The Midlife Feast
The Midlife Feast
#157 - Finding Your Movement Rhythm with ADHD and Perimenopause with Christine Chessman
What did you think of this episode? Send me a text message and let me know!
In this episode, I sat down to chat with our very own Joyful Movement Coordinator in the Midlife Feast. At 49, Christine received an ADHD diagnosis after years of masking. She shares how perimenopause brought long-overlooked symptoms into focus.
We unpack how midlife hormonal shifts can amplify ADHD traits and why rigid fitness plans rarely work for neurodivergent brains. As a movement coach, Christine offers a refreshing approach to movement in trading consistency for persistence, flexibility, and self-compassion.
We also bust the motivation myth and share simple mindset shifts that make movement feel doable, even on low-energy days.
If traditional routines haven’t worked for you, Christine’s approach might be the reset you’ve been looking for. And if you love what you hear, don’t forget she shares more inside The Midlife Feast community, including videos and tips for all fitness levels.
Connect with Christine
Website: hellofitnesschristine.com
Instagram:@hellofitnesschristine
Like what you learned? Check out these other episodes!
Story Session: Navigating ADHD in Midlife & Menopause
Why We Binge: Unpacking the Restrict-Binge Cycle with Toni Rudd, RD
How to Un-Diet Your Relationship with Movement in Midlife with Christine Chessman
How to Fall in Love with Movement While Rejecting Anti-Fat Bias with Louise Green
Ditch the “I’ll be good today” loop in 5 days with the Midlife Morning Makeover Email Challenge! ☀️ Head to menopausenutritionist.ca/morningmakeover
Looking for more about midlife, menopause nutrition, and intuitive eating? Click here to grab one of my free guides and learn what I've got "on the menu" including my 1:1 and group programs. https://www.menopausenutritionist.ca/links
Hi and welcome to the Midlife Feast, the podcast for women who are hungry for more in this season of life. I'm your host, dr Jenn Salib-Huber. I'm an intuitive eating dietitian and naturopathic doctor and I help women manage menopause without dieting and food rules. Come to my table, listen and learn from me trusted guest experts in women's health and interviews with women just like you. Each episode brings to the table juicy conversations designed to help you feast on midlife. And if you're looking for more information about menopause, nutrition and intuitive eating, check out the midlife feast community, my monthly membership that combines my no nonsense approach that you all love to nutrition with community, so that you can learn from me and others who can relate to the cheers and challenges of midlife. Hi, christine, welcome back to the Midlife Feast.
Christine Chessman:Thank you, Jen.
Jenn Salib Huber:How are you? I'm good. I'm good. Feasters in the community will be very excited to hear us have this conversation because, of course, you are our Joyful Movement Coordinator and so they hear and learn from you pretty regularly, and you've been on the podcast before and I've been a guest on your podcast. But today we're talking about something a little bit different, kind of adjacent to the food and movement conversations that we usually have, and we're talking a little bit about perimenopause, adhd and the kind of intersection with food and movement.
Jenn Salib Huber:And, as I've shared before, I have ADHD. I was diagnosed in my kind of late teens, early 20s, but you are recently diagnosed with ADHD, right? Yes, yeah, and I really appreciate you being willing to talk about this, because this is a conversation that I'm seeing a lot more of on social media, maybe because the algorithm is feeding that to me now, but certainly it seems like it's a conversation that's happening in a lot of places, in a lot of circles and, as you know, you know, storytelling is such, I think, a powerful way of sharing our experiences so that we feel less alone and that we can learn. So I'd love to hear a little bit about your story of kind of being diagnosed in midlife, but just how that came about.
Christine Chessman:Yeah, what a good question. So just prepare yourself for tangents. It's going to happen. So I was diagnosed in January of this year. This is 2025. And it's yeah. So it's been a long process for me and it's something that I never thought about until a few years ago. I watched a TED talk on a woman, I think, think, and she was in her 40s and she was late diagnosed ADHD, and she started to describe what life was like as a parent before she was diagnosed and how she always blamed herself for not being able to cope with you know, and regulate her emotions and plan everything and get everything, and and it just resonated so much with me that I thought, hmm, maybe. And then I started listening to lots and lots and lots of different podcasts, reading lots of studies and talking to people, and it just seemed to be wow, this is exactly, and I think you're always looking for some sort of thing. That's going to be the thing.
Jenn Salib Huber:This is what's wrong.
Christine Chessman:This is going to make everything okay, and so for a long time I thought, once I get my diagnosis, that will be it, I will finally be able to cope and it will be different. But it's been quite a process since, which we can go into, but it's. I think the reason that I sought the diagnosis at this point is, as we're going to chat about it is maybe the beginnings of perimenopause. I'm 49 now and it's definitely been the last few years that things have started to change for me in terms of hormones, moods, lots of symptoms, just feeling not quite myself, which I'm sure lots of people can can identify with.
Christine Chessman:And I think you get to a point where you just can't mask anymore. You can't pretend everything's just okay, you can't keep trying as hard all the time, so the mask drops and then it's like oh, so that's why the timing, that that's what, that's the reason for the timing around it.
Jenn Salib Huber:And the question that I see a lot on social media and in the news is why are we seeing so many people being diagnosed now in midlife? And you know, it certainly seems, like I said, whether it's the algorithm or just the news cycle, but you know we're talking about it more. But I think it's important for people to recognize that if you are diagnosed with ADHD in adulthood, you didn't develop it in adulthood, you had it as a child and often we learn to mask and this is more common in girls and in women we learn to kind of cover up. I think it's the root of a lot of the perfectionism that many of us who are also recovering from diet and wellness culture can relate to that.
Jenn Salib Huber:If I make everything look okay on the outside, then no one will see. You know, kind of, what a shit show it is on the inside. If I can just make the outside look pretty, if I can just look and fit in with everyone else, then no one will see how much I'm struggling. And again, just that feeling of like feeling broken right, like there's something wrong. I can't put my finger on it, but I can't do things the way that other people do as easily it was, you know, for me I can look back and I have the hyperactivity and the inattention and one of the things that my mom will, you know, tell anybody, even to this day, is that I could not sit still If I was in front of the TV. My legs were swinging up and down and I'm still like that. Everybody who knows me knows that like I hit the ground running and I have a really hard time sitting still. But at least now I can contextualize that.
Jenn Salib Huber:It doesn't feel like something that's wrong with me. It is part of who I am. Knowing that it's also part of the ADHD gives me context but also helps me, you know, to have self-compassion and to not feel like there's something wrong. So that was a long-winded, tangent way of saying you know, for people who are diagnosed, like you, in late life, later life. It doesn't mean that you developed it. It means that you know the unmasking, as you described, has made it more obvious and as we learn about estrogen and the brain, we do know that. You know, as the brain goes through this remodeling, through perimenopause and through that transition, the estrogen receptors and the amount of estrogen that our brain is receiving, those fluctuations do impact things like attention concentration. People without ADHD might experience that as brain fog. You know people with ADHD experience it as brain fog and ADHD. Did you have brain fog? Did you get it? Did you, or do you have a lot of that?
Christine Chessman:Yeah, I mean it's, it's really interesting for me. Because I think it's interesting, I always, I always say that and then I go to me it's interesting and obviously my we've talked about this before. My mom has recently passed away, but she had alzheimer's for many, many years. So I, when I have brain fog moments, I get, oh you know, I start going oh, I've forgotten the name of that actor, why have I forgotten the name? So and I have to kind of talk to myself and be like christine, it's okay there are many reasons, um, and it's very normal and it's so rather than spiraling um.
Christine Chessman:So I definitely have a little bit of brain fog, but it doesn't seem too bad at the moment.
Jenn Salib Huber:No more than usual, jen and anybody who wants to learn about brain fog. I'll link to an episode that I did last year or the year before on brain fog. But what other things did you notice when you mentioned that unmasking, like what kind of, made you think? Hmm, I think I want to look into this a bit more.
Christine Chessman:It was always that idea that I was on the periphery or I was not quite the same as everybody else, that I thought about things differently. I was very sensitive. It's now that's something that I've just embraced recently. I am very sensitive, um, and emotionally dysregulated, and that's great for some things because I can get so excited about things, but I can get very low about other things and it's yeah, and that's. That was something which I think um an overwhelm. I get very easily overwhelmed and I think it was sort of seeing my kids, seeing myself through my kids eyes, that I'm like, oh, I just not. I think maybe I need to get some help here.
Christine Chessman:And I, you know, I spoke and you know I had a therapist tell me I think you might have ADHD and my hairdresser. My hairdresser said, christine, have you ever been? And I said why? And she went because people come and they just sit in the chair. And you don't sit in the chair, I'm just like always, oh, there's my coat, I better get my coffee, and then I haven't got my water and then I'm just gonna go reach behind. And she said, you know, some people just come and sit in the chair and I went do they. She's like you've never once just sat in there, and it's so interesting to me.
Christine Chessman:There's just little things like that which suddenly became really clear yeah, and it was suddenly that I thought maybe this is why I struggle a little bit more than some of my peers and it just for me, the diagnosis is not the answer, because there's so much more to it, but it is a way of giving myself a little bit more self-compassion, and leading with that self-compassion which you always talk about, rather than oh, why can't I do that that everybody else seems to be able to cope and do everything, why can't I?
Jenn Salib Huber:um, and knowing that actually I'm doing everything that I can and that's okay, if you know what I mean, yeah, and it's so interesting when you find out that you know you have a diagnosis or you just get an explanation for something. It really does change how you view things right, so that you don't you're not so hard on yourself and that maybe you're you know some of that shame is allowed to kind of leave the building because it's nothing to be ashamed of, to have a brain that works a little bit differently or that needs a different support system. I'd love to know, looking back or maybe even like currently, how do you feel knowing this now? Where do you see any kind of intersections with your relationship with movement?
Christine Chessman:It's a really interesting one. It's circling back to what you said about trying to fit in, and trying because your brain doesn't quite work. In the same way, you're trying to look at ways that you can make yourself fit in, and I think it's such a key thing when it comes to, maybe, my eating patterns and then movement patterns in my teens, because all I wanted was to be in that size. You know, I'm going to sort of say size 10. That was what. You know what. What was the ideal UK size in those days? And I wanted to be that. Naturally I wasn't, but I really just wanted to be that and that's. That was the of it just wanting to feel like everybody else. Not that everybody else was that size, but I wanted to just feel that was okay. You know, people couldn't say I was different in any way. They couldn't say anything about my weight if I was this in inverted commas ideal size, which my body was never meant to be.
Christine Chessman:In inverted commas ideal size which my body was never meant to be and movement became a thing, because I never really enjoyed movement before. I mean I was, you know, I was a bit chaotic.
Christine Chessman:But I never enjoyed movement before I started doing it as a way to lose weight or to manipulate my body um and then, after many years of of punishing myself, I started to see the benefits of movement and then changed my relationship to it.
Christine Chessman:So it was never something that I naturally I was never kind of sporty at school or I didn't naturally gravitate towards it until I was using it as a tool for weight loss. And that's something which I always say normalized the feeling of you know you may have started moving because you wanted to change the way your body looked or the way you thought about your body, but actually sometimes that can change and that can evolve into wow. This makes me feel really good when I do this particular way of moving, I feel good in my body, I feel energized and then you can start thinking about it differently. So it's not I think that's something that I like to normalize with people because it's there's no judgment if you get into movement to manipulate your body, because I think we all have at some point in our lives due to the dieting culture that we live in but it's, it's lovely when it can just pivot and become something completely different.
Jenn Salib Huber:And I think that's the difference between intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. So it wasn't until I really started to pay attention to how movement made me feel, meaning that it helped with, you know, managing stress, with managing inattention, with managing my emotions for sure that I started to notice that connection kind of just with my nervous system and was no longer really as motivated and eventually not motivated at all by burning calories or how it was going to change my body, and so really being able to connect it to how I was feeling was kind of the game changer for me. But I mean, there is quite a bit of research looking at movement and really any anything under that mental health umbrella, including ADHD, and that you know it helps with maybe not the symptoms, sometimes the symptoms, but more, really more with kind of the coping right. So and really that comes down to regulation and really that comes down to regulation, what do you notice about movement and your ADHD symptoms?
Christine Chessman:So movement is a very important tool for me, which is a good thing. It's my job, so that's quite good. But generally the mornings, I find, are my most anxious time. I've got the most kind of energy that I need to release and I find if I can channel it into moving my body, getting out of my head into my body, it is game-changing, makes me see the day differently, makes me feel different about the day, makes me more productive, nicer to the kids, um, and to my husband, um. Yeah, so generally I'm a nicer person, jen.
Jenn Salib Huber:Now I'm curious because one of the hallmarks or trademarks of ADHD is that a lot of people don't like routine. They like novelty, they like spontaneity. Following a schedule can be not only challenging because of the executive functioning stuff, but also just because it gets boring. So it wasn't until I really gave myself permission to move on my own terms, which means having the time set aside in my day and in my week but not really deciding what I'm going to do, specifically allowing myself to kind of scratch that spontaneous itch that it really became also a source of like pleasure and fun and novelty. Right Like I like trying new things, but I don't want to do that new thing for too long. Do you notice that?
Christine Chessman:or kind of how are you with routine and structure around movement? So that really is the basis of my work. So I kind of most of my clients work very similarly and don't love the structure, want to love the structure, but just can't stay with the structure and notice energy fluctuations, notice, you know, changes in moods with perimenopause or with their monthly cycles, and it is just not realistic for me for somebody to be consistent with movement. Every week will not look the same, every day will not look the same. So I think once I accepted that and embraced that, I started to work differently with clients to be able to have a personal trainer and you can really work with that person to kind of be flexible around your movement patterns and to kind of keep you interested and keep that variability, just, you know, to keep those, the exercise attuned to your mood and to kind of keep you interested as well as making progress towards your goals.
Christine Chessman:That's quite complex because people will have goals and you know I have some goals but I now hold them lightly. I always talk to clients about that. I hold the goals lightly because it might be that the time that I made the goal was a very different time of my life to. It is now and it just doesn't serve me to keep that goal. Yeah, so it's giving yourself permission, as you said, to let go of the goals, maybe set new ones, maybe set smaller ones, maybe lower the bar, maybe try something different. And it's we spoke about this previously, but it's about being persistent with movement rather than consistent yes, what a great distinction that is and it is just keeping starting again.
Christine Chessman:so that's something that I can't take credit for. That's from a previous guest on my podcast, hannah Husband, and they were very much about let's stop thinking about consistency and start thinking about starting again and stop beating ourselves up for the fact that we life got in the way and we weren't able to stick to our fitness routine for two weeks, because that that is what's going to happen and that's okay. Yeah, but it's just that idea of coming back to it and being kind to yourself.
Jenn Salib Huber:And really that's letting go of the all or nothing thinking right, which is a big part of helping people get out of diet culture and the diet mentality, but it spills over into our relationship with movement.
Jenn Salib Huber:And certainly one of the common features of ADHD is this you know, difficulty with kind of managing the in-between steps, and so if we start something and it doesn't work quickly, doesn't work the way that we think it should, or if it takes too long and it gets boring, it's very tempting to just say, ah, screw it, I'm going to try something else. But being able to lower the bar, to shift the goalpost, to shift the goal, is really practicing attunement. And you know attunement is a skill that we talk about in intuitive eating, but it really applies to anything. It's just being able to observe without judgment, actually kind of look at what's happening and why and if something isn't working and this is what I think an important question and why and if something isn't working and this is what I think an important question is to be able to ask why it didn't work, with that self-compassion and not the judgment, right, like I used to look at myself and be like why can't I do these? You know 75 hard plans.
Jenn Salib Huber:I actually never tried that. That's like newer but like versions of that 10 years ago.
Jenn Salib Huber:I remember working with a trainer one time and she invited me to participate in this like 90 day challenge and it was, you know, either doing something at home or going to the gym three times a week for 90 days and there was a big poster on the wall of all the people at her gym. It was a smaller gym that had signed up to do. It was a smaller gym that had signed up to do it. And the shame that I felt. But when, by like the second week, I had like missed two days, it's really kind of one of those moments of oh gosh, is this where I belong? You know, is this where I am going to thrive? Is this where I'm going to learn the habits and behaviors that are going to support me long beyond 90 days? Learn the habits and behaviors that are going to support me long beyond 90 days.
Christine Chessman:There's some so many parallels with with eating and movement, in terms of. You know, a diet is like 12 weeks. You know, eat this way and then you will be completely different. And you know, you feel such shame if you can't stick to it and you you think it's lack of willpower, for its lack of, whereas it's actually just your body going I need food you know, and and it's it is.
Christine Chessman:It's actually a mechanism which keeps us alive because your, your hunger and fullness signals are there for a reason. But it's similar with movement. You know you can have a 12-week plan and your body will at some point go. That's enough, that's too much. You know, if it is at a 12 week plan and your body will at some point go, that's enough, that's too much. You know, if it is at a pace that you simply cannot sustain, your body will let you know. And it's. You know and we were saying this before it's not as sexy as it to say that move for life. You know it's not. We're not promising you. You know body transformations and all, but we're promising that you'll feel better. And you know you really might. It might make a massive difference to your life, but you kind of got to keep going with it.
Christine Chessman:You know it's not just for 12 weeks or six weeks, it's from now on. It's from now on. It's finding a way of moving that can fit in with your life, that you can keep going with in some form, in some form, and that can change and you can pivot. But it's about always coming back to the movement and I what I?
Jenn Salib Huber:one of the things that I found really helpful when I was trying to kind of just understand that intersection between ADHD and eating behaviors and moving behaviors was to really understand how behavior change happens.
Jenn Salib Huber:It's not a light switch, it's not something that you just choose to change and the change happens. Change and the change happens. Understanding okay, if I want to change my habit, I need to understand first what has that habit served? What part of my life is actually relies on that habit right now. And then understanding habit science of okay, if I want to change something, I have to make it easy to remember. I have to make it easy to do. I have to weave it into my life in such a way that it doesn't feel like too much work, because my brain is always going to choose the path of least resistance. Yeah, of course, right.
Jenn Salib Huber:And so if somebody who has never moved before and I see this lots with with food I'm sure you see this with movement too where people will say, like I really, really want to do this, but I can't seem to get started, I can't seem to find the motivation, and what they think they want from us is motivation. But you can't give someone motivation. It's not something that you can and it's not an exchange of energy from one person to the other. It would be great if it was, but you know motivation has to come from what you hope to feel or how your life will be improved or changed and how that will impact your experience of being a human in order for it to feel that motivation.
Jenn Salib Huber:I guess that people think it is Because, unless something is really terrible, bad is going to kill you in the next like you know, few minutes motivation actually requires a lot of capacity. So if it's going to kill you in five minutes, you have no problem finding the motivation to avoid whatever that is. But if it could possibly kill you in 25 years, your brain can take its chances and do something that's more fun. So we have to move away from this idea that, like motivation is something that you can like dig up or kind of get from somebody else, but somebody can help you understand the habits and how behaviors change. And with ADHD, I think that that is a really, really helpful tool that if the person that you're working with whether it's a trainer or a dietitian or any other kind of coach understands habit science, behavior change, that can be a game changer. I think.
Christine Chessman:And motivation is a really interesting one, because I follow Jill Angie and she's been on my podcast as well, who's not your average runner, and she has a whole episode on. Motivation is bullshit, which I tend to agree with. I often wake up and go. I don't want to move today. No, I don't want to move, and that's okay, cause you, as you're saying, the brain has gone. You know, let's, let's make it easy for ourselves. You don't need to move, and that's, and you know, let's make it easy for ourselves. You don't need to know.
Christine Chessman:And I like to normalize that. That's okay. But I then go. But how would I want to feel today? I would really love to feel energized today, because I'm a bit tired or I'd like to feel relaxed, so that then will spur me on. I don't feel motivated. But once I start giving myself that five minutes, then I feel okay, okay, this, I understand why I'm doing it. So it is absolutely okay to wake up and go. I don't want to do this, absolutely, you know, and I think it's normalizing that, rather than feeling I should feel motivated and I should. No, it's okay if you don't. That's why we have trainers, that's why we have groups, that's why we have classes so that we can all support each other. Yeah, when we wake up and go.
Jenn Salib Huber:No, yeah, if anybody thinks that when you quote, unquote, find motivation, that you wake up in the morning and it's like the thing you're most excited to do, that's not usually how it works. And one of the other one of the things that I do very similar to what you do is I ask myself okay, I have 100% permission to say yes or no to this. I really believe that and trust that, but how am I going to feel in 30 minutes if I do and how am I going to feel in 30 minutes if I don't? Yeah, yeah, and it's just an easy little thought experiment and I don't commit even to doing the 30 minutes.
Jenn Salib Huber:I mean, way back 10 years ago, I would have never pressed pause or stop in the middle of a workout. I would have always pushed myself to finish it to the end. But now I have absolutely no hesitation if I feel like I'm done, for whatever reason, if I feel like I need a break, I have often pressed pause and taken a 10 minute break in a 30 minute video. I never would have done that before. Or, you know, modifying, just doing something completely different or doing something else than what is being instructed, because it doesn't feel right in my body, but knowing that it still counts. You know, those are kind of some of the big changes that undieting my relationship with movement, along with food, has really allowed me to do.
Christine Chessman:Do you know? There's my favorite class ever I used to teach yeah, it was a strength class. I used to teach online and this was, I think, during COVID and just after and I had one attendee and I just loved her so much and she used to just do her own thing, like not one thing was anything that I demoed, not close to anything I demoed. And then, and really it was beautiful, she used to just move how she wanted to move and she just liked being there with us and kind of moving at the same time, but it was just giving herself permission to do what she wanted in that time and it was just I loved it.
Christine Chessman:It really made an impact on me because I was like and I think I do exactly the same as you were saying if, for example, today on my workout, there was a split squat, I didn't want to do a split squat, so I did a single leg deadlift, because I quite like those, I like a bit of balance and and so it's, it's knowing that you can mix it up, you can stop, you can have a break, you can, you know, use lighter weights, you can use body weight. Only you can make it work for you on any given day. It's freeing. It's quite freeing, isn't it?
Jenn Salib Huber:and it's really I mean, and that's not much different than how I teach people to meal plan right. So lots of people with ADHD, you know, benefit from some structure around food and movement. But you know, sometimes we incorporate some meal planning around food so that there's less decision fatigue, fewer decisions to make, you know kind of what you need to have and things like that. But most people when they think of meal planning, they have this very rigid idea of what that involves and you know you have to plan every meal and you have to have the perfect grocery list and all the things that you need and you have to make the meals as you lay them out, otherwise you failed.
Jenn Salib Huber:And anybody who has tried to do that you know perfect 21 meal meal plan knows that life gets lifey, life gets in the way and you need to be able to adapt.
Jenn Salib Huber:It needs to be flexible and forgiving, and so that's why I love talking about.
Jenn Salib Huber:You know forecasting. So you know looking at your capacity and then being able to forecast your needs and maybe doing like a 72 hour plan so that you're looking at your times of lowest capacity and having something flexible that you can modify. So you know putting a bunch of chicken in a slow cooker and then shredding it so that you have shredded chicken that you can use in a sandwich, in a salad, in a quesadilla, in a wrap, in, you know, a stir fry. So those are the kinds of modifications that I think people who have ADHD, especially in midlife, who may also be struggling with some of the other things like brain fog and just busyness because of life, can really benefit from is being able to lower the bar, have that flexibility but also kind of the persistence that you were saying, like if something doesn't work, like let's modify it, let's change it, but let's keep moving forward, because goals can be motivating, but just not in the there's only one way to achieve a goal kind of way.
Christine Chessman:Yeah, and it is. It is about lowering the bar, isn't it? And I think decision fatigue is a real thing, though, isn't it absolutely? It is, you know, and I get interrupts with means because it's just easier to do the same thing. Yeah, you know, week on week, and that's where then I get frustrated with myself. No, I need to mix it all up, and luckily I'm married to somebody who is a foodie and does a lot of cooking so, and he much prefers the taste of his food to mine.
Christine Chessman:So I'm kind of I have to say I'm very lucky in that respect, so I don't. I only really cook when he's away and the kids prepare themselves for pizzas. And you know, chicken, which they love secretly. They love it. I'm like it's heat and serve night and they're like yes.
Jenn Salib Huber:I mean, I think that's great because it just allows an option that is easy. It's leading with satisfaction, which is just as important as nutrition, and just knowing that you have that to look forward to can also be kind of fun. Yeah, yeah, novelty, novelty, yes, oh, christine, this has been amazing. I really appreciate you kind of sharing, you know, this kind of recent diagnosis and sharing a little bit about how it intersects with movement and, of course, sharing your wisdom about movement, which we always benefit from in the Feaster community. But any kind of last words of wisdom for anybody who might be listening and thinking, oh gosh, I recognize myself in a lot of this.
Christine Chessman:I mean really just the lowering the bar. It's a self kindness, it's don't if you want to build strength. So this is a very common thing of women of a certain age the there's, there's, you know. It's similar to diet culture everywhere it's trained lift weights, lift heavy weights. You must lift heavy weights. And if you'd like to start strength training, that's fantastic. But don't do it all at once. It's quite overwhelming. Start super small, start super small. Maybe add in 10 minutes once a week for several weeks and then you could maybe make it 15, then 20. And that sounds tiny, but it is about trying to make it part of your life Absolutely. So don't worry about all these people lifting barbells. You don't have to be there. You can create your own way to build strength. You know it looks different for everybody. So just start really small and build it into your life and know that any amount of movement that you're doing is helpful, is good for bone health and is really good for brain health and for cardiovascular health. It is.
Jenn Salib Huber:You don't have to be there yet yeah, yeah, exactly, and there's no set schedule. You know what's that schedule? A month or five years exactly in the right direction towards your goals. You're still moving forward, and that's really what matters. Absolutely so, christine, what do you think is the missing ingredient in midlife um?
Christine Chessman:well, I said this before. Caffeine, no, um, it is kind of caffeine. I love coffee so much and that's also an ADHD thing. So there is a strong relationship and, yeah, that's the joy of my life, but that's not in seriousness. Persistence, so, um, it's not. It is persistence, isn't it it? Yeah, so, rather than being consistent with movement, keep starting again. So for me, that is the key ingredient coming back to it, just getting good at starting again and not beating ourselves up quite as much as we do.
Jenn Salib Huber:Absolutely. I'm going to end with a funny little story, because it just came to me, about caffeine. And yes, people with ADHD often learn to self-medicate with caffeine because it's a stimulant. Zwick, I think, clearly recognized that I had something, some feature of ADHD, and you know she used to joke that I can't even remember how it actually came about, but she gave me permission to bring a coffee maker into class because it was. It was like an older school, and so the class our homeroom classroom was also actually a lab, so there was like a big bench on the back with a bunch of plugs, and so she allowed me to bring coffee in and make coffee in class.
Jenn Salib Huber:And at the time I just thought that she was really cool, and I still think she's really cool, in case she ever listens to this, I still think she's really cool, but it really made me realize but only in hindsight that that was really how I was managing ADHD then. Yeah, yeah. Anyway, thank you so much, christine, and for anybody who's listening, who thinks you know, that maybe support from people like us would be helpful, we would love to have you join the Midlife Feast community and become a Feaster where Christine supports us in joyful movement all the time by keeping things spontaneous and fun and, you know, sharing you know, your wisdom and videos and just really helping to keep us kind of on that joyful movement path.
Christine Chessman:Oh, I absolutely love the community. Jan Just love it.
Jenn Salib Huber:All right, thanks everyone. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the Midlife Feast. Thanks everyone.
