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Far 2 Fabulous
Join Catherine & Julie, your feisty hosts at Far 2 Fabulous, as they lead you on a wellness revolution to embrace your fabulousness.
Julie, a Registered Nutritional Therapist with over 20 years of expertise, and Catherine, a former nurse turned Pilates Instructor and Vitality Coach, blend wisdom and laughter seamlessly.
Off the air, catch them harmonising in their local choir and dancing to 80's hits in superhero attire. Catherine braves the sea for year-round swims, while Julie flips and tumbles in ongoing gymnastics escapades.
With a shared passion for women's health and well-being, they bring you an engaging exploration of health, life, and laughter. Join us on this adventure toward a more fabulous and empowered you!
Far 2 Fabulous
Foundations of Wellness: Reflecting on Year One & the 'Four Legs of a Chair' analogy for health
Episode 56
The celebration of our first podcast anniversary leads us to reflect on the foundational lessons learned over the year, particularly focusing on the four pillars of health: hydration, nutrition, movement, and sleep. This episode encourages listeners to evaluate their basic needs to foster a stronger sense of well-being and highlights the interplay between these elements for achieving optimal health.
• Importance of celebrating milestones
• Reflection on podcast journey and growth
• The 'Four Legs of a Chair' analogy for health
• Understanding hydration as a key health factor
• The role of nutrition in sustaining energy levels
• Movement as essential for physical and mental well-being
• The impact of sleep on overall health
• Suggestions for implementing minor, consistent changes
• Empowerment through awareness and self-care habits
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We look forward to you joining us on the next episode.
Welcome to Far Too Fabulous hosted by Julie and.
Speaker 2:Catherine, join us on a mission to embrace your fabulousness and redefine wellness. Get ready for some feistiness, inspiration, candy chats and humour as we journey together towards empowered well-being. Let's dive in. Hello, hello and welcome to the Far Too Fabulous podcast. Podcast.
Speaker 1:we're gonna sing it every time now, as those muppets you know what I noticed when I'm like editing podcast recordings or listening to them back, that you always come on like super jolly, yeah, and I'm like the sensible one on the introduction. A lot of the time I think it's like the newsreader. Yeah, yeah, I literally is like that, and it makes me laugh a bit and also cringe a bit, because you're always like la la, la and I'm like welcome to this week's episode.
Speaker 2:This is funny, very serious. This is the radio show. This is like the BBC three or four. Oh, my goodness, we haven't even said hello to you lot yet. We're in our own world, hi, everybody. So we are doing something very slightly different. We are taking a break from our usual episodes that we've been doing because, you know, we've been doing this hormone series and we've been. We've been loving it, haven't we? Yeah, really getting down and dirty with those hormones and we realised because we've been completely preoccupied with these hormones, we forgot our first birthday.
Speaker 1:Can't believe we forgot our first birthday.
Speaker 2:No, terrible. Are you good at anniversaries in this house? Do you remember wedding anniversaries and first date anniversaries and all that sort of stuff? I'm going to say, no, you're in good company that's fine wedding anniversary.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah, other anniversaries no, not so much.
Speaker 2:No, I mean obviously birthdays.
Speaker 1:You're not allowed to forget no, no, you can't forget birthdays. I was allowed to forget those.
Speaker 2:But no, we are really terrible with anniversaries as well, so I think it's probably understandable that I totally, and I do this with my business as well. I know that I started vitality rooms in september actually, it's around my sister's birthday, so I should use that to remember it, but I never do so. Um, yeah, so that's par for the course, but yes, on the 18th of january it was our first birthday. It was so far too fabulous, is one year old and I just we just thought we would stop and mark that because it is a real achievement. What are the stats something like? Is it three percent of no or twenty percent of podcasts don't get past episode three? Is it something like that?
Speaker 1:I think it was even lower. I think you might have been right in the three percent. Yeah, no, hang a minute. Three percent go beyond that. Three percent go beyond three episodes, is it? I think we're gonna tie ourselves in knots. I think what we're trying to say is that not many podcasts get past three episodes?
Speaker 2:yeah, absolutely, and we pre-recorded three episodes before we even launched. We were, we were uber organized. That's because we had a good teacher in donna yes, yes donna ead podcast extraordinaire.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely so. Yeah, we'll give her a shout out because without her we absolutely wouldn't be still sat here a year on her her course was amazing. So if you ever think about doing a podcast, stop thinking about it. Just do it and uh, donna can show you exactly what to do in what six weeks I think we did it for yeah, step by step process, which I think you need, otherwise it's overwhelming.
Speaker 1:And then the tech. You know this, the tech is is a bit of an issue if you, if you're not shown how to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, although we're still having issues with the blooming tech, aren't we? Every single week, every?
Speaker 1:single week with a microphone I don't know what it is and my laptop is not happy no, it's not, but we are still here and we are loving it.
Speaker 2:It's not. It's hard work, isn't it? Trying to get ourselves together? Yeah, yeah that's the hard work, isn't it? It is, yeah, trying to get ourselves together. Yeah, yeah, that's the hard work, actually, when we are like this bit right now is so super easy, yeah, it's, yeah, really really enjoyable. So we hope that you enjoy it too, and what we thought that we would do again, something very slightly different is that we would play you not necessarily our favorite, almost played, although it's probably up there yeah but the episode that we refer to the most, yeah, and the one that gives you the foundations yeah, I think for your health.
Speaker 1:So, yeah, if you only do or listen to one aspect, then that probably is the most important one.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and that's the four legs of a chair. I think it was like episode two or three three, four maybe. Yeah, I don't know it's somewhere really, really close to the beginning, and I I don't think that when we were doing it we realized quite how foundational to everything it was going to be yeah, because we do refer back to it and I know that we both point clients in that direction.
Speaker 1:I've been speaking about that with my clients for a long time. So, yeah, it is the absolute foundations. Yeah, I don't think we called that episode four legs of a chair as well no, we called it something else, but that's what we tend to call it.
Speaker 2:That's how we refer to it? Yeah, absolutely, and it really embodies what we are all about, this empowered well-being. We although I mean we get quite engrossed in in whinging about either our well-being or what our bodies are doing or what other people are not doing for their bodies when they could feel so so much better, but our whole ethos is to be able to give you the, the awareness and the knowledge and then, hopefully, the skills and the power to be able to go and really look after yourselves and really get the very, very best out of your bodies and then your lives yeah, because being in control of yourself, I think, is important when it comes to health, because there's so much we can do.
Speaker 1:We don't want to give our power away to someone else to pick up the pieces when things go wrong. We want to be proactive all the time. So if you're listening to this and you're thinking, what on earth has four legs of a chair got to do with health? It's just um, um. What's the word? An analogy? Yeah, would it that we used, for you know the, the four main areas that you need to focus on for your health, but appreciating that sometimes one of those areas may be down through no fault of your own, say, you're injured and you can't move, so your movement's down.
Speaker 1:Maybe you've got a young child and your sleep is impacted, so that one's down, so you convert your chair to a stool and so you still stay up and you can still stay up, but if you're not impacted in any of those areas, you want to be working on all four yeah, absolutely, that's interesting.
Speaker 2:I was thinking as you. You're thinking about when sleep could be taken out, when movement could be partly taken out, but still, even if your legs are broken, you can still move your arms. But is that just me? But is there ever a point when hydration is not absolutely vital?
Speaker 1:there's that word again how can it not be? When you're when your body is at least 70 percent water. Yeah, it just it's so important and I just think it's so easy. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is absolutely and then obviously.
Speaker 2:The other one is nutrition, nutrition which is your baby yeah, I spend a lot.
Speaker 1:I realized the other day that I spend a lot of the time using the words food first, food first, food first. When I'm talking to people, obviously I'm going to be talking about food as a nutritionist but I also will bring in those other areas and other lifestyle things. But you know, before a lot of people say to me, what supplements do I need? We're still in. We've got that mindset that a pill for an ill yeah a pill for an ill.
Speaker 2:I've never heard that. I love that.
Speaker 1:Oh, we're not no, it's funny, I love these little terms. Yeah, and the same thing happens with supplements. People say what supplements do I need? And I I go food first.
Speaker 2:Yeah, no, absolutely, because you've got control over that. Yeah, I love that Pill for an ill, and food first. Well, there you go. I think you've got some good quality out of this little bit already, so we are going to play you next the episode of the four legs of a chair. I hope that you enjoy it as much as we do. And we refer to it. And what are we going to say? Come and talk to us.
Speaker 1:Yeah, every time come and talk to us in the far too fabulous Facebook group. See you there.
Speaker 2:Enjoy. Are you looking after your basic needs?
Speaker 1:Okay, so we're talking about basic needs, but what exactly are our basic needs? Stripping things back to basics, so most people will have heard of Maslow's hierarchy of needs. At the very bottom of Maslow's hierarchy of needs, we've got things like having a roof over your head, having access to clean water and good food, and for the vast majority of people and we're very fortunate, and the vast majority of people, and we're very fortunate and we're grateful for this we have got those basic needs covered. But then the next level of basic needs are four things. We've already mentioned them. We're talking about hydration, movement, nutrition and sleep.
Speaker 1:So one of the things I often talk to my clients when it comes to basic needs is imagining that those four basic needs, the ones that we've mentioned movement, sleep, hydration and nutrition are like the leg of a chair and you want your foundation, your chair, to be nice and strong. But sometimes things come along in our life and they derail one of those legs and then that chair becomes a stool which is still stable those legs and then that chair becomes a stool which is still stable. But often what I see with my clients is that, for example, if sleep is impacted because of a child's up or for other reasons, it often knocks on to the other three. So when we're tired, we let our nutrition go. We don't do our exercise, we just affect all the other things.
Speaker 1:So we talk about letting go of one. If that needs to be the case. Say, you're injured and you can't move your body, you want yourself to have a chair, or at least a stool, in order to maintain your health, in order to encourage your health. There's lots of things around this. So your four basic needs need to be in place. That's why they're called basic needs. Need to be in place, that's why they're called basic needs in order for you to be healthy, absolutely and we know that you know most of this.
Speaker 2:Most people know what they should be eating, drinking, moving and the amount of sleep. Perhaps that works for them. This is not rocket science, and what julie has just touched on is what robs us of these basic needs. Now we can only talk about what we know and, as mums, often caring for our children, caring for our families, are things that rob us of those basic needs. Maybe we are running the kids around all of the places We've just joked earlier on about running kids through to their fitness activities and then never having any time to be able to go to the gym or move for ourselves at all. And the other thing that is really really common, that robs us of many of these basic needs, is that whole concept of having time for you in the evening in front of the television, which could impact onto your sleep, and then it's what's associated with this time. Maybe that's a glass of wine, maybe that is a snack, and it's certainly a long period of time when you are just sedentary and just looking at how that serves you.
Speaker 1:Do you know what? I must comment on the running around after kids, because my kids do a lot of activities, and one of the things I did quite recently is that I used to drive my kids to karate, go home, come back and pick them up, and then I thought to myself, in order to minimize the amount of driving I'm doing and to make better use of my time, why don't I just do karate with them? So now, on a Friday, when maybe it would have been a time where a glass of wine would have been nice, I now do karate on a Friday night. So yeah, it's just funny how you can just change some of these things. One of the things I meant to say when I was talking about the Maslow's hierarchy of needs is that the mind is very much involved here, but we're going to park that up for a minute in this particular episode because it's a massive topic. But I wanted to just mention that because the Maslow's hierarchy of needs includes that mind side of things. Anyway, we're talking about the basic needs today, that we're looking at our hydration, sleep, movement and nutrition, which sometimes I like to call nourishment. But there's something else I do with my clients around these basic needs. So I mentioned about the chair and how that's a stable foundation. For me, health is about energy. So when we're looking at those four particular topics, should we say those things directly contribute to your energy and how your body makes and uses energy. So, in order to explain this again, this is something I do with my clients. How I present this through my energy accelerator is to look at those four subjects and how they relate to energy. Now, hydration when we drink sufficient water, the drinking of that water is like the packaging for your energy. You've got an energy factory in your body. It's reliant on the things that you eat. It's reliant on certain ingredients. Glucose is a massive ingredient of the energy factory, but it needs cofactors. So if you've got your nutrition and nourishment there, your factory is able to make its energy, but it can't package it up without being hydrated. This is really key. So if you're able to eat the right amount of food, it's not enough for energy if you can't package that energy up and then send it out in the body. Now, in order to send the energy out in the body once it's packaged, we need to move. We need transport for that energy and we do that by moving our major muscle groups. So you start to see how all these things are linked.
Speaker 1:When it comes to sleep, sleep is a massive part of your energy. We already know that if we don't get sleep, we don't feel great the next day. But what happens when you're asleep, in terms of your energy, is it's like you've got your cleaning crew going out in the evening. When you're asleep, it makes sure that your factory is nice and pristine so that your energy can easily be made. It makes sure that the packaging has been put in the recycling bin or been sent off to the tip and it's left the area clean.
Speaker 1:All the road, what? All the roadways, the pathways that the energy needs to travel down, are all kept clear. During the evening, when you're asleep, that's what's happening. That's how I imagine it in my head. All these little helpers are coming out, they're making sure there's no roadworks there, all the cones have been moved away, everything's been cleaned, and then the next day when I get up, I drink my glass of water. Therefore, I've got my packaging ready to go. I'm going to eat my breakfast, which is nourishing, I've got my ingredients for my energy, and then I'm going to go move to allow that energy to get around the body.
Speaker 2:So when we're talking about basic needs, we're linking this to energy, because energy is health absolutely and it's that vital feeling that you've got to do with the energy and to do with some sort of balance between these four and, like you said about the stool, and you'd like the four legs all nice and stable, but three is your absolute minimum and trying to find a balance between all of these, find a balance between all of these, and I love that metaphor because it just shows, it shows how well they work together and how vital each one is. You can't have one without the other, without the other, without the other, and we've just been doing a little bit of maths. We got our fingers out.
Speaker 2:Beginning of this conversation was, um, when I was talking about movement and that you don't need to dedicate huge chunks of your days, your weeks, to movement if your goal is to be fit and healthy and vital. Obviously, if you're training for something, then that's a different matter, but if you want to just continue to feel great and to look great don't get me wrong there is certainly an element of my movement that is to do with vanity. So we worked out that there are a 100?.
Speaker 1:No, there's definitely 1000. There's definitely 1440 minutes in a day 1440 minutes in a day.
Speaker 2:This also got us't find 0.69% of your day to do something. That is what we've talked about as a absolute, non-negotiable. What's going on? We need to re-evaluate these things.
Speaker 1:Yeah, do, because if we don't prioritize our health at some point, we're going to have to prioritize being ill, and no one wants that. Yes, being ill sucks and no one wants that. But what we do is we take our health for granted until the point that it's not there and then we think, shit, I should have done more to help my health. These four basic needs are the key pillars, the foundations that are going to support your health, and what's interesting, I find about these four is that your body is so clever, it knows this and it enables you to feel better when you do these things. It's like that little voice telling you you're doing the right things, thank you.
Speaker 1:When we don't do the right things, like if we don't drink enough water, one of the first signs of not drinking enough water is getting a headache. But when we start to prioritize other things over our basic needs and I get it it's easy to do. When you're in that busy lifestyle, you're on the hamster wheel, you're trying to manage everyone, look after everyone, you forget about yourself. It's very easy to let these go, but if you can just focus a little bit of attention on them, your body will really thank you. So I like the saying that if you listen to your body when it whispers, you won't have to deal with it when it shouts. I think that is a brilliant, a brilliant saying when we're starting to talk about these four basic needs.
Speaker 2:I love that. I really love that it gives you so many, so many warnings. It works so hard to support you and actually it goes quite a long time without you really looking at these. But eventually, like you've said, if you don't make time for this wellness, you've got to make time for sickness. Our body is an amazing machine and it gets really, really good at supporting us even though we are not supporting it.
Speaker 2:However, we get very used to feeling low energy and I don't know about you, but often when I come back from holiday, for instance, when you think that you'd be high energy because you think that you would have been rested for for a week. Actually, when I've come out of my normal daily, weekly habits and we go on holiday if it's a certain type of holiday, perhaps a hot holiday, maybe it's a restful holiday I come back and I am absolutely shattered. The energy levels are gone and you often hear people talk about oh, I need a week off after my holiday to recover. And this is a really good example of when you get out of those habits of looking after those basic needs and everything drops down, and it often makes me think that people perhaps have lived for so long, maybe just slightly dehydrated, quite tired, not enough nutrition, just under par all of the time, not enough really, to be clouted over the head by the body and they get used to this and don't realise that there's like another level of energy that's available to them.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is so true because when you do something over and over again, the body thinks that this is the right thing to do and then that becomes the new normal. And when you start to try and do something different from that, this is where the voice comes in to tell you oh, this is different, I don't like it, we're moving away from the norm. And it puts all these things in place to stop you from doing it different. I don't like it, we're moving away from the norm. And it puts all these things in place to stop you from doing it because it thinks it's trying to keep you safe, so feeling slightly under par. But that being your normal is because you've created a habit out of that, because you've done it over and over again, so trying to break the habit.
Speaker 1:Going back to the, the slap around the head from the body when you're looking at hydration, have you ever noticed that if you sit for a long time, that actually your body doesn't like it? You start to feel uncomfortable? Sleep is another one. I think when you look at those four things, your body is absolutely wanting you to do these things. Our body is really set up to move. We know that we're our bodies are very much reactive to the light. So the sleep cycle, the circadian rhythm, comes into play here. But we override it constantly by being on our phones, by having bright lights on and thinking that we're doing the right thing for our body. Being in that all or nothing approach, where you try and do everything at once, isn't the way forward. But when you start to break down these four basic subjects, you don't need to go all in with each one of them. It's just tiny little things that put you in awareness again and enable you to start thinking about them yeah, absolutely, and you don't need to go for that all or nothing.
Speaker 2:just the t, tiniest, tiniest bits of action in each of these really makes the most difference. Where you've just been talking about the hydration being banged over the head and the headache being the first thing that happens Often, what do we do? We reach for the packet of paracetamol. We don't even think that there is something that we can do for ourselves first. And with all of these four pillars these four non-negotiable, absolute need to be looked after there's a real empowerment element to them that we can so so easily do that will make such a massive, massive difference.
Speaker 2:So the next time that you are feeling a bit under par, just looking at only these four things, seeing which one is not being cared for the most, just paying it, that small amount of attention, less than 1% a day attention has the biggest impact possible. It's absolutely incredible. And you did that. You didn't need anybody's help to go and do that. You didn't need any medical help. You didn't need any lotions and potions For most of these. You don't, and that's. There's a real sense of achievement there, a sense of looking after yourself.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when I go through these four basic needs with my clients and we're looking at how are you doing on these, it's amazing how many times it comes up that actually you're right, I'm not doing three, I'm not definitely not doing four. There might be one. So you know, a lot of the time I might see people doing insanity type workouts, pushing it to the limit and not taking care of their sleep, their hydration and their nutrition. They're trying to exercise their way out of a problem and that's going to make things worse. So it's very much a balance between these four and it's incredible how just looking at these four things can just make you realise actually how much am I letting go of my basic needs to try and keep up with everything else in life. Like Catherine said, we're looking at very little time With hydration.
Speaker 1:I think hydration is one of the easiest things to do. Most people, when you're tired or busy, tend to go towards the coffee and things. It's a very easy switch and now you know that your energy is packaged within your hydration, that's one of the best ways to increase your energy and it's a simple thing to do simple things like taking a glass of water to bed with you and then drinking it when you wake up. You've already ticked a box for the day, you've already dehydrated because you've been asleep all night, but most people, what's the first drink that they have in the morning? Catherine, oh, my god, so guilty coffee. A coffee in the morning, yeah, yeah, and a coffee is actually dehydrating for the body.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and you. I remember you telling me about having to leave it at least 30 minutes from waking up to adding that caffeine into your body.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So when you wake up in the morning, you naturally have a higher amount of cortisol, because that is your motivation to get up and go forage for food as far as your body's concerned, and then the cortisol starts to taper off. But if you put coffee in straight away, you're going to spike that cortisol even more and that's going to put your body in a state of stress right from the offset.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely. I do reach for the hot water and lemon, not every day, but a lot more than I used to. As much as my clients say they hear me on their shoulders, I hear Julie very, very frequently.
Speaker 1:So I mean, when we're looking at these four pillars, obviously I'm coming at it from a nutritionist, so my nutrition is very good. You're coming at it from movements. Your movement is nutrition is very good. You're coming at it from movement, so your movement is very good. I could probably do a bit more movement. You could probably do a bit nutrition, which is why we're doing the podcast together absolutely, yeah, right, because we need all of these things.
Speaker 2:We can't just talk about one in isolation. Yeah, why don't?
Speaker 1:you talk about sleep and and how important that is Again.
Speaker 2:I'm probably not the person to be talking about this but I do.
Speaker 2:I really, really do know that when I pay attention to my sleep and when I look after my sleep, that it has such a huge impact. And Julie's favourite saying is that it's the biggest act of self-care that you can give yourself. And I can hear my husband very frequently, as it starts to get darker and we want the children to start lightening down, he starts going around the house turning the lights down, trying to get them off their devices, making sure that that blue light isn't keeping them awake, making sure that that blue light isn't keeping them awake. I know that if I need to get hold of Julie, I need to make sure that I ring her well before eight or nine o'clock at night, because I know that none of those screens are available to her afterwards. So it's about having these really great habits and routines before sleep so that you can get that really really good quality of sleep.
Speaker 2:And again, they all link together. So I mean, obviously my favourite one of these is movement. But if you have been sat at a desk all day and then you go home, you make the dinner, maybe you plonk yourself in front of the television and there is no judgment, because I am a Netflix binge watcher, without a doubt. Your mind may well be absolutely shattered, but your body hasn't done anything, and that may make it very, very difficult to either fall asleep or get good quality sleep or a good amount of sleep.
Speaker 1:So with sleep, I am a little bit militant about it, only because, if any of you are listening that have experienced chronic fatigue, you have an appreciation of how precious that sleep is and that feeling of being wired but tired. It's horrible, and so, with non-negotiable, sleep is one of those. I have to say I am. Yeah, it's very rare, like Catherine said, my screens are off. My kids still have, I think, a really good sleep routine, considering that they're teenagers. They do come off their devices. We do read before bedtime, etc. And yeah, I agree with your husband Get the lights down low, because you want melatonin to come in and melatonin cannot come in if there's blue lights or bright lights there. One of the places I always remind my clients to look at is the bathroom light your bathroom light off, if you can, because if you go in there before you go to bed and you've got bright lights, like I have in my bathroom, I have a light in the cabinet that I put on because it's a lower light. You don't want to fire up cortisol and switch off your melatonin just before you go to bed and clean your teeth, so it's little things like that can make the difference.
Speaker 1:If you're someone listening to this going. Oh my God, sleep. I wish I could sleep. I have problems with sleep. Please stop saying about sleep. I appreciate that that is a stress. If you have problems with your sleep, focus on the other three. The other three can make a huge difference. Getting out in the fresh air in the morning is known to have an impact on the hormone levels cortisone, melatonin so even just getting out and moving for your 10 minutes, less than 1% of your day, is going to help your sleep later. Making sure that you've got the right nutrition, making sure that you've drunk enough water, is also going to help that sleep. So, for those of you who can't sleep, focus on the other three, and this is why going from the chair to the stool can be really, really helpful.
Speaker 2:That's really great. I'm just. I'm just chuckling at me in the early hours of the morning going to the bathroom, trying to do that in the dark because I don't want to turn the big light on in the bathroom.
Speaker 1:Big lights on, it's gonna wake you up. Especially, to be honest, if you have to get up in the night, you want to do that in the dark as much as possible, because otherwise your body is going to think oh it's morning, the sun came up off, I go on my day, and then your sleep quality is going to be affected so I'm not very good at waking up.
Speaker 2:I am a self-confessed night owl. I know that shit. I tell myself. I am fully aware of that, but I do find it. I struggle to get up in the morning and when I remember to do so and the sun is shining, and when I get outside, as soon as I possibly can open my eyes that wide, get that sunshine, get that daylight into my eyes, immediately it helps me, yeah, and it's helping you because it is literally acting on those natural hormones in your body and because your body expected expected you to come out of the cave.
Speaker 1:It didn't expect you to be in a nice house with carpets and electricity. It expected you to come out of the cave, be exposed to the sunlight and then go off and forage. So your body thinks that it's going to get up and move, be in sunlight. It's going to have a nice sleep at the point when the light goes away and expects you to go find water because, as you already know, you can't survive very long without water, can survive quite a long time without food, but not water. So, yeah, it's absolutely key. I was gonna say to katherine while she's been chatting, I'm thinking to myself you're not coming off so well here. You've confessed to not getting to bed on time. You could. What else have you confessed to?
Speaker 2:this coffee straight coffee in the morning. It's just making me laugh, just making myself relatable people, absolutely.
Speaker 1:I can still have my fitness and my well-being usually at the absolute forefront of my mind and still make the same habitual mistakes as everybody else yeah, and it's important that you know we're not perfect, even though we work in this field and we know you know a lot of the things, of course, but yeah, life gets in the way sometimes and it's easy to not always practice what you preach, although I think we are very good at practicing what we preach good and think about the coffee.
Speaker 2:I have a whole story around coffee as well. Often that is my only vice and again, I am aware that this is a story.
Speaker 1:I like coffee and there's nothing wrong with liking coffee, and coffee is not necessarily bad. You know, it's actually very good, isn't it? It can be good for certain people. It's not good for me because I can't metabolize coffee. And if you're someone that can't metabolize coffee, and if you're someone that can't metabolize coffee, boy, do you know about it? So I can't metabolize coffee. It makes me shaky and I have a physical reaction to it. Too much caffeine I can't cope with it. That I think that's back to my poor adrenals from having chronic fatigue. But anyway, genetically I'm very interested in genetics, done a lot of study with that, but genetically I cannot process coffee. So yeah, but for you it's, it could be a good thing. So I'm not going to beat you up for your coffee.
Speaker 2:I don't mind you having the coffee in the morning, but please have your glass of water first I promise and I have now turned into one of those people that it gets about two or three o'clock in the afternoon and I know that I can't have coffee because otherwise I'll be laying there in bed going and I go to sleep so fast and I'll be laying there going. Why am I not going to sleep? And then I go, oh, I had that coffee later on in the afternoon and, yeah, that always stops me. What was interesting? You just you were talking about your adrenals when I was very, very anxious.
Speaker 2:If you haven't heard our very, very first episode, we go through all of the kind of stories and things that we went through to get where we are right now, and one of them was anxiety. My very, very first panic attack happened when I had a massive cup of coffee and I probably was part of it, but I associated that feeling with coffee for a long time and I didn't. I didn't have caffeinated anything for a very long time. It was, I mean, it was lots to do with the fear around, like feeling like that and the anxiety.
Speaker 1:But yeah, it's definitely, yeah, it's definitely back yeah, and it's no wonder that your body reacted like that and suggested that you didn't go there again. So that's completely, completely normal. So we've spoken about movement and how it doesn't have to be a massive thing. You don't have to go to the gym, you don't have to have all the equipment. It literally is the avoidance of sitting still for too long, because that is not good for us. Don't they say now that sitting is the new smoking? I like that. Yep, sitting is the new smoking. So have a look again. Have a look at your day. How much movement are you actually doing? I like the idea of non-exercise movement as well so how much?
Speaker 1:we move. That's not going to a class, although I do like classes, as you know as well. Classes are great. Catherine does amazing good classes. So, yeah, movement we're looking at such a small amount. Hydration, I think, is dead easy, dead easy to do. Hydration, sleep, I think, a lot of the time it's just prioritizing it. You know, it's one of them, ones that, like you said you, you just you want to try and have some time to chill out and you push it to the end of the day and then you go to bed late because you feel like you need that time. And then, with nutrition, that's a big subject, but I think focusing on nourishing yourself is the way that I would start with it absolutely with movement.
Speaker 2:I love that. It's that you've you've spoken about. Spoken about almost that non-prescribed movement. It doesn't have to be an exercise class Obviously some people like it, with camaraderie with the teacher and the other people in the class, but yeah, it can just be as simple as going out for a walk and using all the other things like nature and things around you.
Speaker 2:I was in a gym the other day Now I haven't been in an actual gym for a very, very long time and I found it so boring. I was self-conscious, which is ridiculous because this is what I do for a job. It was just, it was soulless, I hated it. Job it was just, it was soulless, I hated it.
Speaker 2:So, try and not to, when you think about movement, think about those stereotypical things of going to the gym or even going to a fitness class, and if you don't have time, then there is so much online that you can do and there's so many ways that you can just move or stretch. It doesn't have to be just one way and it can be so many ways. Yeah, that you can just move or stretch, it doesn't have to be just one way and it can be so many different ways. Actually that's one of the things that keeps me moving is that I have about three different things that I regularly choose from, and I swap them around depending on how I feel. So if I don't feel like going for a run, sometimes I'll push myself to do it, but often I'll go and find something else that that suits me right at that time when I think about movement, I think about it as going out to play.
Speaker 1:That's, that's how I think I'm like. I think to myself right, I'm going to do something I enjoy and it's fun, which is why I do crazy things like gymnastics. But movement to me, is normally having fun. And I always think sometimes about you know, they do these studies on these tribes that are out in the Amazon and they've not been exposed to our crazy world. Now I wonder what those girls would think about us going to the gym. They would think that we're insane doing that. And when we think about young children, we wouldn't send them to the gym, would we? They're just running around and playing and perhaps we just need to play a bit more perhaps that's the bit that's missing.
Speaker 2:I think, think so, and actually often, movement for many people they almost use as a punishment. Oh no, and so the play, the whole play element, the whole fun element, is exactly what you need to just flip. Your perspective of it is yeah, have fun, get that energy moving around the body, rather than it being a punishment for what you've eaten or what you haven't done, all those sorts of all that narrative. Yeah, yeah, so fun is definitely the way to go and much easier to implement than thinking you're punishing yourself indeed.
Speaker 1:Well, we're going to end up talking about that mind side of things when we cover habits. So just to kind of close out this episode, we've been talking about you know the basic needs and being aware of those, and they're not anything that you need to go all in like it's some big plan that you've got for yourself. It's just looking at little changes that you can make and then when you make little changes and you keep doing that, you become consistent and it's the consistency that gets you to form the habit. So at the moment, your habit may be scrolling on your phone, because that's the thing that you go to when you've got 10 minutes or five minutes or you want to zone out or whatever it may be. That's the habit you have now, but that habit isn't necessarily serving you. It's not giving you anything towards your health. Scrolling on that phone I'm so glad I grew up as a child without phones.
Speaker 1:I really am. But you don't have to have that habit forever. You just you haven't formed your new habit yet.
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