Achieve Resilient Aging with Grace and Holistic Nutrition (Core Essentials #2)

Hey there, welcome to the Grace Health podcast, your source for aging strong in your physical, mental and spiritual health. My name is Amy Connell. I'm a weight neutral certified personal trainer and nutrition coach who loves walks with friends, chocolate and Jesus. Whether you're looking to grow stronger as you age, nourish your body, mind and spirit, or fit all of the pieces of your health together to holistically thrive, this is the place for women over 40. I'm here to guide you in the areas I can and bring on experts in the areas I'm still learning, and, of course, we cover it all in a whole lot of grace. I'm glad you're here. This is the second of a very quick and short but important season on the core essentials of the Grace Health podcast. If you missed the last episode, I highly encourage you to go back and listen to it so you can kind of get an understanding of why I'm doing this, and then also to hear the first column in our four core essentials. So that was grace and we dug into more about the grace that we need, the areas that we need grace. So if you haven't listened, go back and listen to it. And, as promised, today is the R and A of the Grace acronym, which is resilient aging. I love this word resilient. It's been used a lot, especially since COVID, where a lot of us are done being resilient because we had to have so much resilience and we weren't expecting it, and I think there's still a lot of fatigue that is coming out of it, but I do still like the word. So I thought it would be helpful to define what resilient is, and, rather than getting a definition from dictionarycom or Merriam-Webster, I thought it would be interesting to see what a broader definition is, and so I went to the American Psychological Association, and so they define resilience as the process and outcome of successfully adapting to difficult or challenging life experiences, especially through mental, emotional and behavioral flexibility and adjustment to external and internal demands. Okay, so let me pull a couple of those words out that I think is appropriate for this conversation about aging. Difficult or challenging life experiences, flexibility, adjustment to internal and external demands Is this not what we're doing right now? Is this not the area of life that we are in, when we are finishing up raising our children, or have grown children that we're still trying to figure out how to parent? We're dealing with aging parents. We're dealing with parents who are passing away. I mean there's just there's a lot going on. And then, of course, in all things in our body, over 90% of the listeners here are over 40. I know that from a survey I offer people and actually I'm going to put that survey in the show notes If you have not taken it. I would love your feedback on there. It's just three minutes long. It helps me get to know you better, it helps me and it's anonymous. It helps me understand what you're looking for here. So I will put that down in the show notes. But over 90% of us are over 40. This year I am stepping into the next bracket as I turn 50. And I don't need to tell you that as we age this kind of goes south. I mean. So bear with me for a minute, because these are some of the physiological things that are changing in our bodies that are actual, real facts. We lose muscle mass. I've talked a lot about muscle mass as we age, but we do lose muscle mass. We lose bone density, stabilization, our metabolism decreases, obviously, obviously. We have hormonal changes, our immune system weakens, our sleep quality declines, our cognitive function declines and the list goes on and on, and I know that sounds really depressing, but those are also the facts. Those are the difficult and challenging life experiences that we are having to work through and what we're having to figure out as we go through it. So if aging is a difficult or challenging life experience, we must choose to be resilient, and I know that's why you're here. I know that's why you're here because you're choosing. You're choosing to learn. You are smart, you are thoughtful. I know you love to learn because I know you from the various platforms that I have, but also just because podcast listeners in general are cut from that cloth. They want to learn, they are interested in applying more information to enhance and enrich their life, whatever that is. I was actually just re listening to an episode on Kate Bowler's podcast called Everything Happens. So if you're not familiar with Kate, she was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer very young, like early 30s she had an 18 month old. She is also a professor at Duke Divinity School and her work really is around. I'm probably going to totally miss this and get it wrong, but her work is around women in the church and just the historical roles and how those are changing. So she interviewed Beth Moore, who you probably are familiar with with Beth Moore, but if you're not, she is one of the most renowned and beloved Bible teachers out there. In fact, kate was saying that in the list of religious celebrities, for lack of a better I don't remember what category she called it. It was like the Pope Jolozine and then Beth Moore. And Beth is just incredible. If you've ever done any of her Bible studies, she's just brilliant and she's just pushing through stuff. So, anyway, this was a. This was a rebroadcast of a previous episode that they had done. If you like Beth Moore, I highly recommend that. It was right when her new book, her memoir All my Nutted Up Life, was coming out, anyway. So one of the things they were talking about was aging. And Beth is 65 ish, Kate, I think, is late 30s ish, I think. And you could hear the tears and the emotion in Beth's voice when she said Kate, I do not have to tell you that aging is a privilege. And I think maybe Kate said it first and Beth said you know, you know that aging is a privilege Because Kate has walked through years of uncertainty with her cancer, years of not knowing if she's going to see her child graduate from high school, years of not knowing what the next test result would be Now. Thankfully, at this time of this recording, kate is cancer free and I'm so glad, I'm so, so happy for her. It was such a wonderful reminder to me at just the right time, and I know that was god designed that aging is a privilege. So when we have these conversations about resilient aging, when I mention all of the things that are challenging about it, it is still a privilege to be alive, to have breath, to be able to move, to be able to think, to be able to worship god. I want to make sure that we start from that point that it is a privilege to get older and to have your lower back kind of constantly hurting and your shoulder that is seems to be out of whack and you think it's because the dog pulled on you too hard when she was chasing after a squirrel. And yes, these are both personal Examples, but we have to remember that. We have to remember that. Now, as far as resilient aging goes within the grace health space, I am not going to tell you I need to be. It's a privilege that your back hurts all the time. It's a privilege that your shoulders gone wonky. So I'm not going to be saying that I am trying to provide episodes that educate and enrich us on the aging process and how we can be more resilient in that and how we can apply things that work for us so that we may feel better, so that we can do the things that god is calling us to do. This comes in two ways. One is I invite guests. I am not an expert in anything. I am still learning most things and this podcast, if nothing else, has been the biggest blessing in that area, because it's an opportunity for me to learn from other people and I'm so grateful for that. I do not take it lightly. I do invite guests on. Right now, the rhythm is twice a month. If you have four weeks in a month and episodes drop on Tuesdays, twice a month I have guests on to bring their experts or to bring their expertise. The other two weeks are solo episodes. These solo episodes, I am trying to offer ways that we can age resiliently, so some of those are very specific. I have done episodes on things like a Charlie horse and what to do about it. I have episodes coming up on what do you do about plantar fasciitis. I talk a lot about bone health. As it relates to personal training. I am certainly not the expert in that and I have had experts on about osteoporosis and will continue to do so. So I like to educate like in my heart. I love educating women simple ways that they can become stronger so that they can move throughout their day a little bit better, with a little more ease, with a little more fluidity, rather than feeling so stiff. I have an upcoming episode on stress. We've talked about sleep. We've had many conversations about menopause and not only the physiological things that are happening but the psychological ways that we can deal with that and the body changes that come along with that. I try very hard to have episodes centered on gentle nutritional support, and what do I mean by gentle nutrition? I have really adopted the intuitive eating principles of food and of nutrition. If you're not familiar with intuitive eating, I'm going to give you the 10 principles really quickly and you can learn more if you want. There's also a wonderful podcast called intuitive eating for Christian women that I recommend. But the 10 principles of intuitive eating and they kind of are stair step. They're kind of like the AA approach where it's like you do one and then you do the other after you've climbed that step and then the next. So the first one is reject the diet mentality. Recognize how harmful that endless pursuit of a specific body size has been, and accept that your weight doesn't equal value or health. Number two is honor your hunger. Recognize and allow yourself to eat off a schedule or clock. Number three is make peace with food. Give yourself unconditional permission to eat. Stop turning foods into shiny objects. Number four is challenge the food police. Food doesn't hold moral value and reject the idea that it does, and I know for those of us who love learning about nutrition that's a hard one to overcome. I have to keep going back to that. I will admit that. Number five discover the satisfaction factor. Eating should be a pleasurable experience to be enjoyed. Number six feel your fullness. Recognize and listen to your body signs that it's done eating. Number seven cope with your emotions with kindness. Find ways to comfort, nurture and distract without using food. Number eight respect your body. Stop criticizing it for how it looks and what it can't do. Number nine exercise and feel the difference. Find a movement practice that brings joy to your life. And number 10, honor your health with gentle nutrition. So eat in a way that makes you feel good and happy. So that gentle nutrition, I'm going to tell you, is not something I get right all the time I am trying. I am trying to provide nutritional information or have conversations that provide nutritional information, without making food, without providing morals to it or having good or bad, but it's more of. This is something that you may want to know and you may want to experiment to see if it helps you now or this is something that I think will help you in the future, and I'm specifically thinking about calcium right now. I did an episode on calcium and I have to admit like Was that within the intuitive eating? I think it was, because intuitive eating does not mean eat whatever you want whenever you want. You know, eat all you want. It's not necessarily that it is just taking away the morals of that. You can also learn more about intuitive eating with the episode that I did with Aaron Todd. That was in season 12, episode 32. So you can learn more about that. Most of the nutrition conversations we have had, oh gosh, in the last, probably at least year I'm just doing this off the top of my head Anyone who comes on specifically to talk about food is really under the umbrella of intuitive eating because I feel like I have to offer consistency. I feel like it makes sense. Is it easy to do? Oddly, no, even though we were all born with that. We were all born with this innate ability to eat when we're hungry and stop when we're satisfied and not worry about what our body looks like and not worry about if a food is good for us or bad for us or anything like that. Like we were born with that and diet culture has totally polluted that. So you know, I will say it's just, it's hard and I still I am walking through that and I will get into this a bit more in the fourth episode in this season, which is expansive health topics. But just know that when we are talking about resilient aging and when we are talking about nutritional support, I am always doing it under the umbrella of this is gentle and it is not in the utmost precision, like I talked about up in the first episode under Grace, like I talked about Grace from utmost precision and all of the biohacking trends and all of that kind of stuff. So that's the resilient aging portion of this. If you are under 40 and you are listening to this, you are welcome here. That is okay, it's funny. I actually have a new friend who is in her mid-20s and she is so smart and insightful and creative and generous and giving and I just adore her. We met through my sorority and we've kept in touch and now we talk over Marco Polo and we text and she's wonderful, like I can't wait to see where she goes with this. And so my sorority has this private platform where you can connect with people who have your similar interests or who were in your chapter or something like that. And so there's one that is for retired people, and she told me the other day she said I've joined that one. She goes, don't tell anybody, but I just like learning from them and I like seeing what's to come and I love that. So if you are not yet 40, you are absolutely welcome here. I'm not drawing a line, I'm just saying that the focus of our conversations is resilient, aging as we get older. That is at least one of them. So that is what you can expect here. Tune in next time as I talk a bit more about being Christ-centered and what that means and specifically what that means with regard to the guests who come on. Spoiler alert it does not mean that all guests share the same faith that I am, so you can listen more in the next episode and thank you for tuning in today. An