Holding Body Wisdom and Christ-Centered Health Over 40 (Core Essentials #3)

Hey there, welcome to the Grace Health podcast, your source for aging strong in your physical, mental and spiritual health. My name is Amy Konell. I'm a weight neutral 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 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. We are in the third episode of a very quick four episode season called the core essentials of grace health. So what I am doing is I am taking the four things that guide everything we do here on the podcast, explaining it a little bit more so you can determine if this is a place that you want to hang out and so you know what to expect. The first two episodes have already published, so if you have missed those, I encourage you to go listen to them. Just as a brief synopsis, I have created the acronym grace to cover these four areas Now you are probably smart enough to know that grace is actually five letters, so two of those are one area, g stands for grace, of course, and in the first episode I talk all about the areas that we have grace from and give grace to. R and a stand for resilient aging. This is for women over 40. This podcast is if you are not yet 40, you're still welcome to be here, but I will talk about topics that are a little more pertinent to women over 40. Today's topic is C, which I'll dig into here in a second, and then E, which is the next one, is expansive health topics. So what is C? C stands for Christ centered, so I'm going to repeat something of what I said in the statement of values episode back in season 12. My six statement of values still hold true, and those are congruent with these four core essentials. Those statement of values are knowledge, discernment, diversity, encouragement, faith and grace and yes, I use the word grace a lot, but you can do that when the title of this podcast is Grace, health. So what does this mean to have a Christ centered show? First and foremost, I am a follower of Jesus. I know that this can be an unpopular thing to say, particularly because I want to acknowledge that there are people who have been hurt by the church. They have been hurt by people who attend church who are Christians, because we are all broken and I do not want to gloss over the hurt and the pain that you may have experienced. I can't pretend to know what your story is if so, but I will say I'm so sorry Because of that. Sometimes Christianity can get a bit of a it's just, it can be unpopular, but I'm not going to deny it. I will not deny my faith. Depending on your background and faith, you may come with your own assumptions about that, about what it means. When I say that I am a follower of Jesus, the only fair assumption to make about me being a Jesus follower is that I try to love others the way he did. Am I great at it? No, but I try. I try. I don't understand all of scripture, but I do understand how loving Jesus was, how welcoming Jesus was, how secure and safe people were when they were around him, and I try to emulate that. While my faith is integral to what I do and to the message of this ministry, it is not a requirement for every single episode. Some of the conversations we have are more heavily weighted on Jesus than others, and I'm okay with that. I will bring on people to help our faith walk. I will also bring on people to talk about menopause and I it's just, I'm sorry, it's just hard to talk about Jesus and menopause in the same conversation. It's hard to talk about Jesus and protein in the same conversation. Like the, there are things that I'm just I don't know how to integrate that in. Also, because of these six values that I have, knowledge is one of them. So if someone brings knowledge and they don't share the same faith that I have, I'm okay with that. Again, I look back to Jesus and how often he just gave a hand out and a hand up to people who were not Jewish as he was at the time, who were not abiding by society standards. Not to say that my guests are not abiding by society standards. I want to be very clear that I'm not saying that. What I am saying is that I don't feel like it is in the best interest of what we are trying to do here, to learn, to be enriched, to apply to only have other Christ followers. In fact, I delight in it. I delight that I get to have conversations with and be introduced to and get to know other people who don't share my faith. That's okay. That's something that I have embraced for this show and I hope that you feel comfortable as well. Like I said, everything is from a Christ-centered perspective, so I'm not going to bring someone on who is saying things that are completely antithetical to my faith values. But again, when we're getting into some of the more nitty-gritty stuff, it's just hard to combine it and someone is bringing something helpful and something that will help us, and so I am great with that and I hope that you are too. For some, I think that this show is a little too jesus-y, and for others it's not enough. And I'm just going to say I don't really know what to do with that. Like I don't know how to bring in scripture when I'm having a central's episode on planner facades. I don't know how to make that happen. If you have an idea, if you have scriptures for that, reach out and let me know, but I just don't know how to do that and so I don't. And you know that's just where I am with that One of the scriptures. I will say that I just keep going back to and back to and back to. I use this in my new book for teens called your core strength. I have used this in several interviews. Maybe you could say it's like a scripture, like our, one of our core scriptures. I don't really know, but this is one that I feel like God just keeps hitting in my heart, and it's Romans 12 to. I talked about it in the first episode of this quick season, but it says do not conform to the pattern of this world, but be transformed by the renewing of your mind. Then you will be able to test and approve what God's will is his good, pleasing and perfect. Well, the patterns of this world clues like visually assessing our health, living in diet culture. If you're not familiar with diet culture, it is just kind of a general term. There's not like one official definition that I know of, but it's a set of beliefs and practices that worships and this and equates body size with health or morality. It's also the lens through which beauty is commonly viewed and defined, and then it also demonizes certain foods and food groups while elevating others. I will be the first to say that it still seeps in with me that I have a history of diet culture in many, many ways. I am working through that. I do not claim to do it perfectly, but I do believe that ditching diet culture Makes sense because it honors the diversity and it honors the discernment that God gives us. You know, when we go back to Romans 12 to, and it says, then you'll be able to test and approve what God's will is, his good, pleasing and perfect will. I believe a huge part of that is Doing what he is asking us to do or, as I have said, doing what we're called to do. I talk about the types of callings in a very, very, very early episode back in season three, about the different types of callings. It's also in my book your worthy body, and also I Included it in your core strength as well, and really summed up, god's will for us is to love him and to love others. And how do we know this? Well, we go back to the Bible. In Matthew, twenty two, thirty six, three, four, twenty two, thirty six, three, forty. It says teacher, which is the greatest commandment of the law? And Jesus replies love the Lord, your God, with all your heart and all your soul and with all your mind. This is the first and greatest commandment, and the second is, like it. Love your neighbor as yourself. All the law and the prophets hang on these two commandments. So what's God's will? I believe it's to love God and love others. I do not believe it is to be entrenched in diet culture or trying to make our body a certain size and and I will say this, is a hard. This is a hard lesson for me to be walking through right now, but I also believe it to be true. And so how those things work together, I don't know. Stay tuned, we can figure it out together. We have had several guests on talking about diet culture, but if I could point to one, if you're wanting to learn a little bit more about diet culture, that would be with Leslie Schilling. In season 18, episode six, she joined. She is the author of Feed Yourself. She's a registered dietitian. She also operates under an intuitive eating perspective. That episode was called A Guide to Re-establishing Trust in Our Bodies. I have learned so much from Leslie in her book. We had a book club with her that she joined, and so I was so grateful for that and also through her guidance that she has offered me, or as I have developed my upcoming book for Teen Girls, your Core Strength. Leslie reviewed it and was just so gracious in pointing out diet culture. I liked to joke that I was looking for the diet culture police. I thought I was good and she was the diet culture head of the FBI. So she really pulled out a lot of stuff, but it was all good and I'm so grateful to that. Now, as far as my health goes, I have a few scriptures that I do go back to when I think about it. Two are from Genesis that essentially gives us permission to eat all the foods that God gave us. So one of them is from Genesis 1.29. I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food. And then later, after the flood, he includes animals in that. He says everything that lives and moves about will be food for you. Just as I give you the green plants, I now give you everything. When I say those two verses out loud, the word that pops out to me is every. God gave us everything. God gave us every food, and I do believe that that also includes the foods that maybe don't offer as many nutrients, that may not be as nutritionally dense, but they are still part of every food that God has given us. I mentioned in the first episode of this series that I love learning. I mean I read a lot of books. I read a lot of articles. I do a lot of research, especially when I'm in the middle of writing a book. I'm doing a lot of research. I love learning about, specifically, food and foment exercise, physiology. I love learning about that. However, at the same time, there is so much fear mongering that the health industry does. It is almost paralyzing. I mean the things that you hear that you can eat and that you can't eat and that are good for you and that are bad for you, and all of that kind of stuff. I mean all of that it's just too much. It's just too much and this is why I am intentionally staying away from and we have grace from the utmost precision that I talked about in first episode of this season. Yes, we are all diverse. We all have unique needs for our body. There are some foods that don't agree with me and I avoid as much as possible. You probably have some of these as well and they're probably different. I bet you can have onions without sneezing. I can't. When I say sneezing, I don't mean like when I'm cutting it, I mean like after I eat it. For some reason it just bothers my allergies. I mean, this is what? Like who's allergic to onions I am will I still eat them every now and then? Yes, because it just makes sense to incorporate them. Or I'm not gonna get picky if I'm so at someone else's house, or something like that. So I do hold space for that. At the same time, god gave us the discernment to discover things about ourselves and apply them in a way that works for us, and not necessarily take all of the things from all of the podcasts and all of the books and all of the reals and the tick tocks and everything else and feel like we have to do that. I feel like there is so much danger in that. There is so much danger. So we've got to use our discernment. That's one of our six values here on on the show and that discernment is from god. It's something that is within us and we are smarter than the reals. We are smarter than the tick tocks. You can look, sure, look at him, look at him, take what you think might work for you, do an experiment on yourself and then see, I'm just gonna say this I have a real issue and I get really tired of fitness influencers or health professionals who tell me not to eat a banana because it has too much sugar in it. And it I mean what? What? Seriously, seriously don't eat bananas because they have too much sugar in it. No, thank you. Or when they say something like what you've got to stay away from Tomatoes because those are nightshades and because they cause inflammation. And I'm just gonna tell you right now I don't even know what a nightshade is, I don't know what that is, but like those are the kinds of things that you may have. A tomato issue, okay, that's fine. But taking these blanket statements, I mean, if we were to take everything I'm getting off on a tangent here, sorry, but if we were to take everything that we saw and read and heard and ingested and use that as a, as a filter for what we would eat, I think maybe we could have water, that's it. And then probably someone else would say, no, you shouldn't have too much water, or something like that. So God gave us everything. And then use the discernment he gave you to figure out and I'm picking a lot on food, but also this applies to your movement as well. If you like to exercise, we can get in the weeds with all of that kind of stuff. Exercise because you make, it makes you feel good. If you want to gently move into Particular types of exercise to support what you want to do or to support your future self, that's great to and like. With that, I'm specifically talking about Like doing some strength training because it's going to help our bones, because it's going to help our our skeletal system and make us strong enough to do as we age, like those kinds of things. But again, it's all about like just getting back to the basics that God created us to be smart and he created us to know our bodies and he made our unique and our diverse bodies and we have the power of knowing what is best for those when we are number one with him and talking with him and reading his word because I think I believe that he will reveal things like that to us and then also just using our own head, using our own discernment I know I've used that word a ton here and I'm sorry, but that's just kind of the word that I feel like again is from God, that's that he gives us. So I feel like I've gotten a bit on a rabbit trail here and I apologize for that. And I want to pull it back to jesus. When you listen here, this is the most important thing I want you to know. I have tried very hard to Filter everything through the lens of my faith. We may not talk about faith in every episode. Not everybody who is I a guest on here is going to share my faith. That's okay. They bring something that will enrich us and Will help us in the other areas that we struggle with, and if I don't talk about faith as much as you like, I'm sorry. Like I said, it's just kind of hard to incorporate, like Jesus and mobility. I mean I'm sure I could go through the Bible and find a scripture to slap on there, but that's just not how I operate. I'm not going to Find a scripture to support the things that I'm saying just just for the sake of having a scripture. I will. I will incorporate a scripture when I feel like it's relevant. So that is the basics of this being a Christ centered Show. I hope that makes sense to you. Sorry about all the tangents and a little bit of the ranting, but you know that I'm passionate about it. All right, see you next time for E expansive health topics and what that means for you and what you will get.