Strategy 5: Move Your Body

Hi everyone! I’m Carol Diane and THIS is Happiness Reclaimed. You were born for the pursuit of happiness which means rising toward your potential mentally, physically, and spiritually, living a life of love with deep meaning and purpose. We’re leaving behind the emotional stress, bad health, and empty spirituality of today, to practice powerful life strategies in a mind-body-spirit approach to wellness. It’s time to reclaim your life. Let’s go.

Today we’re covering Powerful Life Strategy #5. Move Your Body.  So we can begin to create instant change at the biochemical level. So try to visualize that, each and every time you do some exercise. You might visualize the oxygen and nutrients gaining better access to the cells in your body as you enhance your blood flow with movement. You might visualize the lymph nodes experiencing more stimulation and flow. You might visualize the immune cells becoming more active. As you sweat, you can visualize the toxins being eliminated from your body. If you’re a cancer patient, you can visualize more oxygen being delivered to the area surrounding your cancerous tumor or tumors, which can change the biochemical microenvironment around each tumor and reduce cancer growth or cancer spread. On and on we could go.

As always, please check with your doctor before making any change. And if you’ve listened to any of my other podcasts, you know that everything I say is for educational purposes only and at no time am I telling you what to do in a specific situation. Your participation in any way with the Happiness Reclaimed organization signifies your understanding of, and agreement with, these terms.

So as you may know by now, I try to keep my podcasts simple and basic, so that we can all benefit, and so that everything is doable and manageable. Simple is good. Simple reduces stress and promotes greater consistency. Simplicity helps to make change possible.

So here are some simple and basic guidelines for moving your body:

Guideline #1 is to be moving several times per day, as much as you can. I realize many people have desk jobs, but experts recommend at least standing up and doing two minutes of squats every 45 minutes or so.  If you feel self-conscious you can always head to a bathroom stall.  Experts also suggest, if your office building has a stairwell, take a 1-minute sprint up a flight of stairs a few times a day and then go right back to work. Research has shown the benefits are amazing. Just start at a level that’s right for you and very gradually work your way up. Maybe you’ll start with walking. Take into consideration your agility and balance. No matter what you’re doing, never push yourself to the point of having an accident or injuring yourself. 

This advice to keep moving matches what we know about the human lifestyle over thousands and thousands of years. Except for modern times, humans did tend to be frequently moving. They may have been nomadic hunters or farmers. They may have had all kinds of chores, and before the days of modern appliances, every household task was probably a form of aerobic exercise! For example, washing clothes without a modern washer and dryer—do you realize what a workout that could be? How about churning butter? Hoeing and weeding a garden?   

And if you weren’t a farmer and you didn’t tend a garden, which was probably rare through most of human history, you would have most likely had some other job that required manual labor. And you would have walked more from one place to another than we do now. And I can tell you from experience that even saddling a horse is a bit of exercise.

But now in our modern world, we’ve lost all that to some degree. And we’re suffering as a result. 

The second guideline is to take a 15-minute walk after every meal to drive the glucose to your muscles. You may have already read in my book, Happiness Reclaimed, that cancer patients are advised to do that to keep the glucose from going straight to the cancer cells. But almost everyone benefits from that post-meal easy stroll. Make it easy, don’t be hard on your digestion.

Guideline #3 includes longer walks at other times, maybe when you’re not so full and can really get out and go. Maybe you’re up for more of a strenuous hike or  a jog. And there are elliptical machines, bicycles, treadmills, and stair climbers, or swimming, or playing a sport. Whatever appeals to you. 

Some might call this Zone 2 cardio, which I understand to mean you get your heart rate up to 60-70% of your max heart rate. What’s max heart rate? The usual formula is 220 minus your age. Take 60-70% of that and stay in that range. If you don’t want to get that technical, you can just push yourself to the point that you know you’re working, but you can still manage to carry on a conversation.  A half hour per day is good, and up to 1 hour probably even better, again, assuming your doctor approves.

 And I believe experts will say that your total time can be broken into more than one smaller session per day.   

Guideline #4 is to try to add High Intensity Interval Training or HIIT maybe every other day at most. Be sure to give yourself recuperation time in between. HIIT can be as simple as 30 seconds to 1 minute at full speed for whatever you choose to do, then the same amount of time at a recovery speed, then back and forth like that.  Try to start with three of those, then gradually work up to 10, for a total of 20 minutes if you’re doing the one minute. 

If you’re in really good shape, you could try the Norwegian 4 by 4, which is 4 minutes top speed, followed by a 3-minute recovery speed, and do that four times. Not counting warm up and cool down, that would total 28 minutes: 16 minutes full speed and 12 minutes at recovery speed if you add them together.

Guideline #5 is weight lifting. Start light and gradually build up. See if you want to challenge yourself by doing 8-12 reps at whatever weight makes it impossible to do the final lift. Be careful and cautious, but gradually challenge yourself if everything feels safe for you. Never ever worry about matching other people. Be smart, be wise. Injuries just knock you backwards and ruin your progress. I once met a man who was in constant pain from excessive weight lifting when he was younger. Don’t let that be you.

Guideline #6 is abs, and strengthening those abdominal muscles is a great way to prevent lower back problems. You could take a class or use a YouTube video to learn some basic moves. Whatever works for you. 

Guideline #7 is to pursue more relaxing movement while focusing on your breathing. These are great for reducing stress and lowering stress hormones. You might try yoga, Tai Chi, or what some call fascia work. FASCIA. You can find it all on YouTube and elsewhere.

One exciting bit of news to come out of the research is that, in addition to countless other advantages of exercise, the exercise you do can actually improve how your body handles the food you eat. In other words, your insulin response to the exact same foods can improve simply because you’re exercising. It’s not just that you’re burning off more calories—your body is actually becoming less vulnerable to the damage of insulin spikes. That’s exciting news!

Finally, here are a few interesting tidbits to enhance the list I’ve already given.

Tidbit #1: It is good to let some of your walking be first thing in the morning, preferably to see the sunrise, or shortly thereafter, to set your Circadian rhythms. If it’s going to be a bright sunny day, ten minutes is all you need, and Andrew Huberman advises people to get the light into the eyes, rather than wearing sunglasses. That doesn’t mean you stare right at the sun, but he advises against sunglasses for taking in that early morning light. If it’s somewhat cloudy, he says 20 minutes might be best, and if it’s really cloudy and rainy, a whole half hour might be best for keeping your Circadian clock set properly. Apparently, artificial light is not a replacement for sunlight in many ways.

Tidbit #2 is an exercise program to help with injuries and that’s called Foundation Training. I know people who are in constant pain as a result of a car accident, but when they do those exercises regularly, the pain stays away. That’s priceless! I’ve heard Pilates was also developed with injury recovery in mind, and it’s now a popular type of exercise.

Finally, I just want to emphasize again how amazing it is to learn all the different ways exercise improves our health. We hope to cover those details later on.

Remember to be careful. Listen to your body, don’t overdo, and as usual, always check with your doctor and exercise trainers before starting anything.  

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If you have any questions at all, please contact me at HappinessReclaimed.com. I’ll try to answer those questions in a future broadcast. So that’s it for today. Love ya guys.