From The Heart #10: Sleep, Strength, And Smarter Habits

Struggling with 2 a.m. wakeups, low energy, or a scale that won’t budge after 40? 

We connect the dots between light, food, stress, and muscle to show how small, smart changes can unlock deeper sleep, steadier appetite, and better metabolic health. 

You’ll learn how morning sunlight flips on your natural “day mode,” why bright screens at night keep cortisol humming, and how a cool, dark room paired with a simple wind‑down routine can shorten sleep latency and smooth out those middle‑of‑the‑night awakenings.

We also dive into iron the practical way. 

Get the exact pairings that boost non‑heme iron absorption, think lentils with lemon or tofu with bell peppers, and the timing tricks to avoid blockers like coffee, tea, and calcium. 

We cover soaking, sprouting, fermenting, and cast‑iron cooking to squeeze more from plant foods, plus when it’s time to check ferritin and consider supplementation with your clinician. 

Along the way, we unpack what the evidence says about PEMF mats for osteoarthritis pain and why protocol differences matter.

Midlife weight change demands a new playbook, not more willpower. 

Hormone shifts, muscle loss, stress, and poor sleep push metabolism in the wrong direction. Our plan is simple enough to start today: anchor meals in fiber‑rich whole plant foods, lift 2 to 3 times per week to protect lean mass, and guard 7 to 9 hours of sleep by managing light and late stimulants. Daily walking raises VO2 max and cuts cardiovascular risk, proving it’s never too late to turn the ship. We close with the six lifestyle pillars and a mantra that works: start low, go slow, stack small wins.

If this resonates, follow the show, share it with a friend who needs a sleep or iron reset, and leave a quick review so more listeners can find these tools. 

Your next small win starts today.

Go check out my website for tons of free resources on how to transition towards a healthier diet and lifestyle.

You can download my free plant-based recipes eBook and a ton of other free resources by visiting  the Digital Downloads tab of my website at https://www.plantbaseddrjules.com/shop

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Thanks so much!

Peace, love, plants!
Dr. Jules 

Transcript

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Yo, Plant Means buddies, welcome back to season three of the podcast. This year's gonna be amazing. We'll be talking about all of the different pillars of lifestyle medicine, from nutrition to exercise to stress to sleep and everything in between. Yo, Plant Means buddies, welcome back to another episode of the podcast. Today I'm gonna be answering questions. Uh a short while back I went to give a presentation. It was supposed to be in person at the Shadyak Pension Center, but a massive snowstorm kind of changed these plans, and so we went ahead with it virtually. So at the end, there was a question period. The question period lasted maybe 15 to 20 minutes. There were still a lot of questions that remained unanswered. And so I asked for people to just send them to me via email, and I decided to just do a podcast episode where the time I spend answering these questions will benefit everyone. So I've grouped the questions into a few different categories because the questions are relatively similar to the typical questions that I get. The first set of questions are about sleep, then we're gonna talk about iron and nutrition and plant-based diets, then we're gonna talk about weight, weight management, weight loss around menopause, and also we'll be talking about highly processed foods and whether or not it's too late to change in patients or people that have been using ultra-processed foods for years and years. Is there such a thing as being too late? So let's start with the first question: What things can I do to get a better night's sleep? To get to the deep and REM sleeps. It says here, I have no issues falling asleep, but I seem to wake up in the middle of the night and have a hard time falling back to sleep. So let's start by just talking about the normal physiology of sleep and then how this can apply to improving it, right? So, number one, kind of keep in mind that when you wake up first thing in the morning, exposure to bright light will do two things. First thing it will do, it will suppress melatonin production. So as soon as you wake up, melatonin production stops once you're exposed to bright light. So getting bright light early in the morning is great because it sets off and synchronizes your sarcadian rhythm and your hormones. So that's the first thing to try to get a good night's sleep is invest in synchronizing your circadian rhythms with your hormones and with your social clock. So once you get that exposure of bright light into your eyes, not only will melatonin secretion go down and stop, it'll actually help activate the car, C-A-R, or cortisol activation response. Basically, what this is is that once your body, your eyes have been exposed to light, it recognizes that the day is starting. And so cortisol spikes in the morning. Now, a lot of people fear-monger around cortisol being a stress hormone, but the reality is that cortisol helps us stay alive through many different mechanisms, and we want cortisol to spike in the morning to be able to confront our day. So not only does that bright light help suppress melatonin, it helps activate cortisol. But that also means that you want to avoid light at night, because if you are exposed to light at night, it'll keep melatonin production suppressed. And melatonin is supposed to start getting produced when darkness falls. So that this means avoid bright overhead lighting a few hours before going to bed, reduce phone and computer exposure because these screens typically have blue lights, and your brain senses darkness as a signal to go to sleep. And as you do that, cortisol secretion will fall. So you see that cortisol and melatonin typically do opposite things. Melatonin gets suppressed, and cortisol gets produced with morning light exposure. And the opposite happens at night. If you have high cortisol level because of light exposure and you're on your computer and you're reading emails and you're watching stressful shows, your cortisol will stay activated, will stay elevated, and it'll be much more difficult to fall to sleep. Now, other things they go without saying, avoiding alcohol in the evening is a good plan. Alcohol actually can help sedate you to sleep, but sedation isn't the same thing as restful sleep. And alcohol has actually been shown to fragment your sleep. It reduces the time spent in deep sleep and in REM sleep, and it increases awakenings in the middle of the night. It can actually increase heart rate during deep sleep, which is the opposite of restful. So try to avoid alcohol altogether and at least for four hours before bedtime. Now, the other thing to avoid is caffeine. Caffeine blocks adenosine, the chemical that builds up during the day and builds sleep pressure. So, since caffeine's half-life can be anywhere from six to eight hours, if you drink a coffee three or four hours before going to bed, that means that almost half of that caffeine amount is still in your system, which equates to drinking half a coffee before going to bed. Now, most people would say no caffeine after 2 p.m. And if you were already struggling with nighttime awakenings, uh, no caffeine afternoon. Now, drinking caffeine in the morning, probably not a big deal. Even if you are a slow metabolizer, most of that caffeine will be out of your system before you go to bed. But caffeine metabolism, the half-life of caffeine in you, the person, can change from one person to the other depending on a lot of different things in terms of genetic makeup. So no caffeine afternoon after 2 p.m. at least, if you can still have good night's sleep. But if you have nighttime awakenings, try to get off caffeine a little bit earlier than that. Now, the other thing is the way you eat at night can actually impact sleep rhythms. Now, blood sugar dips can happen if you consume large sugar loads at night. Now, you want to avoid going to bed extremely hungry, but you also want to avoid having high glycemic index foods. That means foods that spike blood sugar. So, in a perfect world, you'd eat a balanced dinner with fiber, protein, and complex carbs. And maybe if you're gonna eat before going to bed, consider eating something that's higher in protein. Now, the other thing to consider is your environment in which you're sleeping in. And temperature, the temperature in your room can actually impact deep sleep. Now, the ideal range is probably close to 18 or 19 degrees Celsius, which is about maybe something like 65 degrees Fahrenheit, since deep sleep happens when your body core temperature drops. They're boat related. So a bed that is too cold or too warm is probably the best sleep environment. Now you can see it as we evolve to sleep in a cave where it's dark, where it's quiet but not silent, and where it's cooler. Now, we talked about cortisol spikes before going to bed, and if it's too warm or you're too stressed, or you're exposed to too much light, or you have too much of a big carb meal before going to bed, this can actually spike cortisol at night. So you want to make sure to manage these things, but also have a bedtime routine that helps manage stress as well. So some things like light stretching or reading a book or doing breathwork or breathing exercises or even journaling to unload your thoughts a few minutes before going to bed has been shown to lower sympathetic activation of your nervous system and increase parasympathetic activation and help you fall to sleep quicker. Now, a lot of people complain about nighttime awakenings. Keep in mind that nighttime awakenings for a lot of people are actually not normal, but I mean frequent. And certain nighttime awakenings are normal. As you cycle through your sleep cycles, you can actually go from deeper sleep to REM sleep and then go back to stage N2, which is a lighter sleep. So a lot of people, when cycling through all of these sleep stages, will go back to lighter sleep, and that can be fine. Now, if you know that waking up between sleep cycles is normal, you'll not perceive it as a stress. Some people, when they wake up in the middle of the night, they already start worrying about oh my god, I got a big day tomorrow, what happens if I can't go to sleep? And that creates psychological stress, which spikes cortisol and keeps you awake. But typically, people, when they are in light stages of sleep, between deep sleep stages, they typically stay awake for less than five to fifteen minutes. So if you're awake for more than 20 minutes, get out of bed, do something to calm your mind, either read under a dim light, maybe do some breathing exercises, and then return to bed once you're sleepy again. In this way, your brain keeps associating your bed with sleep. Now, also make sure to minimize the other types of nighttime awakenings caused by alcohol or late heavy meals or stress. If you've exercised too intensely too late, your cortisol may still be high, and that may cause some issues with falling to sleep. Or even talk to your doctor about the possibility that you may have diagnosable sleep conditions like either primary insomnia or sleep apnea or restless leg syndromes. Sometimes, even if you're doing everything perfectly, it's simply not your fault. So consider talking to a doctor about it. Now, I wear a whoop band, which is a health tracker and a wearable that helps track my sleep and it helps reveal patterns in sleep fragmentation, it gives me a sleep quality score, tells me if I had high sleep stress or not. And for me, it's actually quite useful. I mean, even if there's some variability from person to person, there's not that much variability in terms of your results. What I mean by that is that for me, it's it helps me track patterns or trends over time. So I know that these wearables they still have some improvements that are needed, and even if they're quite precise with certain types of things, certain wearables will minimize or underestimate sleep, whereas other ones will overestimate it. But typically what they do wrong, they always do wrong. So you can at least measure trends over time. Now, knowing this caveat or catch is important because what you're looking at is sleep patterns over weeks and months and not sleep patterns from night to night. Now, my kind of simple takeaway there is develop a simple bedtime routine. I always give this same example of Pavlov's dog. Now, Pavlov's dog is a dog which, well, Ivan Pavlov, what he did is he rang a bell, then he fed his dog. And he did that for months and months, let's say, I don't know the amount of time, but you get the point. At a certain point in time, that dog was classically conditioned to recognize that when the bell rings, I'm gonna get my food. And so at some point, even when Pavlov removed the food and just rang the bell with no food in sight, the dog kept on drooling, anticipating that food would be coming. And that's called classic conditioning. What I'm saying here is that build a bedtime routine that has as many bells as possible, that have as many cues that will classically condition your brain in anticipating that sleep is coming. So the example could be uh always wear the same sleep mask, always use the same pillow, wear similar pajamas, have a similar bedtime routine, always go to bed at the same time and wake up at the same time to synchronize your Syracuse and rhythm, which are social clock. But basically, it just means have a routine that your brain anticipates that this consistency that you have through through time, through weeks and months, simply means sleep is coming. Alright? Now, other lifestyle sleep interventions is just don't forget that the goal is to sleep eight to eight and a half hours per night. So you may want to look at at what time do you absolutely need to get up, and then reverse engineer the absolute time where you need to go to bed. Maintaining a consistent sleep and wake schedule every day, including weekends, will help build a circadian rhythm and a pattern your brain can work with. Now, if you're like, oh my god, I'm way off, I'm just sleeping six hours per night, I'm going to bed too late, waking up too early. If you're gonna adjust your sleep timing, do it about 10 to 15 minutes per week, just so that your cycle can adapt. Because if all of a sudden you're going to bed two hours earlier, well, surprise your melatonin production is probably not going to be synchronized with your new bedtime. And so you're not gonna feel tired and you're gonna say, Well, I just can't go to sleep. That consistency will help strengthen circadian rhythms and your sleep hormones. Now, don't forget light exposure, morning sunlight exposure, and making sure that you reduce light exposure at night, avoiding blue light from screens, since this is the strongest melatonin suppressor, and having just that bedtime routine that you can rely on. Now, don't forget that being physically and mentally active during the day will help build up adenosine, which is that hormone that builds up sleep pressure and will help you feel sleepy. And that's why, since for certain people, when they take naps during the day, either too late during the day, or naps that are longer than 20 to 30 minutes, they actually can reduce their adenosine because adenosine is cleared more than it's produced when you are in deep sleep stages. So if your nap is too long, uh it can actually reduce that sleep pressure and make you feel less tired. That'd be the equivalent of eating a snag before your meal. You're just not going to be hungry, and that sleep hunger goes down if you nap for too long or too close to bed. Now keep in mind that foods that are rich in magnesium, calcium, potassium, and tryptophan may potentially help support sleep. So include these foods, which are typically found in whole plant foods before going to bed or during supper, and avoid intense exercise a few hours before bedtime because they may spike cortisol levels and they may stay higher throughout the night and keep you from sleeping. Now, a few other lifestyle strategies can help, like for example, cognitive shuffling. That cognitive shuffling is a technique that can be used to reduce nighttime rumination. If you just feel like your brain is going 100 miles an hour thinking about a whole bunch of things, uh cognitive shuffling may help you. Just basically choose a neutral word like guitar and generate unrelated associations for each letter. So if I choose guitar, I'd say G also means George, and U means ukulele, and I means individual, and T means tarp, and A means association, and R means ramble, right? Because I'm rambling on here. But where I'm going with that is just it just simply redirects the brain away from stress-driven thoughts, and it's very useful for sleep onset, helping you go to sleep faster, and it could help you with nighttime awakenings. And if still you are having trouble sleeping, falling asleep or staying asleep or with nighttime awakenings, strongly consider CBTI, which is cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia. You can chat about that with your doctor, he may refer you to a psychologist. A lot of people will buy books about it, and this can help you fall asleep and stay asleep. Right on. The second question is about iron. The next two questions are about iron. First question: my ferritin level is low. How do I maximize my iron in my diet without eating more red meat? And is there anything in our diets that could hinder iron absorption? And the next question was what's the best way to increase iron on a plant-based diet? So I'm gonna answer both of them together. Now, if you want to increase iron absorption, you have to focus on two different strategies: either improve the form of iron you get from your food, or increase the amount of iron you get from your food, or optimize the environment of the meal so your body simply absorbs more of it. Now, to improve iron absorption, the easy, lowest hanging fruit is simply to add vitamin C to iron-rich meals. Vitamin C can actually increase non-heme iron absorption up to three to six times. So that'd be an example of that would be adding lemon juice to lentils, or bell peppers to a tofooster fry, or adding strawberries to oatmeal, or salsa to beans, or citrus vinaigrette to a spinach salad. Even 50 milligrams of vitamin C, about half of an orange, could significantly boost absorption. And you also want to make sure to separate foods that block iron absorption. So coffee and tea, they contain polyphenols and tannins that can actually reduce iron absorption. So if you're having a high iron meal, just make sure to avoid coffee or tea for the hour or two before and after these meals. Now, coffee can actually reduce iron absorption from anywhere to 50 to 80 percent, depending on the timing of the coffee in relation to the iron. Rich meal. Also keep in mind that calcium competes with iron for absorption. So if you're having high like high calcium foods, like either calcium supplements or fortified plant milks or dairy with your iron-rich meal, just try to spread them out and keep them a few hours away from your iron-rich meals because calcium will decrease iron absorption. Now, if you're eating a predominantly whole food plant-based diet, keep in mind that many plant foods actually contain phytase, and they can bind iron and reduce absorption. And it's pretty simple, just either cook or soak your beans overnight, sprout your legumes or grains, and even consider uh fermented foods like sourdough or tempeh. Now, old traditional ways of cooking in cast iron can actually increase iron content in your diet because the iron cast iron pan leaches into your food. Other things is just simply add iron-rich foods to your diet regularly. So for plant-based diets, that could include lentils, chickpeas, beans, tofu, tempeh, seeds like hemp seeds, pumpkin seeds, whole grains like oats and quinoa, and dark leafy greens. And if you can pair these foods with vitamin C rich foods, then you're getting the best of both worlds. Right on. Next question is what do you think of PEMF mats? Now, pulsed electromagnetic field mats are different than grounding mats, and they're actually used to reduce pain, and they have been studied and shown effective for pain reduction and functional improvement in knee and in hand osteoarthritis. So if you can afford them, they're generally safe, minimal adverse effects reported, and they can help. The primary limitation in these mats is just the absence of standardized treatment protocols. So depending on the studies, some use 15-day treatment plans, some use 90-day treatment plans, the session length or the device used is different from a study to another. But just kind of keep in mind that if you can afford it, it's generally safe and probably a legitimate therapeutic modality. So it can work, it does show promise in trials. We're still lacking very well-made huge studies. But yeah, the studies do look promising and it does look safe. Now, next question is please tell us it's never too late to start. Unfortunately, most of us grew up on highly processed diets. Can the effects of this be reversed? Well, I have great news for you. The body is always adapting, right? The human body is constantly remodeling itself, and blood vessels can improve their flexibility with exercise, insulin sensitivity can improve within days of dietary change, blood pressure can improve within a few weeks, and even people in their 70s and 80s can improve their VO2 max, the most important predictor of life and a measure of cardiorespiratory fitness. So your body's constantly adapting to what you do, to what you feed it, and yeah, you can absolutely reverse damage done or slow down things that are already permanently damaged so that they don't get worse. And this is the concept of risk reduction. We can't necessarily completely erase the past, but you can absolutely change the direction of your future. And every health habit that you start today will reduce the risk of having problems later. Now, even just starting to walk daily can reduce cardiovascular mortality. The risk of dying from heart disease or cardiovascular disease like heart attacks and strokes can be reduced 20 to 30 percent with just daily walking. So, yeah, you need to see the future. You need to project yourself in 10 years and try to see where do you expect to be in 10 years and whether or not the daily behaviors that you have right now are setting you on that path or not. Now, a lot of people will feel discouraged when they think about decades of unhealthy habits. But the question is not what happened in the last 20 years. The question is what will your health look like in 10? So, and if you see the time you have left on this planet in days instead of years, you'll notice that you have thousands of days to look forward to. Right on. The next question is for women who try to lose weight after 40 and is not successful. What else can we do? I just saw this morning that it could be the nervous system and not the hormones. Do you have any information regarding this? And I do. I've talked about this at length. A lot of people, mostly women, find that it's a lot harder to put on muscle mass or to lose fat after age 40. And in women, with the average age of menopause being 51, it can be exponentially harder. So I've heard a lot of women say I'm eating less, I'm exercising more, and somehow I'm still gaining weight. What's going on? Now, if that sounds like you, you're not imagining things. The truth is that your body changes with age, and what worked in your 20s and 30s often doesn't work in your 40s. And this doesn't mean it's hopeless, it simply means you need a different approach. Now, what's actually happening is that your hormones start to shift, your estrogen and progesterone decline, your metabolism, insulin resistance, sleep architecture, mood, and appetite, they all start to change, and all of these can impact weight. Now, typically we lose muscle mass with age, and after the age of 30, kind of life gets in the way, and many women stop exercising or lifting weights. And you can even lose anywhere from 3 to 8% of your muscle mass per decade if you're not doing resistance training. So unfortunately, if you have less muscle, you'll have a slower, lower metabolism, meaning you'll burn fewer calories at rest. The other factor is that, well, by midlife, most of us are managing a lot and have a lot of on our plates. I mean, careers, children, caregiving, or constantly multitasking, and we're going through a lot of stress, and that absolutely raises cortisol levels. And cortisol is a hormone that impacts sleep, appetite, it encourages fat storage. It's like life is constantly nudging us towards more stress, less activity, and we tend to be more insulin resistance. So even if our blood sugars look normal, your cells may be becoming more insulin resistant with age. Your cortisol increases, your sleep is worse, and your hormones are changing. And if you're eating a lot of processed carbohydrates, you're in added sugars and you're adding ultra-processed foods to your diet, you're basically basically coupling hypercaloric diets with insulin resistance, and it's making it harder for your body to burn fat efficiently. Now, in to that, we add that sleep quality typically gets worse with age, even worse during perimenopause. So if you're not having good restful sleep, this also will disrupt hunger hormones like ghrelin and leptin. It increases ghrelin, it reduces leptin, meaning that you are left feeling more hungry and craving ultra-processed foods. So these are all of the reasons that it's harder. Now, what do we do about it? Well, first of all, it happens to men and to women. Typically, women get the worst of it because of changing hormones, where men have a slow decline in their testosterone, women, women's hormones typically fall off a cliff. So first thing that we need to do for both of us is to focus on what we eat and not just how much we eat. We need to build our meals around fiber-rich whole plant foods, like veggies and fruits, and legumes, and whole grains, and nuts and seeds, because these foods will help us feel full, will help balance hormones, support gut health, and reduce inflammation. And we also need to couple our diet with prioritizing strength training. Now, muscle is essential for a healthy metabolism. So instead of just doing cardio, you really need to consider doing two or three sessions per week of body weight or resistance training, not just to put on muscle, but to slow down the normal decline that happens with aging. Now, and if you cut back on ultra-processed foods and sugary snacks and refined carbohydrates, and you increase the amount of plant-based proteins, healthy fats, which typically come with added fiber, your energy will stay steady, your cravings will go down, your blood sugars will stabilize, and you will be eating in the way that's now inligned with your physiology. Also, we need to prioritize sleep. We need eight to eight and a half hours per sleep. Typically, between seven and nine is perfect for most people. We talked about sleep at the beginning of the episode, but just keep in mind that sleep is literally our superpower. That's when we heal, and that's that's when we kind of reset everything. So sleep is at the foundation of a healthy life. You can do everything right, and if you don't have a relaxing bedtime routine, or you're drinking too much caffeine or alcohol too late in the day, it may be not sufficient to just have a healthy diet and exercise routine. It's important to keep in mind that your body's not broken, it's just adapting to a new phase of life. You need to support it with compassion, you need just to realize that what you did and worked when you were 25 is not gonna work anymore. Your body always wants to be healthy, it just needs a different approach. There's no need to starve yourself, and there's no need to punish yourself with exercise, and you definitely don't need another diet. What you need are habits that are appropriate and aligned with your biology. Woof, wow, right on. Well, that so those were great questions. Questions that I get a lot of. It's very difficult for me to answer that in an email or answer it on a Facebook post. As you can see, we're almost at 35 minutes here, and we've literally answered like four questions. Now, I've I've grouped a lot of these questions together because there were a lot of questions on iron, on sleep, on metabolism, and ultra-processed foods. But just kind of keep in mind that at the end of the day, the six main lifestyle pillars tend to be the answer for most of our problems. Now, 80% of visits at a primary care doctor are directly or indirectly related to lifestyle, meaning that most of the medical conditions that I see daily in my clinic as a doctor are directly related to the way that people live their lives. So that's important to consider. I mean, we all have our part to play to lessen the burden that we can have on our medical system so we can focus on preventing more disease instead of waiting for complications to arise. Right on. I hope this helped. As with any lifestyle change, the most important thing is to start low, go slow, and to make small incremental changes. Because these small wins they add up, they build confidence, and they build momentum that you can then apply to bigger and bigger challenges. And within a year or two, you could possibly look and feel unrecognizable, which is a good thing if you're making smart choices. Cool, cool, cool. Right on. Thanks so much for the questions. Thanks so much for letting me record an episode of my podcast for you. And I hope to see you at the next one. Cool. Peace. Hey everyone, go check out my website, plantmazedrjewels.com, to find free downloadable resources. And remember that you can find me on Facebook and Instagram at Dr. Jewel's Cormier and on YouTube at Plantmaids Dr. Jewels.