386: I can't do it all. The small habits that keep me feeling great...and what I'm not doing

ELLA: 00:00:01

Welcome. You're on air with Ella, where we share simple strategies and tips for living a little better every day. If you're interested in mindset and wellness or healthy habits and relationships or hormone health, aging well and eating well, honestly, if you're just into living better and with more energy, then you're in the right place. We're not here for perfect. We're here for a little better every day. Let's go. Hey, you're on air with Ella and I am so happy to be back with you. Thank you for joining me right now. I batch recorded the past couple of shows. I told you I was traveling through the whole month of November and I'm back. So it feels to me like forever since I have talked to you. So I'm really, really, really glad we have this time today. I wanted to share a few things with you because I have really enjoyed the information that I personally have learned from the past several episodes, really like the past handful of episodes. But it's a lot, right? Like, it's a lot. So today, I want to share with you the things that I am doing, the things that I'm not doing yet, and the things I probably won't be doing if we're keeping it real, because I don't want to overwhelm you. So I thought it might be useful to share with you the things that are really working for me and the things that I really do want to adopt. I just haven't yet. OK, so I hope you're well. It is the holiday season in real time as I am recording this, and that can be chaos. And the last thing that I want to do is overwhelm you with different ways to take care of yourself when you're already trying so hard even just to prioritize taking care of yourself. Because you are trying, right? We are trying. And I will reference, this entire conversation will be outlined in an email that I will send to everyone on my email list. So if you want it and you're not on my email list, just DM me, podcast, and I will send you the list. Speaking of lists, I just sent out a holiday shopping gift guide to the folks on my email and it has gifts under $30, it has gifts under $75, and then it has a whole host of luxury gifts that are absolutely worth the money. And if you want that, you need to DM me the word gift and I'll send you the link for that. Of Of course, all of that will be in the summary for today. So again, you can just DM me the word podcast. I will send you the episode show notes. Find me on Instagram to do that, at on air with Ella.

Here's my goal. The whole reason that I started this podcast 1 million years ago was to make health and wellness and feeling good and living our best life more accessible and not feel like something that we put on our to-do list. But then when I get all this advice and input from different experts, it feels like a gigantic self-care to-do list. I mean, even just like the list of supplements, if we were paying attention, would be about 87 that are recommended to take in a day right after we journal and take a hot sauna and do yoga and breathing and meditation and breathe through our nose and drink 85 ounces of water and get 135 grams of protein. Am I right? It's too much. I don't know if it will be helpful to you to just know what is working for me, but that's what this is about. I also, like I said in the intro, really want you to know what I'm not doing at all and then what I am trying to do that I will add to my to-do list. These are in absolutely no particular order. But the first thing that I really want to address is lifting weights, resistance training, whatever you want to call it. We have been talking about that ad nauseum on the air lately. And there are so many reasons why. There are so many reasons why. And part of the reason that resistance training or lifting weights It's so very important. It's because as we age, it is not only harder to build muscle, but it is utterly critical to go into the next five years, the next 10 years, the next 20 years with muscle on our body. And I come at this from a different angle because I really like training for triathlon. You know, that's a sport I'm mildly addicted to. And when I found that sport and I found that training, I stopped exercising to change my body and I started exercising for fun and to serve a purpose. And that purpose was not dying in a triathlon. But that means I swim and I bike and I run, and that's a lot of things, right? That's already a lot of things to do in a week. And in the summer, it's very exhaustive, like it takes up all of my marginal time. But in the colder months, I definitely am not out there swimming or biking quite as much, and I have a little bit more margin, a little bit more time to play with. And so I really concentrate on that resistance training that I know that I'm supposed to be doing, but I need to keep it real with you. Whenever I see the people that I respect and follow, like in social media or just whatever platform, they're lifting like, they're doing these barbells that look massive, right? And they're hundreds of pounds. I don't know. They're their body weight in pounds. I don't know because I don't do it. And that's what I wanted to share with you. I am lifting weights and I am doing resistance training. But I got to be honest with you, and I'm not saying this is good or bad. I just want you to know I am not going to a gym and lifting barbells over my head and doing squats with 200 pounds. And I'm not doing that. The reason I think it's important to share that with you is because, yes, I could be doing better, but I'm in pretty good shape right now. And I have muscle on my body that I absolutely did not have six months ago. And part of the reason, not just the season that I shared with you, but part of the reason I'm really focused on that is I was getting injured a lot, like a lot. And I want to be sort of harder to kill, right? I want to be harder to maim. And one of the things that one of the many therapists that I've seen over the past two years has said is, you're lean, and you're agile, and you're fast, and that's all great. But like, you don't have a lot of muscle on your body. And I had never, you know how you have blindness to certain things about you? I thought because I was fit, because I was trained, I wasn't really worried about adding pounds of muscle to my frame. And then I realized I'm like a little fragile in this condition. And being lean, when I say that being strong is my priority over being small and compact, let me tell you how much I mean that. Having muscle on my frame means I'm going to age better. It means that I'm less likely to get that menopause that personally I would like to avoid, that belly weight that you gain. I personally would like to avoid that. to each their own. It means that my bones will stay in better shape. It means all the things that we talk about when we talk about perimenopause and menopause. And frankly, it doesn't matter what age you are. I want the muscle now. That is a priority for me. Why am I going on about this? Because I am doing that just with free weights. And I don't know if that's of interest to you, but I suspect quite a few of us are thinking, okay, I want the muscle, but I'm probably not gonna go do the big gigantic deadlifts in a gym somewhere. You may be, and I salute you, I'm not kidding, but for me, I am using free weights, and I'm adding pounds, and adding pounds, and adding pounds, and I'm doing overhead lifts, and I'm doing squats, and I'm doing quite a number of motions, but I'm doing them in my own home. And I think that this is important because it makes it more accessible for those of you who might feel like deadlifts are something very far away for you. And I just got this bar. I'm so pleased with it. I shared it on Instagram. I was like, I'm delighted with myself. I got this bar that I can connect my free weights to. So now I can order heavier free weights, which by the way, I'm getting them from Facebook Marketplace. I'm buying these in secondhand and I'm getting these rubber coated free weights and I am connecting them to this bar and it is turning my home gym into the thing I normally would have to go to a third place to do. So I contacted the company, as I do, and I got like a $10 discount. I thought it was already really reasonable. I bought the bar and the pad. And I feel like I bought one other thing. Oh, you can turn weights into kettlebells with the smaller connector. And I did all of that for under $100. And now I have a $10 coupon, if that's of interest. So I will put that, of course, in the notes. That is just one thing I wanted to share with you is I hear these experts and I know I should be lifting heavy and I am just not right now going to go to a gym and learn how to do that or focus on how to do that when I'm getting really good results in my own home. And this is not about where you do it, it's about how you do it. I wanted you to know it's so much more accessible than you might think. Okay, if you have any questions about that, hit me up.

in the year of our Lord,: 2024

: 00:01

in the year of our Lord,: 2024

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