Welcome to the Tipsy-Tuesday Newsletter, my Party People! |
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Fill your glass, pack a bowl, or live your soberest life- but WE'RE GOIN IN! |
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First time? Here's what to know: •Takeaways are highlighted in BLUE •Party-Favors are last (topic-relevant resources, goodies, and info) |
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Halloooo, First name / Babes! Warning- I'm spicy today and this is due to be a dense email since we're debunking! But it's not like the 10-page emails I sent when we first started this newsletter… Bless you OG readers. You're the real MVPs and I'll never forget you! 😂 We've all invested in various food and/or exercise approaches as THE solution to ‘hacking’ our bodies for vanity purposes or achieving the all-so-elusive and personal-version of a ‘healthy lifestyle.’ But what happens when you learn that food and exercise only make up 15% of the necessary factors for actually achieving anything health OR appearance? Whether it be a desire for more energy, better sleep, improved focus, or an overall infusion of zest, intimacy, and generally feeling better, usually it's because you've hit a wall and realized, ‘OKAY, something has to give…” and you're beyond the gates of frustration with yourself and/or life in general and are coming to terms with the idea of CHANGE. This is where tend to either grab coffee and have an all-or-nothing mentality- forcing ourselves to take personal time off work, halting everything with a mission to overhaul our entire life with some overcomplicated makeover come Monday, exercising control over food choices, exercise frequency, and the use of supplements for motivation and inspiration for a better life. The unfortunate truth is that food and exercise- no matter how ‘derailed’ they’ve become in your current life- are NOT the fix-all for the imbalances you’re experiencing in your well-being. Trying to gain control over your life by ruling your behaviors with an iron fist is more likely to load your brain with MORE stress, not less- and resulting in a cycle of failures. As we’ve discussed in previous emails, the higher the stress, the more likely it is that your inner rebel will enter the chat unannounced and at the worst possible time. Because stress elicits our most comfortable and practiced behaviors- not our most ideal ones! Wouldn’t it be lovely, though, if the more stressed we became, the BETTER we took care of ourselves just like we’re more apt to do when we come down sick? (Or even made self-love, care, and maintenance a pillar in our everyday life to mitigate stressful fall-outs to begin with?) For some, the illusion of such care might be true- like myself for example, I used to have this idea that I'd work out more and eat the ‘cleanest’ when I was busiest or ‘on my grind.’ BUT the truth is that those illusions of best-effort were actually tragically short-lived in cycles and spurts. They weren’t sustainable, and as soon as my brain needed a break, everything would fall off my plate into a dead-stop halt- the good, the bad, and the ugly ALL took a seat. I thought that was just how health-kicks worked- lolololol. Nope, just a really bad approach that I’d re-invested into 500-times-over because I thought there was ONE way to reach my goals of living a healthy lifestyle that lasted ‘forever.' Once you realize that all made-for-you protocols typically the same dead-end-approach, you'll be able to identify the BS much easier, coming to a place of consistency on your own terms. My clients experience the same. The lows look different for everyone- meaning some experience negative self-talk, others blame their willpower or discipline, and some take the failure as a sign to move on to the next type of exercise or diet. Personally, I’ve been all the above- my frustrations, and undying curiosity in the abilities of the human body, quite literally lead me to pursuing an education and career in nutrition, exercise, and behavior change. With that knowledge now under my belt, and developing more each day, I can confidently say that we put WAY too much efficacy and effort into all the wrong things when it comes to food and exercise. The real of it is that your body is built to adapt and will adapt to almost anything you throw at it- but that adaptation comes at a cost, and if there is no recuperation of that via recovery- as an after-care practice AND as a proactive- shit will indeed hit the ceiling fan one way or another. |
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We're going to address what's absolutely NOT worth your focus, but at the VERY LEAST, I hope this email gives you PERMISSION to drop the ‘shoulds’ you’re unnecessarily carrying when it comes to food and exercise. Food and movement choices aren't to be ignored or overlooked- they're still a part of the bigger picture- but perhaps by underlying the ridiculousness, or level/type of expectation being put on said ridiculousness when it comes to food and exercise, will alleviate some of that burden you’re carrying on yourself and your personal value to achieve food and exercise perfection. A healthy lifestyle is supposed to enhance your life- not add stress to it! Remember, your focus is finite, or limited- even though your energy, or ability, is infinite. So it’s my personal goal, overtime, to have you practice, or at least consider, operating from a perspective of FOCUS rather than burning energy haphazardly. No ‘shoulding’ yourself on my watch! In an effort to make this straightforward, I thought we might dive straight into some every-day, mainstream-popular, oversimplified and overcomplicated advice and separate the bullshit/inappropriate expectation from the validity/underlying principle. I hope this offers a sobering-perspective that helps you start questioning relevancy, not just accuracy, when it comes to implementing ‘wellness’ concepts so you can determine what’s worth your effort, what’s a complete waste of your time and energy, and where you might be putting too much of your focus- or not enough! Here’s your first good reason for divesting from a food and exercise-emphasized approach to wellness OR fitness - when 85% of efforts are dropped or put on the back-burner to uphold only 15% of it, you’re going to experience an imbalance of something, somewhere, at some time. •MOST commonly, you'll experience it first in your daily feels, feeling like shit across the board when it comes to sleep, appetite, mood, and energy. •When ongoing, it hits once you come down with absolute exhaustion in the form of adrenal fatigue- aka REAL burnout- and are forced to let your responsibilities fall through the cracks in order to stop everything and recoup. •Or worst-case scenario, development of a metabolic condition that forces you into a lifetime of recovery. This is actually a common experience in the body-building community where 1200 calorie diets causing ongoing hunger and fat loss are summed up as a small price to pay for a Summer-bod… until you’re in and out of medical centers trying to fix your digestion issues or troubleshoot ongoing conditions like PCOS. But who wants to warn you about all the risks when they can make stupid-money selling you a dream of achieving THEIR body- which is impossible anyway. Many big fit-fluencers, like Katy Hearn, Buff Bunny, and previously- Stephanie Buttermore- who now speaks out against such standards after experiencing a metabolic disorder herself- are notorious for doing this. Here's another good reason: food and exercise has different outcomes on every single person's body. Yes, there are trends that apply to damn-near ALL people, but the application of that and ‘effectiveness,' if you entertain it, greatly differs. Annnnd- the 85% of factors aside from food and exercise directly impact the success of your health, fitness, wellness- whatever you want to label it- goals. Focusing only on food and exercise with expectation of some profound lifestyle change is like expecting a pair of floaties to get you through a hurricane. But alas, telling you to ease into new behaviors, manage stress- or even table certain changes for a later time to your own benefit- sounds a lot less sexy than ‘shred fat FAST’, RESET your metabolism, PURGE those toxins, jumpstart your ENERGY! Even if you do want to build a butt, increase your muscle mass, or boost your energy just to feel better daily, all can be achieved WITHOUT buying into energetically- and financially-expensive, bullshit. My grandmother has always said, “the devil does his best work when telling partial-truths.” And if that doesn’t sum up the wellness industry in a nutshell, I don’t know what does. |
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But cheesy marketing one-liners aside, it’s actually hard to know what’s valid information and what’s not- even for hyper-involved experts and professionals! And I know you don’t have all the time in the world to learn how to do quality research either so I have a little trick for you. Remember the relevancy piece last email? This won’t apply to EVERYTHING, but as a general rule of thumb, it might help you: Accurate or not, first consider if something is relevant to you and if you could implement it without undue stress BEFORE committing to it. Given that I'm a qualified researcher on the subject matter, I'm going to break down these common misconceptions below, but I want you to use them to set a precedent with yourself that not all that's popular is accurate, and not all that is accurate is necessarily relevant or helpful to YOU. The claim, the misleading half-truth of it, and the misunderstood-principle behind it: The Claim: “Move more, eat less” to lose weight. - The Misleading Part: More and less are subjective. How much more? How much less? Do I even know what ‘good’ looks like to know what’s ‘up’ or ‘down’ from there? What does that look like for me versus someone else?
- The Underlying Principle: energy balance! Energy balance is that *also* oversimplified equation of calories in - calories out. Energy balance itself is informed by a ton of things outside of food and exercise such as stress, genetics, and environmental safety. While eating less could result in weight loss for one person, it could elicit over-eating and under-eating cycles in someone else, ultimately leading to weight gain. And as we've also discussed here, resting metabolic rate is responsible the number of calories your body burns on a daily basis- the more weight you lose, the lower your RMR becomes. The more drastic weight fluctuations you have, the harder it is for your RMR to come back to baseline each time- and sometimes, such as the case with chronic dieters- it doesn't go back. This is the metric responsible for the “diets fail 95% of the time” statistic you've probably seen floating around- because each time you lose weight- intentionally OR unintentionally- you reduce your resting metabolic rate and you burn less calories while putting on more weight after dieting is over. Whatever you do to get your body somewhere, you usually have to maintain to keep it there. Hence why I tell people, don't commit to something you can't sustain- like Whole30, detoxes, fasting, 75Hard, or fitness-studio weight-loss challenges- there are longterm bodily consequences to these types of short-term decisions that usually leak into mental and emotional distress. Mental health matters just as much as your bodily health!
The Claim: Focus on fat loss instead of weight loss for health and/or body composition - The Misleading Part: This is a dichotomy comparison of two factors that are minimal. In addition, the things glamorized as benefits to focusing on fat loss versus weight loss are actually worsened by both weight loss AND fat loss- your energy decreases over time despite an increase at first, your sex drive lessens over time despite increasing at first, and your fat/weight loss slows down despite rapidly decreasing at first. People on keto REALLY love to tout these short-lived benefits- but years after abusing their body by depriving it of an essential nutrient, they end up having to recover from chronic metabolism issues due to a self-inflicted, long-term, nutrient deficiency. No bueno. (PSA- Don't do keto unless directed by a dietician as a direct-result of a carbohydrate-resistance illness… which usually comes with clear signs of distress and needs to be tested/assessed by a medical professional.)
- The Underlying Principle: Muscle mass! It's muscle mass that actually brings about all the benefits expressed by the fat-loss zealots. Muscle growth and preservation is usually implemented alongside fat loss protocols under the radar due to the macronutrient-ratios (Macros= nutrients measured in GRAMS- carb, fat, protein, water) recommended by most fat-loss protocols but not highlighted as THE benefit. Why the misdirection? Well, how many of you would buy a program that said, “Build muscle!” versus “Lose fat!” ….. mhmm. Focusing on building and preserving muscle improves virtually all health outcomes regardless of fat mass and/or scale-weight with few caveats. Muscle mass is the REAL reason for a all the following: looking ‘toned’, aiding faster and better recovery, shows improvements in immunity, stabilizes scale weight, mitigates your likelihood of injury, and reduces fat-stores in the body as muscle eats a lot of energy to sustain itself. The more muscle mass you have, the better quality of life you’re statistically proven to have- especially as you age since muscle mass begins to decline over time and you have less ease or ability to build and strengthen muscle over time. Those declines begin in estrogen-heavy bodies around 40-50 years of age, while those with testosterone-heavy bodies won’t experience a sharper decline until 50-60 years of age. However, where the fat-loss people really get shit wrong is you lose ALL these benefits when pursuing a calorie-deficit required for losing weight- it's VERY difficult to build, much less maintain, muscle in a calorie deficit. And muscle builds BEST when in a slight caloric surplus, and there are correlations between fat mass and the ability to build muscle mass. So- love on your fat, build up your muscle mass, and skip the fat loss vs. weight loss debates because they're a two-way street going in and out of Doesn'tReallyMatter-ville.
The Claim: detoxes, cleanses, and fasting for energy, brain fog, and fatigue relief. - The Misleading Part: Ridding or flooding your body in response to an ongoing behavior insinuates that you can cleanse your bowels and/or body of something you've already consumed…and that’s actually an impossibility because your body would have to purge on a cellular level anyway. Cell turnover takes YEARS to DECADES- not 1 week, 30 days, much less 6-9months. So no, you're not detoxing shit by shitting your brains out. Also, detoxes and fasting protocols don’t revive your energy- energy is a measure of heat and comes only through intake, meaning energy is a component of carbs and fats and can’t be elicited without intake. (This is the same for caffeine! Caffeine doesn’t provide energy- it reduces your feeling of fatigue- it’s your energy stores from food that give you energy.)
- The Underlying Principle: Your stomach acid and organs like your kidneys and pancreas actually stabilize the pH of all food and liquid that passes through it. There’s no need for- or benefit to- detoxes, fasts (outside of our built-in fasting system called sleeping) or jumping on the alkaline foods and water train. You’re much better off dedicating effort to slowly incorporating more whole foods, especially fruits and veggies, into your regular dietary practices over time to relieve body fatigue, digestive discomfort, and mental fog. Doing so slowly is both helpful for your brain to successfully alter your habits, giving yourself and your brain a transition that’s manageable, thus reliable and less likely to fall off in the first place- but it also saves your digestive system from harmful residual stress! Detoxing and fasting, especially done regularly, is hard on your gut which is built around the foods you eat most often. It gets disrupted when introducing new bacteria, fiber-quantities, and nutrients it’s not used to. So whether you’re eating meat for the first time after being a vegetarian, or doing a whole-foods challenge when you’re used to eating lots of instant-meals, your stomach is due to be upset and it takes a while to adjust. Which has nothing to do with whether the food you’re eating is ‘healthy’ or not! We want to limit distressing our body as much as possible, so ease into any dietary change instead of going 0-100.
ONE MORE! (I'll keep this one shorter) The Claim: Fat-burning foods and/or exercises - The Misleading Part: This insinuates that certain foods and/or exercises can provide a benefit in isolation- meaning on its own accord by eating a food, drinking a supplement, or doing a certain kind of movement or entire style of training, as we see with the popularization of things like HIIT, the ongoing celery-juice craze, last summer's chlorophyll-supplement situation, and this year's ongoing collagen-everything fiasco. (Even the skincare girlies are tired of this collagen shit!) I really could make a marathon-list of things that don't do what they claim to do… No matter the exercise, food, supplement, or ANY promise made about ANYTHING: fat-loss, weight loss, muscle-growth, etc is completely dependent on overall energy balance- which we already touched on in ‘move more, eat less'- and outcomes are HIGHLY dependent on the 85% of factors we haven't yet discussed. (Next email!)
- The Underlying Principle: What’s being overly complicated, and given WAY more credit than it’s due in this fat-burning capability is thermogenesis. Thermogenesis is how much heat is used in the body. Heat from the body = energy burned. A popular claim to fame for thermogenesis are what’s known as ‘zero-calorie’ foods, where the energy burned through digestion of the food is more than the caloric-value of the food itself. All foods burn different amounts of calories and have varying values from their raw state, to their cooked state, and then to their being-digested state. It's actually pretty interesting, but pretty freaking irrelevant when we go back to the fact that overall energy input vs. output is going to dictate the movement in fat-mass on the body, and to greater fluctuation, weight on the body. Aka- the thermogenesis of a food or movement is more-so a sub-fact that is only beneficial to researchers who are studying the overall effects of energy balance. The information is otherwise useless to the general public and is completely irrelevant to your ability to see weight loss OR fat loss as a direct result of consumption. The ONLY supplement known to man to produce a completely-independent benefit to the body is Creatine in regards to muscle mass preservation and growth- even without exercise intervention. It's the only supplement I recommend and the research on it is astounding- it's the single MOST researched topic in nutrition sciences, exercise science, and performance. To that point- I stress it's significance over that of multi-vitamins, protein supplements, or fish oils.
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…. Sooooo, how we doin'? Told you today's debunk was dense! Soak it in. But if you come-to by the end of the email, let me know if any of those surprised you, if they added to things you've already been learning, or if you knew all that already. Help me help you by letting me know where you're at in the wellness-matrix. One FINAL push of info, then your brain can rest for a week… 👉Most claims made as ‘the best’ or ‘the healthiest’ or ‘the most effective’ are to no benefit other than when successfully used as a marketing ploy, getting people to buy into a myriad of exercise programs and juicing-books. There are different ‘sectors’ of wellness if you will, but most of them are jam-packed with de-contextualized information, or half-truths cherry picked from research, culture, or medical intervention for some hyper-specific condition (like how keto was pulled from some inconsistent findings on epilepsy-treatment research and other carb-resistant conditions.) Before continuing, might I remind you that I warned you of my spice-level at the beginning of the email… 👉Most of the ‘natural’ or ‘organic’ lifestyle advice given mainstream are just loose-interpretations of spiritual practices of other cultures, taken so out of context that they provide no transformation or value once it makes its way to you. This is called cultural appropriation and we see it from the spreading of concepts like: •Superfoods (This is not a professionally-regulated or qualifying list, but one that’s based on consumer purchasing-trends alone. where superfood lists used to demonize foods like avocados, sweet potatoes, and plantains for being “dirty” foods of other cultures- their words, not mind- it now touts the like as ‘superfoods’ not even 5-10 years later.) •Fasting (Origins used as a practice for spiritual enlightenment/stillness but now abused for the sake of weight-related outcomes and has recently gained traction as an ‘optimization’ tool appealing to high-stress-environment employees who are unknowingly worsening the side-effects of their full-time coke-habit should they partake.) •Yoga (Originally a spiritual practice meant for manifestation and honing inner-divinity but transformed into the flexibility-olympics and green-juice-guzzling competitions by rail-thin white bitches in string bikinis selling you the concept of orthorexia, fashioning dreads to the detriment their hair's health and selling mushroom-water.) •Demonization of specific ingredients (such as Canola oil or vegetable oil, used as a primary ingredient across cultures and under attack recently for being ‘cancerous.’ However, it’s oil-temperature that can produce carcinogenic-properties, not the oil itself. ALL oils do this- so instead of replacing everything with coconut or avocado oil, play up the temps you use to cook your food- varying your meals between raw, heated, cooked, and fried options.) 👉Likewise, most of the exercise claims you’re used to receiving is some rendition of a bodybuilding-competitor tactic for shredding fat- much of which is either completely false, dangerous, or irrelevant to the everyday person- OR a cherry-picked piece of advice taken from sports performance research where that information only applies to people who are in a position to benefit from a literal 1% edge over their competitors. We're talking olympic-level athletes. To which we have this HIIT-exercise wave to thank- sending already-overstressed and over-worked people across the world into an ongoing state of shit-recovery and heightened stress-response because their personal trainer doesn't even know how to program HIIT responsibly. That'll be a rant for another day. Hence why relevance, not just accuracy, matters when it comes to where you decide to put your effort!
In all, I want you to be clear on one thing for certain- your food choices and exercise choices- quality, consistency, OR lack thereof- has ZERO impact or effect on your value as a person. You're not going to be a better, hotter, more understanding, or smarter person just because you attend regular workout sessions and drink nutrient-dense smoothies. If you’re feeling a lack or feeling a stress, it has nothing to do with your food and exercise- those are just the reasons you’re giving yourself. You have EVERYTHING you need to get through what you’re going through. That shit has nothing to do with the food on your plate, the exercise sessions you’ve completed or skipped, or the number of inches of hip, waist, and ass you’re carrying around. So please, stop ‘shoulding’ on yourself because you're only using it as ammunition against yourself when your stress is already high. Now, if you’re not taking good care of yourself- like eating irregularly or not eating enough the majority of the time- that can add to stress since your Central Nervous System NEEDS food, water, and movement to better regulate itself. These behaviors can also elicit patterns or cycles in behaviors- like under-eating throughout when stressed for days or weeks at a time that then trigger overeating for days or weeks at a time. That guilt can elicit stress around your self-image, etc. I know these experiences are a large part of the “BUT WHAT ABOUT”-isms that stem from these type of food and exercise debunks/fact-checking emails. So tune in next week because we’re going to address the psychological aspects of food and exercise implemented inappropriately, with a heavy emphasis on that 85% of factors you may be neglecting as a part of your healthy lifestyle. |
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Option 1: Watch my Principles vs. Fads video on YouTube to get a simplified process for determining if something is worth your effort or not. Watch this video for other one-off debunks including the concept of superfoods, eating meat- specifically red meat, and when it’s *actually* appropriate to stress over sodium intake. (In the Party Favor section!) Option 2: Look for things you do, eat, or guilt yourself about when it comes to food and exercise- are your healthy habits actually helping you or further stressing you? How valid are those expectations you’re holding yourself to? Are you giving minor things too much credit, thus energy? Are they actually more appealing to your health, or are they just appealing because they seem luxurious or expensive? *cough* supplements. Option 3: Poke around the Determinants of Health graphic and read about what impacts our best efforts towards wellness outside of food and exercise. We’ll be diving into that next week, detailing ALL the factors that *actually* lead to better health outcomes, easier weight management, and an improved quality of life overall. (In the Party Favor section!) Bonus: If you want an application for food and exercise- here you go: •Focus on your meal consistency FIRST. Idgaf what you eat or how much- just make sure you're eating every 3-5 hours - starting the first hour of waking. •Got that down? Cool- now you can start looking at your plate. Next, aim for WHOLE ASS MEALS- some variation of micronutrient (veggie/fruit) protein, carb, fat, and a liquid of some sort if you struggle with staying on top of your hydration. •Want more tangible nutrition tips? I give a few menu-adjusting tips in an Instagram post. (Linked in the Party Favor section.) •ONCE your food intake is consistent, then we can talk movement since you need energy to burn energy! Start with regular movement- aiming for 2-3 movement sessions per day whether they be a mix or repetition of walking, cleaning, dancing, stretching- and yes, even yoga. But put some respect on the practice if you partake by learning about its origins. •Then exercise can be implemented if desired- exercise is not vital to health like movement is- it's additional. However, it has significant benefits if practiced in addition to movement. Minimum benefit for health outcomes according to research: Twice a week, full body resistance, moderate-to-high intensity, 30-minutes. |
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Need help balancing your work-hard, play-hard lifestyle? |
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Let's talk about it! •If coaching is a good fit, we'll get you started. •If not, we'll get you turned around in the RIGHT direction! $0.00, no commitments made I only ask that you show up, reschedule, or cancel- no ghosts. 👇Grab a spot that fits your schedule!👇 |
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PARTY FAVORS! ⬇️ Click for posts, podcasts, songs, and other content related to this newsletter. ⬇️ |
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Rest well, raise hell - much love. |
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