Hello, everybody. Welcome to Up and Not Crying. This is your host, Beth Rep. I am an MD and certified life coach. Today is episode 10. I'm so excited. Most podcasts do not make it past 10 episodes. So I have some really fun listeners. We're almost to 500 total downloads for the first nine episodes. Hopefully, we cross the 500 with this one. Um, so it appears that people are listening. I'm getting some really fun, great feedback. Please give me your recommendations and your feedback. I am not running out of things to talk about, so I wanna keep this thing going. So I'm super excited to make it to 10 episodes. As you may know by now, Up and Not Crying is a Norwegian phrase that you would give in response to someone asking, "How are you today?" You can say, "I'm up and not crying. So far so good." In the vein of that, I'm gonna give you another little story that kind of highlights that mood of up and not crying. Uh, my husband, who is just kind of a overall badass in all areas of life, um, two summers ago did this survival course in Utah. Um, and he went for... And it was for a full week. They didn't have any access to phones or technology, and he was in the wild, um, with a group of people and instructors that would kinda like occasionally bop in and give them really minimal instructions, and they would have to figure it out. And on the very last night, they kind of thought they had reached the endpoint, but they hadn't. The instructors told them they'd be hiking through the night to get to their base camp by morning. So this took everybody by surprise, and I think they were kind of underfed and underclothed and cold and tired, and they found out they still had miles to hike. So, um, one of the young gentlemen was kind of struggling and had some really sore, blistered feet and was having a lot of difficulty walking. And Dan hung with him the whole night, you know, blistered, and, uh... Sorry. Bandaged his blistered feet and carried his pack and made sure they walked into camp together. So this, this is what we're talking about here. You're gonna do it. You're gonna get there. You're gonna stay upright and keep walking, but I'm your Dan walking with my arm around you. We're helping you, helping you to the finish line. And being the good Midwesterner my husband is, he will never tell you that story, but here, here I just did. Okay. In this episode, 10 episodes, episode 10, we are gonna talk about 10 tips for fitness and wellness, which kind of goes along with that little story of, of my husband. Now, a disclaimer. I am not a fitness expert or a personal trainer or a dietician. In the future, I'd love to have some of those experts on the podcast, but full disclaimer, from my experience, uh, going through medical school, through doing all my readings, through trying to live a healthy lifestyle for me, uh, for our family, um, the- these are the things that I've encountered. Also, in training with coaches who do focus on, um, weight loss coaching, wellness coaching, um, I've learned a lot. And from having, uh, worked with personal trainers myself as a client now for several years, I've learned a lot. So I'm gonna give you 10 tips that I have learned along the way that I think are very generalizable to anyone at any phase of life, um, at any size, um, male or female Let's get right to it. Number one, when it comes to eating, the key way to drastically increase your intake is to ask yourself each time, "Am I hungry? Am I hungry?" Um, this one I learned from Corinne Crabtree, who is a life coach who focuses on weight loss. Corinne herself has lost over 100 pounds and kept that off. She has a really funny and fun podcast called Losing 100 Pounds with Corinne. Um, and she says if you simply ask yourself that question and only eat when you're hungry, you will do yourself a huge service by, uh, decreasing your caloric intake and starting to lose weight. And then once you've started eating- Recognize when you've gotten to about 80% full. So this in, uh, Okanau- in Okinawa, Japan, this is referred to as hara hachi bu, hara hachi bu, which is the 80%-full rule. You're recognizing when your stomach is 80% full, and then you stop. You completely stop eating. Um, at some point on the podcast, I wanna talk more about the blue zones, but this is a component of what people in the blue zones, Okinawa, Japan, is one of those, uh, a component of what people do to live longer lives. The blue zones are areas throughout the world where people live the longest, and there are several common characteristics among these very different locations throughout the world that have been studied by Dan Buettner, a National Geographic, um, explorer and researcher. So that's a really fun thing that we can get into later, but the, the element of the blue zones that we're talking about today is hara hachi bu, which is recognizing when you're 80% full and setting your fork down. Okay. Number two, recognize when you are buffering with food or alcohol. And I'd like for you to refer back to one of our first episodes about buffering. So that is when you are, uh, reaching for something to avoid feeling any negative emotion. So it's something that gives you a hit of, um, um, neurotransmitters. It makes you feel good. So that can be eating, um, sugary, deep-fried, uh, alcohol. It can be, um, gambling. It can be having illicit, um, romances. It can be smoking. It can be reaching for any type of substance or thing that helps you avoid any type of negative emotion. So recognize, am I eating, am I overeating, or am I drinking alcohol as a way to avoid feeling stress, sadness, anger, resentment, frustration, boredom? If you are, then recognize it, stop what you're doing, name the feeling that you're having, and simply feel it. Start to feel your feelings Number three, focus on increasing your fiber, protein, and water. So just use, say this as a mantra all the time, fiber, protein, water. Fiber, protein, water. So the way you're gonna do that is increase your volume of fruits and veggies, chicken and fish, um, olive oil and nuts, oats and brown rice, and water. So you cannot overeat fruits and veggies, fish, olive oil, oatmeal, and water. You, you just really can't. So you're gonna really fill up on fiber. You're gonna fill up on really nutrient-dense and calorically low foods, and that will help you, uh, increase your energy, decrease your hunger levels, um, and decrease your percentage of fat on your body Um, this way of eating is very consistent with the Mediterranean diet, which is also very consistent with what most people recognize as anti-inflammatory diets. And the reason I bring that up is the, the more I practice medicine and the more new medications come out and the more new discoveries about chronic health diseases and diseases comes out, just the more I consistently think that a lot of our chronic illnesses is related to inflammation in the body. So that would be heart disease, cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes. A lot of these things are very, uh, uh, are secondary to inflammatory problems in the body. Um, so if we can focus on eating a more anti-inflammatory diet, and again, that's fruits and veggies, fish, lean chicken, olive oil, nuts, oats, brown rice, water. If we can eat those things more often, we're gonna decrease the inflammation in our body and decrease the, um, likelihood of chronic diseases or decrease the severity of the chronic diseases we have. Number four. Uh, there are many regimens for how to get exercise in and what the best regimen is for exercise. I really like this following regimen. I have read many books on longevity and health and fitness and exercise and listened to a lot of podcasts, and this one, um, I'm, I'm taking directly from Jesse Karagiat from Stronger Weekly, the Stronger Weekly Podcast. I recently read Vonda Wright's book, Unbreakable. Vonda Wright is an orthopedic surgeon who also focuses on women's health and longevity, and she wrote a book called Unbreakable. And these two go v- they, they're very similar. The two of them really agree on what to do. So, um, what you should do for an ideal week, for an ideal week... Now, certainly don't get, um, focused on an all or nothing mindset, which we'll talk about in a minute. But for an ideal week, get three sessions of resistance training per week, um, at about 30 minutes each. Okay? So 30 minutes each, three sessions of weight training or resistance training. Lift weights. Also get three sessions of 30 minutes each of zone two cardio. So zone two cardio is a light cardio. It's a brisk walk, a really slow, slow, light jog where you can still talk pretty easily to each other. So a brisk walk, a very light jog. Three sessions of 30 minutes each of zone two per week. And then two sessions of HIIT, that's high intensity interval training. Um, that is also considered zone five cardio training. So that's your highest cardiac zone, um, your highest heart rate zone, and you're gonna do about two 10-minute sessions per week of that. So if you, um, are not familiar with the heart rate zones, there are five, um, heart rate zones. So the lowest zone is when you're just sitting at rest. Um, that's zone, um, zone one. Then zone two is when you're just starting to get your heart rate up and, um, and getting into a brisk walk. Zone three is a lighter jog. Zone four is when you're running. You're, you're doing a solid workout, and that's, um, kinda what Orange Theory Fitness is based on. So they're, um, they want you in that orange zone four quite often. And then zone five is the red zone, which is your really high heart rate. So you're gonna be sprinting or really going all out. And usually people can only, um, maintain that for a brief period of time, so you're gonna be doing that in intervals. So zone one is basically at rest when you're working, you're walking around your house. Zone two is when you're getting your heart rate up a little bit by di- doing a brisk walk, light jog. Zone three, you're jogging a little bit heavier. Um, zone four, you're running. Zone five, you're sprinting. So again, we want three sessions per week, 30 minutes each, of resistance training. We want three sessions per week, 30 minutes each, of zone two cardio, a brisk walk, light jog. We want two sessions per week, 10 minutes each, of HIIT, high intensity interval training, or zone five cardio per week. So that's 90 minutes, 90 minutes, 20 minutes. 90, 90, 20. 90 minutes of resistance, 90 minutes of zone two cardio, 20 minutes of zone five intense cardio. Number fi- number five, recognize the ways that you move your body, that you like to move your body, that you naturally move your body, um, that are not dedicated workouts, and count those as exercise. Um, so think about all the things that you, you naturally do that you enjoy doing. So yard work, housework, walking the golf course, pickleball, a job that is, is more physically challenging, and recognize that as physical activity that counts, and I'll explain to you why. So there was this, um, famous study by Ellen Langer, who is a Harvard psychologist. She, um, published this in 2007 in the journal Psychological Science. Um, and I'm just gonna read to you the abstract 'cause it basically says it all In a study testing whether the relationship between exercise and health is moderated by one's mindset, 84 female room attendants working in seven different hotels were measured on physiologic health variables affected by exercise. So those in the informed condition were told that the work they do, which is cleaning hotel rooms, is good exercise, and it satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for an active lifestyle. Examples of how their work was exercise were provided. Subjects in the control group were not given this information. Although actual behavior did not change, four weeks after the intervention, the informed group perceived themselves to be getting significantly more exercise than before. As a result, compared with the control group, they showed a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist-to-hip ratio, and body mass index. These results support the hypothesis that exercise affects health in part or in whole via the placebo effect. So I think this is such a fascinating study. So you have two groups of hotel maids, basically, okay? Housekeepers in a hotel. You have two groups doing exactly the same work. They have been doing the same work. They continue to do the same work. The two groups are doing the same work as each other. One group is taken aside and shown, "This is what you do all day. You are lifting, you are bending, you are stretching, you are, um, um, doing cardio activity all day long in your job, and this satisfies the Surgeon General's recommendations for exercise and for an active lifestyle. You're getting a lot of exercise every day in your job." The other group is not told anything, okay? So the other group is thinking, "I don't really get any exercise because I don't have time after work to go to the gym, and I'm too tired after working all day to go to the gym, so I don't get any exercise." Nothing changes. The two groups continue to do their normal work. They do not change anything else. And at the end of four weeks, the group that was told and recognized that what they're doing is valuable exercise, valuable physical exercise to their per- personal bodies, they have a decrease in weight, blood pressure, body fat, waist to hip ratio, and body mass index. That is fascinating. So I want you to take that knowledge and say, "Okay, this yard work really, uh, was... I put in a lot of effort for the yard work, for the housework this morning. That counts for my, my zone two cardio today. I got my zone two cardio in." What happens then is if you think that, you don't have this all or nothing complex about saying, "Ugh, now I'm too tired to go to the gym, and again today I'm not gonna get any exercise in, and I already ruined it. And so, you know, we might as well, you know, go out for burgers and milkshakes and, um, why don't we throw in a beer too?" So if you recognize that what you're doing is healthy and good for you, you more likely are gonna take the next healthy step to continue to support that lifestyle Number six, sleep. So we really want to increase our sleep and increase our quality of sleep in order to decrease the amount of cortisol flushing through our body. So decreased or disrupted sleep leads to an increase in cortisol, the stress hormone in the body, which really jacks with your weight and your health, uh, parameters. So in order to increase your sleep and quality of sleep, you really want to moderate your caffeine and your alcohol. So try to decrease and limit caffeine to before lunchtime, and then really start to decrease your alcohol. And the older we get, the more alcohol really starts to mess with our sleep. Do not, I repeat, do not get into pho- into bed with your phone. Do not take your phone to bed with you. This is the kiss of death. So plug your phone in completely across the room or in the bathroom next to your bed. If you take that phone to bed with you, you will scroll, scroll, scroll. So the light from the phone is gonna keep you awake. The apps on your phone are designed by very, very smart people with the goal of keeping you on that phone for as long as possible, okay? So the way that any of these apps make money, the way that any of these developers make money, is to keep you on that phone and keep you engaged and keep you spending money somehow, okay? Or just with your eyeballs on the phone, they make more money from their advertisers. So the goal is to keep your eyeballs on that phone, and this is being developed by very smart, uh, people that are, that are manipulating you. So it's not just that you don't have willpower and it's hard for you to set your phone down. It is designed to keep you looking, okay? So if you want to get some sleep, do not take that phone to bed with you. Plug it in across the room or in your bathroom next to your bed. And then actually read a paper book with a low-light lamp next to your bed. You will much more naturally gradually fall asleep. You'll get more quality of sleep, and then in the morning when your alarm goes off on your phone across the room or in the bathroom next to your bed, you have to physically get your body up to turn off that alarm. Instead of having your phone with the alarm on it right next to your head and you roll over, pick it up, and s- immediately start scrolling, and then 45 minutes go by and you're scrambling to eat breakfast and get to work on time. Okay? So, um, your sleep, your morning routine, everything will be better if you keep the phone out of your bed and off of your bedside table Number seven, keep the big picture in mind. So keep your overall goals in mind, which are have more energy to manage your day, play with your children or grandchildren, have a normal body mass index and normal weight. And there are many calculators online to calculate your body mass index. That's an easy thing to do. Um, your m- other big goals are to live a long, healthy life, to be mobile, active, and independent in your life for as long as you possibly can. Do not compare and despair by looking at other people and wanting your goal to be in line with what they're doing and what-- with what they look like. So I was just doing a little Googling around for this topic, and I came across this. So modeling agencies estimate that one in fifty thousand people possess the facial genetics, proportions, and body types required to be a cove- cover model or runway supermodel. That is point zero zero two percent of the population. One in fifty thousand people have the looks to be a cover model, yet everybody wants to look like that. Everybody compares and despairs, says, "Oh, I should be thinner. I should be more muscular. I should be this. I should be that." No, no. Stop that. So keep the big picture in mind. You want energy. You wanna be t- able to interact with other people by going golfing or playing pickleball or playing with your children or grandchildren. You wanna have a health- healthy, normal weight, healthy, normal BMI, live a long, healthy life, be mobile, active, and independent throughout your life, and stop. Number eight, think about your effort to results graph. Okay, so I want you to imagine or even physically draw a graph with the up and down Y-axis and the horizontal X-axis. So on the Y-axis, going up is the effort we're gonna put in to our, our health, our workouts, our wellness. And the X-axis going across is our results. So of course, the more effort we put in, the better our results are gonna get to a certain point. Now, you can overdo it. You can reach a point where no matter how much effort you get, you put in, you're gonna reach peak performance or peak result. But for all of us just mere mortals here, the more effort we put in, the better our results get. So you're, you're gonna think of it just kind of as this, um, this, um, oblique line going up on the, on the chart So when you think about this, a lot of times the problem is each one of us picks a result on that X axis that is way over to the right of the graph. So we wanna lose 35 pounds. We wanna gain 10 pounds of muscle. We want this, we want that. So we want this huge goal without really thinking about the effort that it's gonna take to get there. Okay, so really get realistic about how much effort you can and even want to put in to getting the results. So I want to live a real human life. I want to be able to go out to dinner. I want to be able to go get ice cream with my daughter. I want to be able to go to a movie and get popcorn and candy. I want to be able to live a real life. So I know that I'm never gonna meet this, this peak maximum Olympian level performance. I also know that that's just not in my genetics. That's not who I am. So I am being realistic with myself and saying, "Okay, this is the amount of effort that I can realistically put in, and that I like putting in right now. And then, and then these are the realistic results that I can get with that amount of effort." And so I want you to find that happy spot for yourself. So you might want what... to put in way more effort. You might have the time and the genetics that can really respond to that level of effort and get these huge results. You might like that. Or you might be way busier than I am. You might have more kids than I do. You might have... be taking care of way more people and have a, a more, uh, stressful job. And the amount of effort that you want and can put in is lower. So then you're gonna have to adjust your results to a more realistic level. So again, just think about your effort to results graph and make it realistic. Number nine. Everything in moderation, including moderation. Live most of your life by the 80/20 rule. So 80% of the week you wanna shoot for healthier options, 20% of the week, live a little bit. Sometimes though, it's actually okay to totally overindulge. Christmas, birthdays, you go... date night, whatever it is, it's okay to overindulge, and it's not that deep. Think of Cody Rigsby, my favorite Peloton instructor. "It's not that deep, babe. Just... It's okay." We're human, we celebrate, we enjoy life. So 80% of the time, shoot for healthier options. Stick to your protocol. 20% of the time, live a little. Uh, don't be derailed by the times that you overindulge. All or nothing thinking is a very common trait among high-achieving, perfectionistic people. The great irony of that, though, is that those people are more likely to overindulge to a greater degree when the inevitable human moment happens, and they did not achieve that all that they were striving for. So then they go to nothing. Okay? So it's this all or nothing, and they get derailed, and they stay derailed for a longer period of time. So I want you to think of this. I want you to shoot for most or something. Can I get most of my workout in? Can I get most of that 90 minutes of resistance, 90 minutes of zone two, 20 minutes of HIIT this week? Can I get some of it? Shoot for anywhere in that range, most or something. Do not go for all or nothing. So the problem is, if you don't get that 90, 90, 20 minutes in, and you're seeing that early in the week, you're like, "Oh, shoot, I'm never gonna get that in." People just with all or nothing thinking will just stop and not do anything. And then you also overeat. And you take your phone to bed with you, and you scroll, and then you don't get up on time, and it starts to spiral. So think most or something is gonna be good instead of all or nothing Number 10, just do the next right thing. So if you have overindulged or you're at a point where you're not feeling healthy, you've had this last week, 4th of July, you've had too many adult beverages and too many cheeseburgers, and you're just feeling a little sluggish. Um, you're just not where you want to be, uh, physically, cardiovascularly. Just do the next right thing. Put your horse blinders on and think, "Okay, for this next meal, what am I gonna have for this next meal? Today, can I go for a walk?" What's that next right thing? Just the next one thing. Serena Williams has a quote, uh, which I love, which is this: "If you're behind, focus on one point at a time. Don't focus on the score, don't focus on anything else, just focus on that one sole point." Okay, to review, guys. 10 tips for fitness and wellness. Number one, only eat when you're hungry. Stop eating when you're 80% full. Number two, feel your negative, uncomfortable feelings. Just allow yourself to feel those. Don't try to avoid feeling them by eating. Number three, increase your fiber, protein, and water. Number four, shoot for 90/90/20. 90 minutes of resistance training per week, 90 minutes of zone two cardio, that's a brisk walk, per week, 20 minutes of HIIT or zone five cardio per week. Those... That's, uh, sprinting intervals. Number five, recognize all the ways that you naturally already move your body or that you enjoy moving your body and count that as exercise. Number six, increase your sleep. Do not take your phone to bed with you. Number seven, remember the big picture. You wanna be healthy, you want energy, you want longevity. The big picture is not being model perfect. Number eight, how much effort can you reasonably put in? So get realistic about your effort to results graph. Number nine, remember everything in moderation, including moderation. Shoot for most or something. So get, get something in. Eat well some of the time. Number 10, just do the next right thing. All right, friends, until next week, stay upright, find the good, and if you can't find the good, at least make it funny. You can find me at bethrepp.com, hello@bethrepp.com, or Beth Repp Coaching on Facebook. And finally, the disclaimer. The content presented in this podcast is for general information only. Reliance on the information provided is done at your own risk. We will see you next week for episode 11 of Up and Not Crying