Hello and welcome to episode two of Making Sense of Women's Health with me, Roberta Bass, so if you haven't checked out the intro episode then please do so, because that will give you a bit of history about who I am, my background and what to expect from these coming episodes.
But today I'm going to talk to you about the SENSSE method. So this is the system that I have created to give women simple, manageable steps and create a foundation that will help them improve their health. So of course, there are lots of other things that can help improve your health, like supplements, medication and lots of other things that you can do. But really we need the foundations of how so think if you are building a house, if you all these other things are, like the roof and the walls, like medications and anything else that you might do, but if your foundations are not good, the house is not going to be solid and is likely to fall down. So we need to get the foundation, steps of our or pillars of our health, kind of there built, ready for anything else to go on top of it. And then we're going to get a lot better outcomes from anything else that we do on the top. So that is what the sense method is all about, giving you those foundations to build upon. Let's give you just a bit of an overview of the sense method and what it stands for. So firstly, the first S is subconscious, then we have empowerment, nutrition, stress management, sleep and exercise. So those are our key foundations that we're going to build our health on. So I'm going to just give you a bit more detail about each of those steps, and we will cover them in more detail in future episodes.
So starting with your subconscious. So there's there's different ways to think of your subconscious, but if you think about your mind having two parts to it, so our conscious mind and our subconscious. The conscious is the part of that's immediate focus, the logical, rational part of our mind, the part that's probably listening to me right now. Well, hopefully you're listening to me, the part that's listening to me, ah, that does a handful of things. Our subconscious, however, does hundreds and hundreds of things in the background, and it's where all our behavioural patterns are, anything that we can't start doing, anything we can't stop doing. It's all stored in our subconscious. You may also heard it called mindset. So mindset is kind of how we see the world, as how it's really useful to have a positive mindset, that we can change things, that we can improve our health. If we have a fixed or negative mindset, we may think this is how we're going to be forever. Whatever we do is not going to help. So we need to have the mindset in the right place, we need to be able to make changes to these subconscious patterns, because they may be limiting our ability to make positive changes. It might also be causing us to have mental health concerns such as anxiety and depression, but also subconscious patterns kind of be affecting our sleep, our emotional eating, such.
So how we eat, whether we eat because we're hungry, and we need to kind of give our body nutrition, or whether we are eating because we are sad, angry, they're all subconscious patterns. So we need to address that side. Because no matter what else we do is like going to kind of like a slimming club or whatever you may be given the education and these the foods to eat. But actually, if your mind isn't in the right place, if you don't have the right mindset going into it, or we don't change those patterns that have been there for a long time, then you're not going to get the result you want, and that goes for anything that we do with our health. The next thing is empowerment. So this might be like, yeah, empowerment, but actually, yes, empowerment, but I'm giving you the tools to empower yourself. So the education. So if you don't know what to do, then obviously you're a bit stuck, so giving you the tools and the knowledge that you need in order to make the change. So it's empowering you to take control of your own health journey. But also in this part, we need to set some goals. So oftentimes, if we don't have something that we're working towards, then we're not actually going to make the changes. We're not going to be motivated. I'm always like that. I need a challenge. I need a goal to walk work towards. So if it's anything kind of fitness wise, I like to have a challenge. You know you can do the like 10,000 steps a day challenge, or you want to be able to walk a certain distance, or you want to participate in a run, or whatever, we need to set those goals? Well, I certainly do, and a lot of other people do need the goals in order to motivate yourself, in order to have the mindset that you're gonna get where you're trying to get to. So that part is the education and goal setting. And we will probably do a whole episode just on setting some goals so you can make your own goals, but they need to be realistic to you. There's no point me trying to say, Oh, I'm going to run a marathon. Well, I guess I could, if I trained for long enough, but I can't at the minute, even run, but I possibly could run a kilometre, if that.
But there's no point me saying, Oh, I'm going to run a marathon in a month's time. It's not going to happen, or me trekking up kind of Mount Everest in a couple of months. Not necessarily realistic, and we also need to have some kind of time frame on that. But if I wanted to do a 10-mile walk in, say, two months time, that's probably realistic, because I do a lot of walking, so for me to up the distance I was doing wouldn't be such an unrealistic thing for me to do, so is choosing the goals effectively, knowing how to reach those goals. So that's the education. So the next part is nutrition. Now nutrition is so important. We are fueling our bodies, and the effect of what we put in is massive. So physically and mentally, if we are feeding ourselves with the wrong kind of foods, then that can cause inflammation within the body. That can cause like joint pains. It could cause brain fog, any symptoms of menopause can be made worse. So things that cause inflammation are generally things like sugar or processed foods. And we've also got to break down the evidence of what's the best nutrition and the best diet for certain conditions. So, like I've mentioned, kind of weight loss clubs and things, they're fine, and they give education. I mean, I've tried many, many times to go back, but it's the education is there, but they're not necessarily kind of the best evidence behind those kind of diets or ways of eating, particularly when it comes to like the low fat foods, when they put a load of additives and kind of sweeteners and fake things, they can all cause problems within the body. Fat isn't necessarily a bad thing if it's healthy fats, and we will talk about more things for nutrition in later episodes, but what we feed our body has a massive effect for everything, not only for weight, but also our mental cognition, menopause, symptoms, general hormone health. If you've got things like endometriosis or any other hormone kind of fed conditions, what you eat is going to have a massive part to play in your overall health, but also things like bone health. We want to have calcium and vitamin D. So we've got to make sure we're having all of the right foods in our diet, as well as not eating some of those kind of bad foods. So certainly we will cover that in later episodes. Next thing is stress management. Now people may be really good at kind of eating the right things, and what we'll come on to later, which is exercise and doing those things. They may be really good at that, but oftentimes they struggle to manage their stress. But our stress has a massive effect on hormones and general well being. I will go again into a whole episode about the effect of stress on the body, but if we don't have effective ways to manage our stress, then we are not going to reach kind of the well being goals that that we set ourselves. So one of the things we need to do is, yeah, find effective ways, and we will go through these in again, later episodes, but things like meditations, breathing exercises, and there's lots of different ways that we can manage stress, and if we don't, then it's going to have a real effect, a negative effect, on the body, physically and mentally. And you'll find a lot of people burn themselves out due if they're working many, many hours, they may be trying to eat well, they may be exercising, although exercise is a good form of stress management. Stress affects so many different conditions and even something like weight loss, if you're struggling to lose weight. It. It may be an element of stress that is affecting your ability to lose weight, but also sleep and many other things that stress kind of affects as well. So that's definitely something that we will be addressing in future episodes. So the next part is sleep. Sleep is when we repair the body, but also where we kind of store all our memories, and also kind of our mind has a chance to kind of reset and repair itself as well. If we don't sleep properly, then our cognitive health is kind of depleted, as it were, we might get brain fog. We certainly get a little bit more irritable, but certainly if I'm more tired, and they necessarily respond in the way that you would if you'd had plenty of sleep, also our joints and our muscles and things, they repair at night time. So if we don't get enough sleep, we're not repairing any like little micro traumas that we have in the daytime. Also, we talked about weight with our stress. Also, if we're not sleeping well, then that can cause weight gain as well, because we tend to eat poorer choices. We go for the sugary, kind of bad foods for us, if we are kind of tired, but also hormonally. If we don't sleep very well, we produce more of our hunger hormone, and that causes us to eat more. If we have a good night's sleep, we actually produce more of our hormone that causes us to feel full, so we eat less and we eat less calories. So sleep is one of the well, it is the most important job of the day, so that we need that to repair our mind, our body and our cognitive function, our memory, like everything, if we're not sleeping, then we need to sort that out. And then the final pillar of our foundation is exercise. So exercise helps with our stress management. It also helps with our sleep. It helps to kind of balance our hormones. It also helps us to burn calories if
we want to lose weight, but helps with our bone health. It kind of produces more testosterone if we're doing resistant exercise. So that helps with our hormones, but also libido and it can reduce brain fog. So exercise isn't just about getting fit and losing weight. It also underpins all other kind of we need to move. Our bodies need to move. There'll be certain exercises if you've got certain joint pains, we need to strengthen up, certainly as we go through the menopause, then our joints. We get more inflammation within the joints, our ligaments and our tendons become stiffer. So we need to move in order to strengthen the joints. We need to move in order to stretch out tight muscles, and we need to have a certain amount of exercise of different types, so not just our cardio, running, walking, we also need some weight bearing strengthening exercises such as yoga, Pilates. We need some balance type exercises. So we need to include lots of different exercise into the day. But it doesn't necessarily need to be an hour down the gym every day. It doesn't need to be that. It could be go for a walk, and depending on your fitness level, it might be walking to the end of your driveway. It might be having a little boogie in the kitchen for five minutes while you're waiting for the kettle to boil.
So I will give you lots of tips and ideas of how you can fit exercise into your daily life without thinking, I've got to do an hour of exercise. Find the right kind of exercise, find the time to do it, make it a habit, and then it will be much easier to have it into your daily life. And it is difficult when you're busy, and that's probably one of the biggest things as a physio, we give people exercises. They're often quite boring exercises, to be fair, because they are specific to certain joints or muscles. Much more interesting putting a bit of music on and having a like a boogie than it is to do some bending of the knee or bending off the elbow. But the biggest thing is people don't have time to fit in exercise, or actually with any of the things I've just mentioned. Have time to prioritise sleep, have time to get in the right nutrition. It's not that people don't have time, it's that people don't prioritise those things. So if we made it a habit, so rather than scrolling on your phone for half an hour in the morning, you got up even 10 minutes early and did a 10 minute workout, a little yoga flow, or a bit of Pilates, or go for a walk outside. Right? So these are all the things that I will be helping you with, because I know the difficulty. I myself struggle with chronic fatigue. If you don't know what that is, it's got many lovely symptoms, and I do a whole episode on that, sometimes in the future, but they sleep very well. So sleep is one of the things that I definitely need to improve on, although I've tried lots of things, but we can, I can optimise that a little bit more. So I will be giving you all the things I'll be trying. All I try lots of new things that I can find, and there's a few things actually that I found really, really helpful to improve my sleep. So that's something I'm always working on. So I yeah, I don't sleep very well. I'm fatigued all the time. Have brain fog, joint pain. I'm also hypermobile, so I'm always struggling with some kind of joint aches and pains. My memory is really bad, so lots of symptoms that are similar to perimenopausal symptoms and other hormonal symptoms, if you name it, I've probably got it. So I know the struggle, I know the difficulty of trying to make these changes in order to improve your health, but I am here to give you the education you need, give you the tips try and help motivate you to make those small, little changes, and if we can fit them into your daily life, it makes it much easier. So hopefully you've got a bit of an understanding about where we're going to go with this podcast and all the things that you can be learning and that you've got some value out of today. So don't forget to subscribe and share this podcast far and wide if you can.
And until next time, take care and just start making a few little changes every day.
