Movement is Medicine

In this episode, John discusses the merits of movement, how to get more into your life and why it can be much easier than you think it has to be.

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Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00:00) - Hello and welcome to today's episode. We're recording a little bit later than usual in the week. Usually record on Mondays and release on Tuesdays. I was really not feeling well yesterday, so forgive me. I'm recording Tuesday morning here and hopefully we can get this edited and upload it to you as soon as possible. To the the few dozen of you who listen first thing Tuesday morning, part of my brain is like, oh, it's only 36 people who were waiting for this thing. And when you have aspirations of having thousands of listeners someday, it's really easy to go like, oh, that's nothing, right? But actually, like, those people are the most important because that's the foundation of everything. So if you're one of those people who's a Tuesday listener, I really do want to keep having new episodes for you. Usually first thing Tuesday morning, I usually want to have them uploaded Monday night so that they can drop Tuesday morning. And you can have those for your your commute, your, I don't know, whatever you're doing out hunting gazelles, picking berries, whatever it is you do first thing in the morning.

Speaker 1 (00:01:05) - If you don't know I'm a weight loss coach, I mainly help people lose weight by getting to the root of their weight issues. To begin with, the things that really started them eating emotionally and depleted their motivation to move the substrates of all their negative beliefs and the negative schema of their mind. So yes, we do get into the nuts and bolts of losing weight, but the vast majority of coaching is really centered around what's going through your mind and how are you making your decisions, and why are you treating yourself the way you are. So the basic way it works is, hey, we're going to set up a sensible smart weight loss program, and then we're going to watch you fail. I don't tell people that first day, but that's basically what I'm doing. And I do assure people like, listen, there's no such thing as failure in this program. There's a chicken making noise in my neighbor's yard. Hopefully it's not too loud. It's really got really hot in here, so I wanted to keep the door open.

Speaker 1 (00:01:59) - Okay, well, sounds of nature, right? Just imagine that I'm out on a bucolic farm somewhere in the countryside. Rolling hills, white picket fences. So we really do use the weight loss journey as a way of showing us where those core issues are emotionally, mentally, so that we can tease those out so we can start to talk to them, ask them questions. Because ultimately these things are like code in a software program, or you can think of them as little pieces of you. Sometimes they feel like they have a personality. They have at least a sense of what they're doing and why. And even if you're talking to like an AI, right, you can get a sense of what it's doing and why it's doing it. So in the same way you could ask questions of ChatGPT, you can ask questions of these deeply upset, emotional, chaotic places in your mind, and you can surprisingly get a lot of answers. It may not seem like something you can do, but it's actually one of the more straightforward things we do in coaching.

Speaker 1 (00:02:56) - And so I do think that is the majority of the healing journey is learning why we do the things we do and leveraging reality and realizing all these passive tools. We have to allow healing to come back and to allow nurturing and maybe healing for the first time ever. Maybe especially with things like self trust, maybe you've never really trusted yourself, and you've never really experienced what it's like to trust yourself. A lot of that is being developed for the very first time, a sense of identity outside of just responding to trauma, a sense of identity outside of our survival mechanisms, a sense of who we are and what we value outside of just trying to avoid danger. But at the end of the day, I am working with people who have a significant amount of weight to lose quite often. You might be surprised. Some of my clients are in fantastic shape, but they still have the same emotional components that everyone else does. It just so happens that they also are addicted to working out, or they're very good about it because they know that if they don't, they're going to be in a lot of suffering.

Speaker 1 (00:03:57) - And yeah, that brings up kind of an interesting point about like, I have a lot of people from different age groups, different genders, different everything, and there's a lot of populations that have been told that it's their hormones and things like that. But I work with some people who have the exact same hormones, and they're just far more active, and that the level of activity is really what makes us old. It's not our hormones, it's not the number on the calendar, it's not the number on the driver's license, so to speak. It's really how much we move. And that's going to decide how our body is running. And I think that's the hardest thing for people to learn is how sedentary they've become compared to, say, what they were like in their more active years. It could be for some people, it could be their 40s, and then they suddenly just got sedentary in their 50s. For some people, it's they started getting very sedentary in their teens. And the last time they can remember being very active as being quite young.

Speaker 1 (00:04:57) - But I think the biggest mental shift people could go through on a strategic level as far as like, how do we help people lose weight? I think it's realizing that whatever activity level you think you're at, it's probably lower then where you're at. And this explains why a lot of people think they're in a calorie deficit and they're not. It comes down to they're eating more than they think they are, which I've talked about that before. I'm not going to talk about that today, but they're moving less than they think they are. And this happens for a couple different reasons. So today, I think it would be great to talk about movement and how we can increase our metabolism the real way, not through bullshit. The whole theme of this podcast is what's the easy way, right? But we're not going to avoid the changes that need to be made. There's a nuts and bolts aspect of changing your life, and there's just certain biological realities that there's no way around. And unfortunately, our fitness industry and our culture and yeah, industry or not, the economy, but our marketing landscape has really painted a picture that is divorced from reality and has not equipped us at all for the work of actually taking back our health and taking back our lives.

Speaker 1 (00:06:14) - That's important to note that on this topic of how do we increase activity to a place where we are able to lose weight and we are massively impacting our health, you're not going to be able to do that without massively improving your mental health. Movement is medicine. Now you don't hear me trotting out a lot of overplayed talking points from the fitness industry, because I disagree with a lot of them. However, if you've heard that one before, that's what I do believe in. Movement is medicine. I see a massive difference in my life and the lives of my clients when we move more. So instead of seeing this invitation to move way more. And you think you possibly could. As some like mountainous challenge that's going to defeat you, just see it as like, no, this is actually a slippery slope. And the more you step into new places, the more you get back and the more addictive it can be, the more you can be drawn in naturally through your own motivation. Not forcing it, not pushing yourself super hard, but allow it to happen the easy way in a flowy, natural way.

Speaker 1 (00:07:21) - Not some straight line between glued to the couch to triathlon athlete. Like that's not the way these things work. It's not the way we lose weight. It's not the way we change our lives. It's a real. The tide comes in, the tide goes out, the tide comes in, the tide goes out kind of situation. Some people like to say two, two steps forward, one step back. I don't like that per se, because that implies that some parts of the process are forward in some parts of the process are backward. I think they're all part of the forward process because stimulus and rest, these are both parts of how we grow, and we have to get rid of this idea that when we rest, when the tide goes out, that somehow going backward, because that's not the case. And that's a big reason why we're so messed up. It's one of the reasons we don't talk about is that our culture is sick when it comes to how we perceive rest. We see it as something for lazy people.

Speaker 1 (00:08:16) - We see it as a, we see it as a liability toward our productivity, and we see our productivity as the ultimate good, the ultimate thing that we could provide the world. And in so doing, we move ourselves out of balance with the way humans actually live and work. And when we do that, we impede both our rest and our productivity. We impede both our quality of life and the quality we're able to add to the lives of others. So today, I'd like to talk about movement in a way that maybe you've never heard of before, in a way that grabs at a bunch of different aspects of the things you've heard, the things we've all seen and actually grabs them, takes a hold of them and looks at them closer and examines them until we can see like, oh, this is what we're actually looking at. So back to mentioning that ad, one of these people reached out and said, does what you do work for a 53 year old male? And I'm like, yeah, because I just, I work with human beings.

Speaker 1 (00:09:11) - So yeah, for sure. And it's like, what do you offer? And I gave a little rundown of what I do. And he's like, do do anything to boost metabolism. And I told him, like, listen, that's most of what you've been told about boosting the metabolism is not true. It's not a thing. You're going to burn a baseline of calories based on your body mass, your muscle mass, your organ activity, and the rest is going to come from activity, whether it's exercise activity or non exercise activity. And to boost your metabolic rate, you can either increase your body mass, which isn't going to that's not going to help our overall goals or for increasing it from fat mass. So increasing muscle mass which is generally a slower process, it's not something that you do in six weeks and then just start burning fat like crazy. It's just it doesn't work like that. If you're going to take that approach of building muscle so that you are slowly raising your metabolic rate, you want to think of it like investing, right? That's something that's going to compound year after year.

Speaker 1 (00:10:12) - And so when you take that approach, it's like, wow, this stuff can really add up. This can make a remarkable improvement to the quality of your life, especially as you get older and all along the way, it's improving the quality of your life, not necessarily because you have all the muscle you're going to gain. Obviously, something that's going to take time that some of that's going to happen later on. But because you're enjoying the mental, physical, emotional and often social benefits of resistance training and other forms of exercise. So it's a win. And I can understand why this individual came to me looking for metabolism boosting foods or metabolism boosting workouts, because that's what's been sold to us for decades now. And it is largely horseshit. So how can we think about movement in a way that's helpful while getting us away from all this metabolism boosting nonsense that we've been inundated with? So let's start. If you want to burn more calories, there are two things you can do. You can move more and you can gain muscle.

Speaker 1 (00:11:11) - Obviously, there are a few other things you could do, but not optimal to your long term health outcomes, right? Like I said, you could gain £400 of fat and probably burn more calories in the day, but that's not obviously what we're going for here. So for all intents and purposes, you can build muscle and you can move more. And while it's a little bit different from aerobic activity to muscle building resistance training, there is this principle called progressive overload, where you want to constantly be applying greater and greater stimulus to your body if you want greater and greater muscle gains, or if you want better and better cardiovascular endurance, or better and better muscle endurance from those fast twitch. From those slower twitch muscle fibers, which are the ones you use when you're doing a steady state cardio. I've discussed how to resistance train in a previous podcast. Let's see, what podcast was that? Yeah. So episode number three think like a monkey. How to start building muscle and strength no matter your fitness level.

Speaker 1 (00:12:09) - That is a pretty good place to start. Maybe I should do a full episode just on building muscle, which seems like it could be. That could be a good one. Maybe we'll put that on the list. So we'll save the finer points on that for another day. But basically you want to do progressively harder resistance training. You want to make sure you're getting in some protein and you want to make sure you're resting. Obviously, everything else with fitness applies. You want to manage your stress. You want to make sure you're getting your daily vitamins and minerals. But I would like to think about resistance training in the context of a more global sense of movement that yes, that is a big part of our daily movement that I think we should be doing most days for optimal health. But there are things that are less sexy, that are very effective, like just how much you're standing in the day. Right? I'm not the first person to talk about this. This has been more and more common.

Speaker 1 (00:13:02) - If you spend more time on your feet, you're going to burn more calories, something like that. It's not sexy. It's not this metabolism burning. We're going to eat the right foods that are going to blast fat off your abs. It's dumb stuff like standing up more. It's not dumping. It's getting more steps in the day. It's spending more time on your feet. It's also things like fidgeting more like that's not something you're going to do consciously. Some people fidget more than others, and that's why some people have slightly higher metabolisms than others, because they're literally making tiny micro movements all day long. That often is genetic or result of conditioning. You're usually not going to learn how to be more fidgety, but there's one way that people become less fidgety. There's one way that people tend to stop walking as much. There's one way that people tend to stop standing up as much, and that's when they go on really restrictive diets, because the brain has a way of conserving calories, especially when things are low.

Speaker 1 (00:14:01) - When stores are low. The brain does this because let's think about to the plains of Central Asia 20,000 years ago, if we were in a band of 120 people and all of a sudden we hit some lean times, if we can go, let's say, hunt down a wildebeest and get some food, or go out and dig up some roots, find some berries, just catch some fish. Our body wants to do that. Spending the most calories possible or spending the least calories possible? Yes, spending the least calories possible. So we want to economize movement. We're going to reduce unnecessary fidgety movements. Subconsciously. We're going to spend less time on our feet, more time sitting. If you're really hungry, maybe you're not going to run down the buffalo. Maybe you're going to sit there, use your brain, try to figure out where they're going to walk and just sit there for two, three, four, five days until they come walking through and then bam, dinnertime. Survival is a real chess game.

Speaker 1 (00:14:58) - You really have to use all your wits. There's a strategy around how you use your energy when your body lacks the things it needs, and we don't have to tap into even, like 5% of that to maximize our weight loss. Even in the context of people who are very overweight and have serious mental health issues, serious conditioning that's taught them none of these things, that has not equipped them at all to move more and eat less. I talk about those in my Hunger Management masterclass. Or you can go back to episode what was it? Oh, nope. Where'd you go and just lost? Okay, so episode 17 looks like powerful perspectives on hunger. And also I would check out episode 15, The Stress Management Diet, the only weight loss diet. So in our context, what am I talking about? Okay. Well the first major point is that if you ratchet down your calories super aggressively, you're going to expend less energy. And you almost have you have basically no way of stopping it. So what you want to do, obviously, is try to find a more moderate calorie deficit.

Speaker 1 (00:16:06) - You want to find that balance between the maintaining solid energy, being able to feel vibrant and be able to get yourself to stand up and move, even if it takes a little push here and there, that's fine. Just as long as you're doing it, as long as you're getting in your steps, as long as you're getting in your workouts. And if you're wondering, hey, my weight loss is slowing down, can I reduce my calories from here? The question is really like, well, can you do it with while still maintaining the quality of your workouts and getting your steps in and not just sitting on the couch all day? If the answer is yes, then yeah, you can reduce some calories and prompt some more weight loss, and you can continue to do that until weight loss is stalled out and you just can't reduce calories anymore without seriously sacrificing the quality of your workouts or being able to peel yourself off the couch. That's when you want to go back into a maintenance break. You want to let your body recover, just like you recover from a workout.

Speaker 1 (00:17:02) - That's the same thing, except we're doing this weeks or months at a time, and then we recover, right? And it takes and it can take a little while. It depends on the person, depends on how hard they have been pushing it. But generally speaking, more is better and we can always restart. And if we've learned to maintain properly, these breaks don't really have to be an impediment to weight loss. They can actually keep weight loss going in a steady. And it might be like it might look like a terrace on your weight chart. But in the long run, if you're trying to lose weight for good and keep it off, this can be a very effective way to do that. One of the best things we can do for movement is to not diet too aggressively, and to always keep our wellbeing front of mind when we are deciding whether or not to reduce calories. Now, if you go back and listen to episode 17 about hunger, whatever the one about hunger was, there are lots of tips and tricks on how you can see hunger differently, and to see your energy levels differently in a way that gives you a lot more bandwidth for reducing calories even further.

Speaker 1 (00:18:04) - You have a lot more capability than you probably think you do. I've certainly learned that to be the case with myself and many clients. So if your calories are not the issue, what prevents people from moving more? I think a lot of it is just getting their heads around, moving more. And for a lot of people this starts with their mobility issues. A lot of people have a hitch in their giddyup, so to speak. A lot of people have joint issues. It's hard to be someone who's been overweight for a long time and to not have any mobility issues, to not have any joint issues, and I think people really take that hard when they think about the road ahead and how much more activity they'll probably need to engage in to be their healthiest self. And that can be very intimidating. But the truth is, movement can help fix those things if you do it properly. If you go too hard, obviously you're just going to create more injury, you're going to create more issues. But everybody's issues are different.

Speaker 1 (00:18:59) - Some people have serious issues that they're never going to be able to work through, and you need to work around it. Other people have a lot of injuries, like I said, that have to do with their weight, and if they didn't weigh so much, those injuries wouldn't be such an issue. Overuse injuries wear and tear. So it can be difficult. Like how do you find that that pathway through getting more and more activity without flare ups of your mobility issues, especially when you have mobility issues in your lower body, which that's going to cause issues with your walking and things like that. And this is this is just one perspective on that, how to get through those mobility issues. I think the best way to do it is to begin, go back to episode three. Listen to how I talk about starting resistance training, no matter what weight you're at, because that will help strengthen your body, which can often take a lot of the strain off your joints. A lot of the pain we feel in our joints is because of muscular imbalances, because muscles are turned off, and that makes some sort of compensatory muscle stay on all the time.

Speaker 1 (00:20:06) - And that's what often feels that's where we feel pain. So the problem might not be the muscle that you're feeling pain. It might be the agonist muscle. For instance, I often will get pains in my lower abdomen and my like so as, but that tells me that my glutes are turning off. That's the that's the agonist muscle in that relationship. Same thing. Same thing can be true of your lower back muscles and other hip flexors or your quads. And so it may sound strange, but people with lower back problems, one of the things that can really help them is stretching out their quads. And. All of a sudden, oh my lower back doesn't hurt well, or actually working their quads more and now their quads are turned on, their quads are operating the way they're supposed to. And now those little tiny lower back muscles aren't being stressed as much because the quads are actually doing what the quads are supposed to. And obviously they're a much bigger muscle group. And so often these aches and pains like for me.

Speaker 1 (00:20:58) - So as in lower back muscles, it's usually when I've started to slack on my lower body conditioning, my lower body training, I immediately notice an increase in stiffness and decrease in range of motion. Oftentimes, if I'm working out a lot, I can not only just touch my toes, I can put my palms on the floor, and if I'm when I'm tight, I can barely. I can't even touch my toes. I can't even touch my fingertips to the floor. That's how big of a difference in mobility. And I can see that change within days if I'm changing the way I'm moving. So that's all to say, to see movement as complementary. It's not either cardio. It's not either walking or resistance training. They all complement one another. The more cardio you get, the better you're going to be at resistance training. Because ultimately, do you need your lungs for resistance training? Yeah, eventually your cardiovascular ability is going to impede your ability to push your muscles. And like we've seen with mobility and basic physiological function, if your body isn't strong, you're going to have more and more mobility issues.

Speaker 1 (00:22:06) - You're going to have more and more wear and tear injuries when you're out there walking or doing even gentle cardio. So this isn't a bad thing. What this means is the more we apply ourselves to movement, the more we get from it, and the more we apply ourselves to will. Just for the sake of argument, divide it into cardio and resistance training. Even though some people, when they say cardio, they mean like hard cardio and they don't count walking. But in this case, let's say that walking is included in cardio and resistance training are complementary. They don't have to be at odds for elite athletes, for people who are training really hard. Yeah, if they're doing super hard cardio, especially on the same days that they're doing hard muscular workouts, they're they're burning the candle at both ends. The body's not going to be able to fully like if you're trying to get really good at if you're trying to get to be like Lance Armstrong on the bike, doing a hard leg day is going to steal a lot of your body's resources from being able to recover those longer, slow twitch muscles and lung capacity, while also impeding the full recovery of the short, fast twitch muscles that you're working through resistance training.

Speaker 1 (00:23:20) - But for most people, they don't have the cardiovascular ability or the muscular ability to really tax their system to that extent. So most people can do cardio and resistance training whenever they want, especially early on. So the people who need the most latitude have it. So you really don't have to overthink doing your cardio and doing your resistance training, because quite frankly, a lot of your cardio is going to be walking low impact cardio. It's not you're not going to be doing super hard cardio, because if you're really out of shape, you can't. And that means you can't really impede your recovery from doing resistance training. And how hard can you resistance train if you're really starting out? Not that hard. So there's a balance to these things, right? You don't have to decide, okay, do I want to get better at cardio or do I want to focus more on muscle mass? You don't have to even think about that right now. And in fact, you probably don't have to think about that.

Speaker 1 (00:24:14) - And in fact, many people don't need to think about that at all ever in their life, because they're just not training that hard in either case. And that's a good thing again, because it keeps life simple and it keeps the rewards coming in without without your movement overtaxing your body. And I think this is something we see in longevity, where people who tend to not only live long, but to move well while they live long, they're not necessarily the people pushing it the hardest, the people who are staying active and thinking of food as a way to fuel their activity. These are the people who live long and also live well. So to sum up, and this was maybe a bit of a circuitous episode, maybe not my most coherent apologize. I'm still not feeling well, but the biggest takeaway I want you to have from this is that you can increase your metabolism a lot more than you think, and it's not going to come from eating super foods or doing some special fat burning workout. It's going to come from slowly applying more and more stimulus to your muscles and to your cardiovascular ability, and doing so consistently.

Speaker 1 (00:25:21) - And the consistency is not going to come just from discipline, right? Discipline is the end result of us connecting with activities that we actually value, and to not get psyched out about the road ahead like it's a red carpet. It's not some like terrible journey. Like it's cool, it's fun. On watching yourself constantly get better. As long as you're good to yourself and you keep your wellbeing the priority, it really doesn't matter how old you are or what gender you are, or what hormones you have or don't have, your body is going to get better. We did not evolve for bazillions of years to to a point where most of the population just suddenly has bad genetics. That's just not. That's just not possible. That's nonsense. Most likely your genes are just fine. Most likely your hormones are just fine. It's your lifestyle that's holding you back. And it's the negative beliefs, the negative perspectives, the negative schema of your mind that's keeping your lifestyle stuck in this more sedentary way of living. And that's not any sort of judgment like I've been there.

Speaker 1 (00:26:19) - I've lived a lot of my life there. I know what it's like. I know how hard it is to get moving. I know how hard it is to hear someone say like, oh, movement is the best medicine when you're really depressed, when you're really anxious. And there's a different conversation we could have about the mental health around getting moving. But for here, the main point I want to get across is just that movement is not like climbing a mountain where it's just it's harder and harder the further you go. It's more like rolling a snowball downhill. It just gets more and more momentum. The further you go, it gets easier the more you do it. And the first day you walk out of your house and go for that walk is the hardest it's ever going to be. Most likely because a year from a year after that, you could be doing incredibly hard workouts that you didn't think you were even capable of doing, and doing them with gusto and drive just because you stepped out and did something different.

Speaker 1 (00:27:12) - So what are the Oscars for podcasting? The potties. I'm probably not going to submit this episode for potty consideration. That's not a real award. And it sounds like potty, so probably shouldn't be, but I hope that I've encouraged you today. I hope it's been good to touch base. It's been good to get something out to you, give you something to chew on, something to think about. Hopefully you got something out of it today. If you have more specific questions about how to get moving, about how to deal with a specific mobility issue, how to work around it, you can email me at okay, weight loss, that's John at Oaks Weight Loss. And just ask me your question. Just subject line podcast question. You can hit me in the DMs. You can find me in the Facebook group. Ask questions there. Lose weight with John. There's a link in the show notes. You can join our new program, The Easy Weight Loss Club. This is not my main coaching program.

Speaker 1 (00:28:07) - This is, like I said, a club. It's a way for us to come together, learn, offer support to one another and yeah, do this together. Because part of what makes movement so fun and what will keep you doing it is the social aspect. And yeah, a lot of us were not. We don't have a strong social circle that we can work out with. A lot of our social circle are just a sedentary, if not more so, than we are. That's part of the way we got to where we are. But having that online community can be really valuable. And the easy weight loss club I've had a lot of people tell me they want to join. We haven't had a lot of people actually sign up yet. We'll get that rocking and rolling as soon as some people sign up, but I guess that's a good thing. Starting off, you want it to be small and manageable so we can build bonds and get to know one another. So there's a link to that in the show notes as well.

Speaker 1 (00:28:53) - If you're looking to get after some serious life change and you want to talk to me about my main coaching programs, you can email me John at Oaks Weight Loss Subject Coaching Inquiry. Tell me a little bit about yourself, and then I'll ask other questions to make sure that you're you'd be a right fit for the programs I have and my approach to behavior change and weight loss. Yeah, I think next week I might talk about some how to read fitness marketing, because a lot of it is nonsense. And I found some examples of fitness marketing that I think are particularly egregious and sadly all too common. So to sum up this episode, do a little bit. Begin the journey. It only is going to get easier after that. And if you have challenges toward your mobility, hey, you're not the only one and that doesn't have to be an impediment. You just start taking things one step at a time. That is the essence of the easy way out. It's in the path of least resistance, one little baby step at a time.

Speaker 1 (00:29:51) - That's how I got out. That's how I'm still improving my life despite a number of struggles. And if you're ever not sure where that next step is, that's what the podcast is for. That's what the Facebook group is for. That's what the Easy Weight Loss Club is for. That's what coaching is for. I've got resources for you. If you're not sure which ones are right for you, just reach out. I hope you have a great week. I hope you move well this week. I hope you enjoy moving as medicine, and I hope that when I find you, hopefully next Tuesday morning, I'll find you a little bit fitter and a little bit happier. All right. Take care.