought it was very intense.
Speaker 1:It's intense for sure, even in the beginning, right. But I kind of feel like almost to the combination of what you both said I felt like he just boom, jumped us right in there, right in there, right. I cannot take any time to set the stage for you to be ready for what was about to come. He was like let's talk about, let's talk about healthcare, let's talk about not in healthcare, let's talk about medicine.
Speaker 3:Yeah, like let's talk about lipids, let's talk about molecular biology, let's talk about, like, the pathology of the aging mind. I mean, some of that stuff is heavy for me to even like listen to, like the let's even talk about proteins. Yeah, like the wife.
Speaker 1:He was like let's talk about death, like I mean, if I'm very honest, that's the piece that for a lot of us, is the piece that's like e why am I going to keep reading this?
Speaker 2:What I thought to know is like he did not. He talked about lifespan, but for him it was about health span and that this is actually a different. It's not that we want to live for 120, 130, 150. We want to live to 80 and 90, but being able to play with the grandkids, being able to play tennis, being able to shop on your own, like this is all like what he addressed and what I actually like. He picked the four diseases what are going to kill us very slowly and what was it? Heart disease, alzheimer's cancers and metabolic metabolic disease.
Speaker 1:They're the generative neurogenerative. Is that all right?
Speaker 3:Pretty column, not the huntsman the the horsemen, the horsemen, yes, yes. So there, I thought there were like three, I thought it was.
Speaker 1:What did you think it was Okay? So this is what.
Speaker 3:I understood from it there are three horsemen. That's it three, but metabolism affects all three.
Speaker 2:I understood cancer, alzheimer, heart disease and metabolic disease, and insulin resistance is the cause.
Speaker 3:That, that's what it is so that's you have. Number one is heart disease, is cardiovascular disease. That's what kills most people.
Speaker 1:And is that, and for sure most women right is? Is that yes?
Speaker 3:Oh, yes, everybody puts so much focus on breast cancer and cancer and cancer, but no, the biggest killer of people in the United States is heart disease and it gets not as much press as you know. Breast cancer awareness and, like cancer, cancer is like so much. Well, he said it, cancer is so much more difficult to prevent because it's we don't find. I mean prevention is more like with cardiovascular. We know about a lot of the preventable factors. So don't smoke, exercise, keep a healthy weight, keep a healthy diet, those types of things.
Speaker 3:Now, when you're talking about cancer prevention, the only thing that we really know about to prevent it is don't smoke or drink in excess. Now he sort of touched on that. He thinks metabolism has something to do with that as well. Yeah, but that's still quite difficult to uncover because of so many of the variations in cells that become cancerous, cause there are so many like genetic mutations that it's hard to pinpoint if they're spontaneously becoming that way, genetically becoming that way, or is there inflammation or something coming from like metabolism? So that's hard to find that because cancer cells are so like genetically diverse, they're crazy diverse. And then the other horseman is the neurodegenerative, and that has many factors as well. So there are. There is a cardiovascular way to become neurodegenerative where you have like or blood flow blockages in your coronary arteries and that's part of like smoking and it's like cardiovascular disease too and you stroke. But then you know, metabolism can have a lot to play there and there's other factors with, you know, your brain decaying, like alcohol and not for the lot.
Speaker 2:See for me Alzheimer's. I always call it diabetes, type three.
Speaker 3:Right, so metabolism has a play in almost everything.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So Tell us more about that. What do you call some, as you call diabetes type three, type three?
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's what I like. If we talk about Alzheimer's, is diabetes, type three. And again, this is the thing about like the insulin resistance in not having what Christina just said a healthy metabolism. And what I loved about this book and see, this is now where I'm coming from and this was like also a hot moment for me. His title for what was it? Exercise. He called it. It was the most powerful longevity drug. Yes, Hallelujah.
Speaker 2:Thank you. Yes, it was like a hot moment, because what he's talking about is that those diseases are created by unhealthy muscle and unhealthy muscle meaning that he had such a good explanation it's like a bathtub where it's like shut and water is coming in and the water cannot go out and it's over spilling. And that's basically like the food we are overeating, so we are overfed and he's building that wonderful bridge. So this is what's happening. Usually we store everything in our muscle and in our bloodstream and he gets into, like the glucose, how we measure it and all that, and if this gets overflowing too much, we over spill.
Speaker 2:We cannot store this excess calories in body fat and muscle anymore, like in glucose form in the muscle, so we're actually storing excess fats in the liver or in the muscle. We get fatty muscle, not good quality muscle, it's not really working. We get insulin resistant there is that there's some not working and we store it in visceral fats in the organs, so on places we do not want to have the fat here's where it goes gets worse. So now you have a fatty muscle not functioning. You're probably not exercising, you keep overeating and this spirals down and then you develop all those diseases he was talking about in an early age. This is not like in your fifties, that you wake up oops, I'm having practices. Or oh, now I have Alzheimer's.
Speaker 1:Now it starts very early. It's like a slow burn, right. Because I mean, I think the thing that hit me, you know, as the true layperson here, was he almost called out that he could typecast a profile and, with some reasonable prediction, articulate which of the four horsemen is probably going to start revealing itself and showing up, right and all just from you know, not just the genetic makeup but lifestyle voices. And that blew my mind because I think, up to this point, so much time, so much, things you hear about are all about genetics. It's genetics, right? Well, your mama had this, you're gonna have it. Even the questionnaire you know, doc, hey, even the questionnaire that Docs give us when we go to the doc, it's all about your daddy and your mama and da, da, da, da. Very few of those questionnaires say hey, what's your lifestyle like? Are you traveling a lot? Are you sitting a lot? Like very few?
Speaker 3:Now, you know the doc asks if you get like occasional exercise, moderate heavy. It asks you if you smoke, drink caffeine. If that's it, it's just like a few factors. Yeah, it stops. But now.
Speaker 1:Docs like you who I just happened to be able to say you double click right, you get to know, but that's not the norm. It's not the norm, yeah no, unfortunately not. Yeah, oh yes, if you don't know that if you don't know that, if you don't double click as a doctor to know all these things that aren't in the questionnaire, right, and you only have the basis of history, you're almost going to treat to the ultimate conclusion. Isn't that great? Am I wrong Like that? Like I got chills when I thought about how-.
Speaker 3:What I think To be treat to the conclusion. I'm sorry, I'm not following.
Speaker 1:So if so, okay. So what does that mean? Because it probably makes not much sense.
Speaker 1:But if you're looking at the questionnaire, right, and it talks about my mama having a certain medical condition, on my daddy having a certain medical condition, and the questionnaire doesn't have the double clicks that go into my lifestyle, that I'm layering on top of those things, there's a predisposition, that another physician not mine could go down a path to say you are predisposed to high blood pressure because your mama has high blood pressure, versus saying you're predisposed to high blood pressure because your diet looks like this, your sleep pattern looks like this, your exercise looks like this right, Instead of allowing me to stand distinctly on my own as an entity, with that being the double click plus, it's exactly the reverse.
Speaker 3:All right, I'm gonna be very honest. Yeah, medicine today isn't even looking at any of that, that family history questionnaire. Well, when it comes to OBGYN and that is what I am we're looking at that family history questionnaire as a predictor of cancer. So maybe primary care should look at it a little more and say oh, I mean.
Speaker 3:I do. I look at it and like, if I order like a cholesterol panel on you or I see your blood pressure is high and I see that you have a family history like that, I'm just like, well, you know you're? You know, yesterday we had someone who was very, what did she do? She immigrated here from Finland. Like, okay, she's very active, she's very healthy At her blood pressure.
Speaker 3:We almost sent her to the emergency room because she doesn't wanna take blood pressure medicine and her mom has high blood pressure and she's trying to, you know, and I'm like, okay, so I think you have something. You've been fighting it and you're doing a good job, but I think your genetics are probably gonna take you down that road and I could see that in her urine test that she has some kidney damage already. She's 52. So but when you're talking about the medicine right now, I'm gonna be very honest with you and he said it in the book yeah, it's not doing so well, it's not. So when you see a doctor or a PA or a nurse practitioner, you're not getting customized medical care. You are not.
Speaker 2:See what I like he said. He didn't talk about preventative, he talked about pro-active.
Speaker 3:It's medicine 2.0.
Speaker 1:It's medicine 2.0. And it is.
Speaker 3:And the thing is, because of the way that it's sort of set up here is like we don't have that much time with you and so if you have enough money and you get a concierge doctor, you're going to get better medical care, and that's the truth. So it's got worse. It's got worse over the years.
Speaker 1:Because now it's a business.
Speaker 3:It's a business. It's not just that we're working harder and faster than ever because the demands are greater, because of the flow of information coming in faster and we're trying to have to sort through that fast-paced information that's coming at us. So it's not just coming at us with research and we're having to like, read it, but your results are coming in faster and faster and faster through a computer. So we're trying to sift, sift, sift, sift, and then we're trying to see you and you have a 15-minute slot.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 3:Yeah, wait. I don't typically try to keep my slots for annual exams 30 minutes so that we have enough time, wow. But many times it isn't even that, because if someone comes in with a problem, you're double. You're seeing something, you're going to be double booked and I have to try to. Yeah, and there's a shortage. There's a shortage of primary cares and people have a difficult time getting in with a primary care or a primary care that takes their insurance. So there is kind of a crisis and it's really what it is. Wait a minute.
Speaker 1:I love it. Yeah, this is a mess. It's a medicine to put on. I love that Because this is like going in a whole other yeah. Yeah, this is a crisis, right, because we talk about the crisis in the sense of you know, like we said, healthcare costs and all that stuff. But what I'm hearing you say is, well, it's actually capacity, it's actually think about the business challenges that you're solving in a corporate sense or in a business sense, right?
Speaker 1:You need the capacity to be able to manage, to demand. And if that capacity doesn't exist, you're either going to get efficient at the risk of the quality, quite frankly right or you're going to have a bottleneck that just pushes everything back for everybody.
Speaker 3:And it's really not necessarily like. You can't even say it's a money thing, it's just an information highway. It's an information highway thing. It's really fast-paced. We're trying to keep on top of all this biopsies coming in and telling people their results and research coming in fast and keeping up to date and seeing people. It's just, you know, we're getting the information fast and it's really hard to stay, I don't know see all the people and do a good job with all this input.
Speaker 1:What do you think, Angela? What are you hearing? What do you think?
Speaker 2:Well, I totally get it. And this is the other flip side. On my side, when I have clients as a health coach, it's very personal. I work with clients a very long time. I work with the doctor and what I do is basically it's very individual and it's all about that person at that moment. Of course it's a different. It's all about health. You know, I can't diagnose, I can't, but we are doing the proactive stuff. So if clients come to me, yeah, I spend a lot, a lot of time with them. It is a six months, 12 months process and they only this is the funny thing, because this is the flip side they want the quick fix, so they go to the doctor and they want a prescription. It's a very interesting thing because this is now my side, explaining the foundation that we need to do and all the work. This is the well, this is very hard and this is uncomfortable.
Speaker 1:That part is actually the interesting dichotomy between what we just heard Christina say, right, right and what you're saying is, even when you break this down and you realize that the tools that will help you to sustain a healthy lifestyle are non-medical most of the time, right, exactly, exactly, you know, but we are conditioned to want that fix, quick, right. So we'll go back and we want the medicine, without appreciating that the medicine is what can put us in the tailspin to begin with. Yeah, Wow, that's so crazy. That just helps somebody, that literally just helps somebody. But just to frame it, let's frame it around this fictitious character that comes into your office and has this high blood pressure, has this family history of high blood pressure and doesn't want medicine. Doesn't want medicine, right? How do you get your head around poaching someone to take the more holistic, organic path that allows food to be medicine, that allows lifestyle to be healthier? How do you walk that fine line, right, right?
Speaker 3:Well, yeah, this is like the thing, so I don't know if that was the thing.
Speaker 1:Give us the thing.
Speaker 3:I'm not sure if that was the best example. She needed medicine or she's going to have a stroke?
Speaker 1:But, I think, that's something to that, because I actually know someone in my life too, literally right now, who is resisting medicine because of the mindset that medicine leads to bad things. But I believe I personally believe that if God created it all, I have to believe that all of it's good and it's safe.
Speaker 3:Okay, so here's the thing. So, when it comes to certain factors, many, many years ago we did not treat high blood pressure because we didn't have medication for it. People died at 65 because of a heart attack or stroke, and then they just died and we said, well, they were just old, but high blood pressure, we actually do have good medications for it. I mean, of course you want to lose weight, of course you want to exercise, of course you want to decrease stress, and this woman was doing all of those things.
Speaker 3:And it wasn't working. She'd been to the ER with migraine headaches and tingling down her arms and now we are seeing in her urine because we dipped it that there was some protein. So her kidneys are starting to have some damage. I'm like cut right there, one of the most I said to her. One of the most common reasons why people have renal failure or kidney transplant is because of untreated high blood pressure. Wow. So there comes a point right that I'm like and she goes how do I reverse that? I said kidney damage is not really reverse. You have to fight. You've got to know when it's the right time to take medicine.
Speaker 1:So there's a thing called emergency. She's already been in a healer.
Speaker 2:That's medicine 2.0. I think medicine is really good If something's broken, if something's burst, if something can be cut out or something. Then we go to medicine 2.0. Now, medicine 3.0 would have been if she would have started in her 20s or 30s, complete, always be on baseline target all her life. How old is she, Christina, 52. Yeah, that's the thing.
Speaker 1:But if you listen to what Christina said, though, Angela, there are some situations that are just going to be right, and so now I'm going to be. She's a skinny woman and she's like so that's right. So there's some situations that are just going to be right. How do we get our head around? How do we allow the messaging out there to not be so black or white, right?
Speaker 2:Right, because I think everybody's different. So there is bio-individuality and we have to find this is also in the book Like he has certain systems and he believes in those systems. Let's say about working out or about diet and about and he is, I think, in his book also very black and white. And I don't agree with that because everybody's different. So, yeah, we do whatever we can for that person and if it doesn't, it's interesting to. In every decade you're different. The diet would work for me in my 20s, doesn't work for me now, in my 40s, it doesn't work anymore. Girl talk I'm, but yeah, it changes. So we have to make adjustments and we have to listen to our body and have to find this this is my favorite word balance. I think I never find balance, but I'm trying.
Speaker 2:I catch myself not being balanced. But there is this fine line and I think if we listen to this and we do our best, there is a way that we can make it work. And do we have to do high intensity workouts on top of our stressful job and on top of taking care of kids and on top of? No, we don't. I don't agree with that. Like we can't go extreme, saying oh, because of if I only do this extreme workout, that extends my health? No, it doesn't. So there is a fine balance, what we have to do the dance with and we have to find the optimum in our lifestyle and what works for us. And I'm telling you, if, yeah, recommended you should do zone two training every day for 45 to 60 minutes. Who can do that? It's not what you can put into a regular person's lifestyle. If you can do a cardio training, a brisk walk twice a week, it's better than nothing. You know what I'm saying? That's right, so that has to be.
Speaker 1:You know what I will say too. What comes up for me when you say that is too often when we read books and I'm not picking on Peter anymore, I'm picking on all the books out there, right, yeah? So there's this prescriptive regimen that sort of makes this hypothesis about if you do these things, then you're going to dot, dot, dot, right, Right. A couple of things that I'm taking away. One when it comes to our state of being, there are many factors, no different than just about anything that we do. There are many factors, and they all need to be considered, but it's personal, right? So those factors that are mine are different than yours, Angela, are different than yours, Christina, right? So it's the whole thing, right.
Speaker 1:And then the other thing is, as we think about lifestyle, this notion of balance, while it is a really hard thing for a lot of us to get our head around for sure me. But what I've started thinking about is stop thinking about it being in a 24-hour day 50%, 50% and more. Think about it in the context of a seven-day week, right? And am I making the best choices in a seven-day week, such that I'm winning on the scale? And I heard someone, really cool, told me 51% wins. Who told me that 51% wins? Tell us about that, Angela, because I think that that is a brilliant way to take, honestly, to take some of the blood pressure-raising stress out of the whole matter, right.
Speaker 2:For me it's. I see this a lot in my clients. They want to give 100 percent all the time. 100 percent, 100 percent. Then I come to their homes or they come to me and we work out and they're all stressed and didn't sleep well. They're like this is not going to be a good workout, let's just cancel it. No, no, no, no, no. Today you didn't sleep, baby, real good and you had a stressful day. It's okay, but we do whatever we can and we make the best out of it. But you're here and you're showing up and you're giving 51 percent and that matters.
Speaker 3:You're here, you're showing up.
Speaker 2:And I have to say Christina is one of the best examples for that. No, matter what she fights, sometimes through the days and stuff, and I can tell she's tired, but she is doing her workout and she is accomplishing the 51 percent. She's one of the very good examples of being consistent and living it. Exactly what I just said. You do not have to give all the time 100 percent, the 51 percent, these are the ones that matters showing up and doing it, not quitting. Thank you.
Speaker 3:Well, I think maybe in the book he's bringing up a lot of great topics about the horsemen, the things that can kill us or debilitate us. And now what are the things we can do to expand our good times in the latter 10 years of our life and just shrink down the suffering? And I know in this one part of the book he said, well, I wouldn't rely too much on personal trainers and blah, blah, blah. I think what he a tool or something he might have used as a health coach. And that is what Angela is. She is a health coach and this is somebody that you can get used to help to customize this thing that we say lifestyle, this customize our lifestyle so that it can fit into our life. So let me give you some concrete examples of that. Go for it and it has a pertain to me, but you know All good.
Speaker 3:And now when I met Angela several years ago, because I was going to LA Fitness and I decided to get some personal training there and then the personal trainer I was with left and then they put me with Angela and it was really great. You know, it's been a great fit and then over the years, I've learned. Some of you know the things that she has taught me. So, okay, yeah, if you pack your lunch and you take it with you to work, you know, and I I do not food prep all day. I'm not good at it, like you know, for the week, but I'm very good at my breakfast and my lunch. Let's get that dinner down, right. So, uh, you know how you take.
Speaker 3:If you take your lunch with you, you'll take it in like a bag, right, and it's like an insulated bag and maybe it's ugly, all right, she told me about this website called six pack bags, woo Lava resource. Six pack bags is great. So six pack bags. I have a backpack. It's a little black nylon backpack that's insulated and it doesn't look like a stinking old insulated cooler right, but it has little ice packs and it comes with some, you know, plastic containers in there or you don't have to use their containers, use whatever you want and it has room inside to put like maybe you know your water bottle I put in there, I fill it up with my water, my Yeti cooler. There's room in there to put your silverware, your apple, your dried snacks and things. And I've learned some certain you know snacks that she's told me about that are really great and taste good and they're quick and grab them.
Speaker 1:What are they? You got to share them, oh, great, interesting.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I like, I like those snacks by rhythm. You know, they're like dried veggies. Yeah, some of them are good and some of them are not.
Speaker 3:But the ones that I like. They sound really weird. It's dried cauliflower and they are very crunchy and yummy. The sea salt is good. They're white cheddar, which is not white cheddar. It's made with nutritional yeast, which sounds weird, but it tastes great. That's good too. Sometimes the quality of it I don't find it great. There are times that I'll get a bag and I'm like, oh Jesus, some air must have gotten in here and it's like chewy. It's not crunchy anymore and that pisses me off. But most, 90% of the time, they're good, they're spot on. You know, I do have a food scale at home and I do weigh and measure my breakfast and my lunch, so I put the plate on it and my fruit and vegetables and whatever, what else. I guess I do pay a lot of extra money for caught up fruit, because that's what works.
Speaker 3:I'm not going to cut it up.
Speaker 3:It's not fast enough for me. Yeah, that's another thing, protein. So a protein powder that I really love is by Vega, v-e-g-a Vega, and I've tried different Vega protein powders, but I go with the Vega Sport because I'm not sure what it is, because when you mix it it's just really dissolves really well, and I love the Vega Sport chocolate. The vanilla is awesome too. You could customize the vanilla to anything you want, like. I think it's a good base. So like we ran out of chocolate today here. So if I have some good cacao powder, I just put a tablespoon of that in there. It turned into chocolate. Or you could put some powdered peanut butter in there and a little chocolate and you can make a chocolate peanut butter. So the Vega Sport protein is great.
Speaker 3:If you're looking for something sweet and yummy, there's a really cool company. You should tell me about what's that one. Oh, king Line. It's one word King Line. They make these protein butters and they taste so good. I stopped buying them, though, for a while, because, let me tell you, they are so good that I'll just eat them out of the jar, and that's not balanced, and they make a protein brittle. It's like peanut brittle, but it's healthy. Yeah, but that's. I am so addicted to it, like I can't, like the jar won't last, like I'm going to just be honest. So I had to put the kibosh on the King Line for a bit. But if you want to try that and you're better at that than me go for it.
Speaker 3:What else do we do around here? We got the. I mean, I found this one on my own and I told you she heard about the daily harvest, daily harvest, so we get it comes on dry ice and they're like there's a cauliflower, a bag of cauliflower rice with some little lentils in there and some black rice, and that one's good. But a lot of them are smoothies. Now, I don't like to do a lot of smoothies for myself because, like Angela told me, she like it's a lot of fruit smoothies.
Speaker 3:Like Peter said, you know it's too much ground up sugar from the fruits, right, but my daughter, she does a lot of the smoothies, although if I do a smoothie I'll put the powder, like the, the Vega powder, in it, and so then there's protein in it.
Speaker 3:It'll last me longer because I did have a protein. I had a the mint cacao smoothie at lunch with a scoop of the Vega protein powder in it and that way I felt much more satisfied for longer. So those are some concrete examples of, I think, how a health coach could kind of learn who you are and learn like what your rhythm is with your home life and your work and like kind of find these things that will fit there, like okay. So now I got my backpack with my food, I got some protein powder and some shakes, and then she's really good with the workouts because she doesn't over train you. It's not like a trainer that you think is going to just yell at you and boot camp you, and so she customizes it and makes it very meaningful so that you build muscle in a safe, effective way, and I love it.
Speaker 3:It sounds gentle. I think he needed to say like you need to use a health coach.
Speaker 1:All right, come on, let's hear the health coach, angela, tell us where we're right and where we're wrong.
Speaker 2:I just want to reflect. I mean, thank you, christina. But yeah, with Christina, when I started working with her, she didn't have a lot of muscle. She was in a very stressful life situation at that moment. There was a lot going on and what we actually did, we toned down the intensity of the workouts and I wanted to build robust muscle. Muscle is the body armor. This is what keeps you going and this will also help you to shed the body fat, and that was like one of her goals. So I focused on literally putting on quality muscle and creating a healthy tissue.
Speaker 2:And then what I love, what she just described she was she loves food, as you can tell, like she can really give you good tips and she's a very good cook. But she mentioned it all the time and this is what the whole purpose was of this nutrition change. She always talks about protein. Yes, christina's meals are very healthy, but she always has a robust amount of protein as well to feed the muscle. So she was healing her metabolism, she was building the muscle, she was shedding off the body fat and she got going and calmed her whole system down and her metabolism is like clockwork now. She can do whatever she wants. As soon as she pulls it out on a diet or whatever she does, the body reacts. She's very, very healthy and very good and very strong and she accomplished a wonderful goal and she's at that level and she's holding and maintaining it. Now there is really, like I said, at that point she has a flexibility and a food freedom and she's doing the dance. You know what I'm saying.
Speaker 3:She's doing the dance. Yes, the dance, the dance.
Speaker 1:So you guys, that is actually the phrase of. I think this talks so much, right? I think it's the dance, the dance. Yes, and that's a perfect captioning because you know, kind of getting back to my point, there's so many options that we all have.
Speaker 1:There's so many workouts you can choose. There's so many, so many, so many. I think for me, I'm in a season where it's the fluidity that feels nice to my body. It's waking up one morning and acknowledging that I flew all day the day before and my body is telling me I need to ease into my day and I need to feel the sun or feel the breeze and just get moving, just move.
Speaker 1:Or there could be another morning where I wake up fully rested and I feel like I just need the intensity, or it could be two of those different things in the same day. And so I think if there's one thing that I'm evolving to still so much baby steps to learn under Angela's umbrella is just let go of this notion of one approach and just start to allow your body and your feel, your whole body, your whole self. Start to allow it to talk to you. It'll even tell you what supplements you might need that day. As I'm getting a little bit better at it, I'm also seeing that every day you don't feel like you need the fish oil, right, because you ate a whole bunch of fish the night before and you're eating fish that same day, right? It's a time where I didn't think about it that way.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think a lot of people are so out of touch that they don't know anymore what healthy feels.
Speaker 3:Yes, and actually being able to experience this.
Speaker 2:I would wish that's for everybody, that they would give themselves the chance to actually get started and experience it and live through it and actually feel awake and healthy, and then they know what to do, can I tell you?
Speaker 1:I'm gonna tell you even one more on that that you just said. I would venture to say there are a lot of people that don't really know what hunger pains feel like. Yeah, like literally. We don't. We're so regimented with either six foods a day or three and all the things that we just we wake up and it's just what you do you eat.
Speaker 2:But you know what, Bonnie, what you said, I think this was a great. Okay, this was mindset. Hunger used to feel pain. For me, hunger is like, oh yay, I'm burning body fat right now I'm at that point, for, yes, I'm at it.
Speaker 1:Reframe. I do not eat right now. Reframe. Oh yeah, it's not pain. It's not pain. No, it's not pain. My body's working for me.
Speaker 2:It's actually telling me my body's tapping into the body fat. That's what I want. So this little brown in here, yes, I want to feel it, I really do. It's not pain, it's actually my body saying hello. I'm burning body fat right now and I don't get it.
Speaker 3:It's probably good for your other systems too, like your brain and your organs, to just like he even said it in the book that there are certain like pathways that are being turned on. I think he was saying, Foxo, he's talking about your stuff. That was, yeah, turning on when you have hunger and we're not allowing ourselves to have that hunger or we have too much access to quench the hunger, and that is something that might not be supporting us long term.
Speaker 1:Wow, and that'll take us down a whole path of intermittent fasting and thinking about breakfast in a different way. And it's not breakfast because it's 6 AM and I just woke up. It's breakfast because it's my first meal of the day, and that's when it is right. Right, there's a whole path, you guys. I feel like we have only just scratched the surface, but I feel like there are some themes that really come loud and clear, and I'll just summarize a few of what I think, and then I'll let you guys weigh in on what else you think would be notable for folks that are enjoying this conversation with us.
Speaker 1:One I would say is that we own our health care. Yep, and gone are the days of I have my doctor and I go to my appointments annually and life is good Because we just heard and have to acknowledge that you can have the best, most compassionate, most skilled doctor. But the math isn't mathy when it comes to having the ability to really root in there on every aspect with everybody, and so that was a big takeaway for me. The second one would be when I start to really tap in to whole living for myself. I am not just thinking about it one dimensional. It is diet, it is exercise, it is mental clarity and how all those things sort of come together and manifest themselves for me. And being tapped in in tune for me is being available to just kind of go with the flow, sometimes right, and be gentle and kind to myself. So that's what I'm taking away, all right, so I'm going to go next, Christina, and then we'll let Angela take us home.
Speaker 3:Yeah.
Speaker 1:Christina, what do you think? Tell me.
Speaker 3:Oh, you want me to take us home, or Angela?
Speaker 1:Angela is going to take us home, unless you have any. Do you want to add some more to what I said? No, I think.
Speaker 3:I think I'll just briefly. It ties into what Angela said and it's that 51%. It's that balance, so it doesn't have to be like all or nothing and we want to just get into a good zone when it comes to food, exercise and activity, sleep and stress reduction. That's really important. Medicine 2.0 can help us, but those things are your foundation and don't stress too much about it. Go for that 51%.
Speaker 1:All right, I love it. All right, angela, take us home. Health coach. Health coach All right.
Speaker 2:Well, we heard a lot of things today what we can do and I think if you pick three things and have a goal of doing just those three things a day as a little checklist and this is like the promise to yourself that you want to do something good for you, for yourself then pick those three things and make it like reachable. Don't set the goals too crazy, too high. Be realistic, do step-by-step approaches and then improve by this like the next step, and then the next step, and then the next step. Don't look at the top of the mountain immediately. Start on the base and just go step-by-step and reach new goals and then one day we'll be on top of the mountain and you will enjoy the view, but you don't have to look up the mountain right away.
Speaker 1:Ooh Y'all. This is good. This is so good. I am so sure that more than me has been truly blessed by this conversation. Thank you both. You're both very busy. You're doing goodness in the world and that's why I wanted to pull your voices front here. If you want to be coached by Angela, who is scaling her business now to go beyond folks that meet with her in person but to be accessible and available to folks that are literally around the world, you can contact her on Instagram at healthcoachangela, and I think that's going to be the best place to follow her and to get information around some of the cool things that she's launching in her business.
Speaker 1:Christina did an excellent job of giving us some sneak peek into some of the coaching, and just stay tuned here. Soon I'll be doing some more, but I tell you what it is really just a gift to be able to share the thinking for both of you, because so much of us are not only caring for ourselves. We're caring for others and we're trying to create healthy strategies, healthy lifestyles that this next generation, quite frankly, that's following us. They're going to write the ticket for what that 3.0 looks like, because they will have a new baseline in what we've had, so I'm super grateful to know you both and to be able to call you both friends. Thank you for so much for joining us, thank you.
Speaker 3:Thank you, Chandra.