S2 Episode 24: Uncover the Truth: Pain and Discomfort are not Inevitable in Aging

Do you feel like you're at war with your own body as you're navigating through midlife? Don't worry, you're not alone. We have the pleasure of hosting Janis Isaman (@mybodycouture), a movement specialist, as our guest in this enlightening episode. She shares her profound insights on the physical, emotional, and intellectual transformations we undergo as we age. Janis debunks the myth that pain and discomfort are inevitable parts of aging and empowers us with pragmatic strategies to maintain a harmonious balance amidst the onslaught of fitness marketing and the temptation to simply throw in the towel.

We continue our engaging dialogue with Janis on how we can adapt mind-body fitness programs to meet the changing needs of our bodies as we grow older. Discover the critical role of hyaluronic acid in maintaining tissue hydration and elasticity and how this impacts our bodies' look and feel. This episode underscores the significance of listening to your body and redefining what feels good for you, rather than seeking external validation. Embark on this journey with us to uncover ways to reduce stress, challenge deeply ingrained beliefs, and cultivate a healthier, more attuned relationship with your midlife body.

ABOUT Janis:
Janis Isaman is a movement specialist based in Calgary, Canada. She is the founder of My Body Couture, a movement therapy studio that provides personalized training and rehabilitation services to clients with chronic pain, injuries, and other movement limitations. Janis has been working in the health and fitness industry for over two decades, and she has extensive training and experience in various movement modalities, including Pilates, yoga, and functional movement.

Janis is known for her holistic and personalized approach to movement therapy, which involves addressing the root cause of movement limitations rather than just treating the symptoms. This includes trauma modalities and she has trained with Bessel van der Kolk’s The Trauma Centre as well as Gabor Mate’s Compassionate Inquiry. She believes that every person's body is unique and that each session should be tailored to each individual's needs and goals. Janis has helped numerous clients overcome chronic pain and improve their physical and mental health through her innovative and effective approach to movement therapy.

CONNECT with Janis:
Website  |  Facebook  |   Instagram  |   Elephant Journal  |  LinkedIn  |  YouTube  

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Transcript

Christina Smith: 1:01

Well, welcome back shifters. This week I am so excited about this conversation is about our midlife body. Now I know that our bodies are changing in ways, probably, that we have never, ever experienced before and we're like what is going on For me, it's like what's going on with my belly and lately, the joints on the right side of my body and what is happening here. So I don't know much about that, but we have an expert, Janis Isaman here,, who is going to be able to help us understand our body, what's important for us to be doing, and a lot of other juicy stuff. We already had a conversation. Probably should have recorded it because it was. It was really lovely. So thank you, Janis, so much for being here today.

Janis Isaman: 1:53

I'm really, really excited to be speaking to you again.

Christina Smith: 1:56

Yes, me too, and tell us a little bit about who you are.

Janis Isaman: 2:03

I am a member of your age cohort so I'm presenting that because I live the experience as well where my body's shifting. I mean, I think our bodies are always shifting, but there is definitely parts of being middle age that look different than being a different age group, and I'm, by trade, a movement specialist, so I help people feel better in their body. So most of the time what triggers people to come see me is that they're in pain. That does again link to kind of our age group where we often tell people that living in pain and discomfort is just part of you know what you have to live with and what you have to accept.

Janis Isaman: 2:42

So the the issue of our body appearance and our body function is really baked into my work, because I have a lot of people that come in because their knee hurts or their back hurts or they have sciatica, but then we move very quickly into, you know, my back, my, my belly is saggy, my thighs are floppy and there's kind of all of this negative self-talk about the skin and the appearance of the body and we have to work with that emotionally, intellectually, because our bodies are not 20, they're not 15, and they never will be again, and so there's a huge psychological component to the middle age body, quite often in women. It is actually a period where we often have a spike in eating disorders, body dysmorphia. So this is really a huge part of the conversation that needs to be had with every middle-aged person, especially women.

Christina Smith: 3:44

I love how you said that, because all those like symptoms, the shifting of our body and and you know the way that our hormones are shifting and what's happening in our bodies it's like really similar to adolescence, right? I mean, we have this huge shift in our body and adolescence, and I love that sometimes people call, you know, midlife, the second adolescence. So that's almost what we're going through. So what I'm hearing is sure it's okay to have some discomfort in midlife, because even in adolescence I don't know about you, but every time I think about puberty my armpits start sweating and I get a little nauseous. But even, but with all of that, like discomfort is normal, but the pain doesn't have to be, is what I'm hearing 100%.

Janis Isaman: 4:38

So I kind of hear two different narrative streams. One is our classic fitness marketing, where we go on Instagram and it's like you just have to cut calories and increase your exercise and then you're going to, in 21 days quote unquote transform your body. And so I see a whole subset of women in particular who are actually what I would call on the wagon, off the wagon. So we get kind of that binge mentality where we say, okay, you know, I get people who literally have never run a day in their life and they're like I've decided to train for a half marathon. And then they, you know, come up with these elaborate schemes and plans about how they're going to not eat any more sugar for the rest of their life. But don't worry, it's a lifestyle. And then, and then you know, just this massive spike in exercise and activity that actually doesn't fit quite often into the middle age lifestyle where we're juggling homes and caretaking of, you know, both generations on both sides etc.

Janis Isaman: 5:41

So you know, where are you even finding the time for this? But then the second kind of group of people, it's the give up mentality.

Christina Smith: 5:51

And.

Janis Isaman: 5:52

I actually have received a lot of messaging, even with what I do, and I'm like whoa, you know, oh, you just have to accept that that's paramount pause. You accept that your hormones are shifting, you accept that you're going to be, you know, aching and creaking and squeaking for the rest of your life, and neither of those are true. But I noticed that we really kind of have this dichotomy where it's one or the other and there isn't a lot in the middle that says, okay, yeah, our skin is going to change, maybe some of the muscle tone will shift slightly. But here are the things that you can do, and let's do it in a way that the target isn't to look like a 20 year old, because 60 year olds don't look like 20 year olds and 50 year olds don't look like 20 year olds but also not in a way where we're like, you know, you're just going to have to accept it and live like that, because neither of those things are true. So we actually have this real gap in the market where we have solutions that are actually practical, real, where we actually talk about the actual bone and muscle and tissue shift that's happening.

Janis Isaman: 7:00

And then you know, one of my favorite things to say to people is behind every aesthetic concern is a functional concern. So when we come in and we say, oh, my belly feels disgusting, actually what you're feeling is a bit of loss of muscle tone. So if we can actually get a bit of muscle tone there, 99% of the time kind of that aesthetic concern goes away because it's actually about what we're physically feeling. So we don't have those conversations where we're teaching women okay, the pelvis actually shifts. Your hyaluronic acid, which is a substance that attracts and retains water, is now half of what it was in your 20s. So you might feel you're not feeling dry, but what you're noticing is that your skin is a little bit more creepy. So what do we do about that? So that conversation really actually honestly doesn't exist anywhere.

Christina Smith: 7:50

Yeah. So what I'm hearing is out there and I witness this all the time, I mean even outside of our health like there's also healing and you know all these other things that it's like all or nothing. Like you either have to become this brand new person overnight or you just and it's even more than accepting it's like settling right. It's like, well, not only have I accepted this, but I'm just going to settle into it and therefore continue the same habits. That kind of got me where I am and just going to make it worse.

Christina Smith: 8:24

Right, yeah, and I love that you're, you know, in the middle, because I think that that's how all of our growth happens, whether what, no matter what habit, that is right. It does become a lifestyle. But like even me who, I got issues in my 30s, I had to change things. But it's not like I could like suddenly one day it wasn't easy for me anyway one day to be like no dairy, no grain and, you know, do all of this exercise. I mean that just didn't happen overnight. And I love when people do that for, like New Year's resolutions, like I'm gonna Train for a marathon, even though I hate running and I've never done it before and I eat all kinds of crap, but tomorrow I'm gonna wake up being the person who wants to run.

Christina Smith: 9:15

Yes and I have actually tried that, so I'm guilty there. I've done it like I've done like five you know, couched to 5k programs and what I got after that was I hate running. Can I do something different? I?

Janis Isaman: 9:31

Think we're all guilty of it because we get served up so much marketing and I think it often doesn't even look like marketing to our eyeballs because it's on Instagram, it's on Facebook. We have a a ton of you know, it's influencers and Coaches and people who, honestly, I do believe that they have people's best intentions in mind and I don't think anybody's setting out to kind of trick you, but it is very compelling.

Janis Isaman: 9:57

I can say, as a business owner, I don't do it, but it actually takes effort to not do it because it's very compelling to just post those before and after pictures or tell that kind of really First percentile story that isn't an average story. The message of go for a walk, spend some time outside, connect with others, take some supplements. It's boring, it's really boring, whereas I can say oh, here's my 21 day program that created this dramatic result. In the meantime I'm not mentioning I didn't eat and I was starving, I was bitchy and I can't sustain that. That messaging will get likes, it'll get clicks, it'll get interested, will get people kind of inquiring, and so I think that we kind of have a system that encourages people To suddenly create that messaging for people.

Janis Isaman: 10:46

And then, as a consumer, it's really hard to be on these platforms, or you know, that includes Reading a magazine, watching television. I kind of see all of these bodies everywhere and see this promise of magic and and not fall prey to it Mentally, intellectually, physically, monetarily, etc. I've done it and I know better. I, you know I do this for a living and I still, I still can really catch my brain going into these little like oh, you know, you tomorrow, just stop eating sugar for the rest of my life.

Christina Smith: 11:23

With a straight face.

Janis Isaman: 11:27

And so I think that you know that's an important thing to mention because I think that we can, we can feel Shame about actually, you know we don't use the word diet anymore thought that word went past a number of years ago and we use lifestyle.

Janis Isaman: 11:45

So we're kind of finding these cliches to pretend that they're not diets and extreme exercise programs, when what we're actually feeling is this desperate sense of I don't know what to do, and it's really because we're being hit with it From every angle. I probably get, in some form or another, literally hundreds of messages about bodies every day and that could be as innocuous. As you know, I have a magazine on my coffee table in front of me right now. I open it up and there's a. It's the marketing imagery of the really sexy, tight-skinned, wrinkle free body, because the model is airbrushed and she's a model and she's 22 years old and so nothing in that. I might say, hey, this is a diet and fitness or a lifestyle and nutrition program, but that messaging is still hitting my brain as Middle-aged or older, is is not, it's not sexy, it's not desirable, it's not, it's not aspirational.

Janis Isaman: 12:49

So it's everywhere and it's really easy for us to kind of fall into that hole where we we just say, okay, the solution has to be to do this extreme thing.

Christina Smith: 13:00

Yeah, and then what happens, though? What I have found happens with my clients is they try to do this, these extreme things, one after another, maybe after another, and then they get. They get to this other opposite point where it's like I've tried it all like this, this doesn't work. There's no way, right, that I can. So it's almost discouraging when we see these like really Shiny, sleek, sexy bodies and we're like you can do that in 21 days. I mean, doesn't it depend on where we're starting from first of all, not only physically, but mentally? I mean that takes a lot of mental endurance.

Christina Smith: 13:41

I've had clients who do the I'm 75 hard, and I mean it's just so daunting that that's not really how we make a lifestyle change. I I know for my clients and what I do with them, it's always small shifts. It's not like they come and meet with me and the next week their wounded child is healed. You know what I mean. Like Issues never come up again, right? I mean it's just like it's not a magic wand, unfortunately, but it is what I'm hearing, and I believe that you do as well as like it's a lot of little changes, like a lot of tiny shifts. So is that how you work with women when they come in.

Janis Isaman: 14:24

I do. I do a couple of things. One is I do offer Education pieces, so I kind of I kind of referenced a couple of those items earlier, but An example that's really concrete is if you think about the bones in your pelvis, which almost none of us have ever thought about, ps. But the bones have an angle, so usually that the top part of the bone is a little bit wider than the bottom part in a female body and as we age that angle actually increases, so that the bottom of the pelvis will typically pull in a little bit more and the top will come out a little bit more.

Janis Isaman: 15:01

Most women have never heard this information before. It's Part of what your eyeballs are looking at when you look at a woman like Jennifer Aniston, who's obviously Incredibly fit. She obviously puts a lot of time and energy and money into her body maintenance. But you could look at her from the backside and realize that she's not a 22 year old woman and that's not a criticism of her in any way, but what you're actually. Your eyeballs are subconsciously processing that Tiny shift and that tiny biological signaling that she is not a 22 year old, she's older than that, and so there are pieces of the body that is it actually an example where I've actually found that sharing that with clients Gives women quite often kind of that up. I can let go of that. My pelvis has shifted. Perhaps my pant size went up. That's not going to change because that's not your body fat. You're never going to diet and exercise your way out of that. Your bones actually speak your age. That's it. So we can't make a shift in that. So I start with kind of some of those pieces of education of what is shifting, another one that I actually referenced earlier but I'll kind of flush out.

Janis Isaman: 16:14

We have a substance in our body called hyaluronic acid. It actually appears in a lot of beauty products these days because it attracts and retains a thousand times this body weight in water. If you look at a child who's like nine, ten, eleven, their skin kind of glows. It's actually because they have a ton of hyaluronic acid. It's giving that hydration. That's part of why there's no wrinkles in children. They also have, you know, really high collagen. So you can actually supplement I do with hyaluronic acid because we have I can't remember what the exact number is, but you have half or less at age 40, as you do when you're 20. So that's something that actually you know. Think about your elasticity. That's when we talk about flexibility. When you have no water in your tissues, you're gonna feel dry, you're gonna look creepy, you're gonna have wrinkles, you're gonna feel tight. So it's both an aesthetic thing and a Functional thing. But again, nature kind of and bake that in where there are those signals of this is a young person, this is an old person.

Janis Isaman: 17:20

Even supplementing with hyaluronic acid, I don't look like I'm 22. So it doesn't quote-unquote solve it. There's no kind of binary like this fixes it. It's a miracle, but it does make my tissues.

Janis Isaman: 17:36

I live in Canada where it's cold here, and so as soon as it gets cold I notice that there is kind of that like eugh, like my spine doesn't feel great, and that's really for me what the hyaluronic acid is actually doing. It's giving that hydration to my tissues so that every time the weather changes, my body isn't like, hey, stop. So that's a small change that most of us could do, provided that we can afford it. You can buy a bottle of hyaluronic acid tablets and start taking them in the morning. That's not an extreme change. That's nothing that's going to. You know, you're not in this big cycle, so that isn't. You know, that's not a diet or exercise solution, but that is a solution that a lot of people will decide that they want to do, based on those kind of just little micro bits of education Like this is actually how our body is changing as we age.

Janis Isaman: 18:32

So I bake that into what I'm doing and then we really start to focus on the sensations of the body. So in my primary work, if you were going to come into my studio, every single movement, every single thing that we're doing is where do you feel that in the body? What are you feeling? Put words to it. We start to really develop that vocabulary about the body, because the vast majority of women have grown up with what does your body look like? How hot are you, how appealing are you to men, how sexy are you?

Janis Isaman: 19:05

And there is a phase of life where we actually our appearance helps us attract a mate, it helps us mate, it helps us have babies, if you happen to do that in your life and what happens is that becomes the entire focal point of a woman, typically from age 12 to 80. But our actual physical appearance really has that quality for you know, let's say, age 15 to maybe 35. So we take that 20 year age period and we blow it up to this is the only thing that women actually. That's our whole relationship to our body. So I really start to shift that into. Let's use words about sensation.

Christina Smith: 19:51

We're moving.

Janis Isaman: 19:52

We're doing exercises. Where do you feel it? What are you feeling? Describe that. That sounds so simple. For the vast majority of people it's incredibly difficult because we don't have that vocabulary. We have a huge vocabulary about how we want to lose weight and look different and be skinny and have no wrinkles. We don't often have a huge vocabulary of actually, is that sensation at the front of your shoulder, the side of your shoulder? Can you pinpoint exactly where it is and describe? Is that a stretching sensation? Is that a twisting sensation?

Christina Smith: 20:26

Is it?

Janis Isaman: 20:26

hot, Is it cold? Is it? You know what's the color of the sensation, etc. There's a thousand different kind of platforms there that you can go on and google different ways to describe body sensations. But that's where we start to really develop that mindful connection to the body and then, from that place, then you can start to be like what my body feels best doing is so for me at this particular moment, because I had a really high stress period during the last couple of years I feel best when I walk and so I added that into my routine. Every day I walk and that is, you know, different than what I did a couple of years ago. It's different than probably what I'll do a couple of years from now. But just having that vocabulary of like, hey, let me dive inside my body, Where's the stress sitting, what is my stress level, Like how are my joint sentience feeling when I actually exercise?

Janis Isaman: 21:30

Do I feel better or worse? And starting to develop that kind of internal narrative that's actually based on the education of your body, then you can start to make a plan. So there is no such thing in my world as I can make a plan without knowing these other things about you, and so we actually do them concurrently. I don't have a thing where I'm like you have to have the mindfulness before you can have the program. We do them together because you get that mindfulness through the movement and through articulating it while practicing. But that's kind of what it ends up looking like. So the shift moves away from.

Janis Isaman: 22:05

There's research that says that by age 12, girls are focused on what their bodies look like. Boys are focused on what their body can do. So actually I think that's a good thing, and so actually in middle age I'm flipping that and focusing on teaching women who have never been taught how to get that vocabulary what can our body do? What does that look like? And from there we can develop that internal knowing of what does a fitness program look like for me today, tomorrow, the day after, because we shouldn't be doing stuff like most of the fitness world out there is really focused on what to do when you have this abundance of energy to burn. You go to the gym, you lift as heavy as you can lift and you run as fast as you can run.

Janis Isaman: 22:53

And I don't know a lot of 45 to 55-year-old women who are like, wow, I just had so much energy today. I just needed a place to get rid of that, right. So we've designed a whole program that's actually not for us. It's not like most women I know are like I just love to go to the spa. So that already says to me that you probably need something that's a little bit more gentle. You need something that reduces your stress. You need something that's bringing the nervous system down. So it's a more complex answer than hey, just stop eating sugar and start running. But it's so satisfying when you can kind of really just shut out all the noise and be like this is, this is what my body is actually communicating, and I have the language, and I own the tools to make that decision for myself.

Christina Smith: 23:48

Yeah, it sounds a lot more empowering, like there's no one size fits all. It's like me really tuning in to my body, which you know. Our body also contains the feelings which I think like we often try to avoid. So avoiding those feelings means that we're also avoiding what's going on in our body. And I know I grew up gen X and my mother was always like it doesn't matter if your back hurts, just keep going like if there was no, like paying attention to my body. Nobody cared what my body wanted to say. I was too sensitive If I, if I, really tuned into that. But what I'm learning now is that sensitivity that I used to be called all the time is actually my gift.

Janis Isaman: 24:34

It is.

Christina Smith: 24:35

I learned over time like running just wasn't for me. My joints are not built for running. I mean, I'm not trying to say it's impossible, I don't. Just don't like it, and so.

Janis Isaman: 24:46

Don't do it.

Christina Smith: 24:47

I want to do things that I don't like and because I know I won't keep them up, it takes so much energy just to talk myself into doing them, rather than what I'm hearing from you is like, first of all, understanding and educating myself on like this joint pain that I'm having now, like, oh, what's going on. I already thought like my joints probably aren't retaining enough water, especially because I had surgery on this shoulder, and like so understanding that our body shifts and there's not much we can do, and I can really speak to the whole Pulvic area shifting, because after I had a baby, I thought there's no way I'm going to be in single digit clothes anymore. After like a year and a half and I gave them away and, don't you know, like after two years my hips came back together and I was like Yep those are my favorite pants I gave away.

Christina Smith: 25:42

So this actually happens and I didn't know that our hips shift. So when we're seeing that we're wider in our genes, it doesn't necessarily mean that we're getting fat or growing big. It just means that our bones are now in a different structure and I think you know and know this is like a I don't want to say minor thing, but just a little piece of what you're talking about. But I think that relates to us, like once I am educated on how my body is working, what nutrients it might be losing, I can start focusing on On really how my body feels, rather than focused on this how does it look? Because I think that we focus too much on I mean, at some point probably we're going to have wrinkles. I mean it's unless you have a really great surgeon, I guess Just a natural thing. No matter how much, no matter how much liquids and, you know, water that we can retain, it's still going to happen.

Janis Isaman: 26:43

Oh 100% yeah last week because it's it's fall here now and.

Janis Isaman: 26:47

I was walking and thinking we don't. Nature has no mechanism where it's like OK, summer's over, now it's fall, but we're going to put out giant lights to pretend that it's still summer and we're going to paint all the trees to pretend it's still summer. We actually humans quite often respond like I'm so excited it's fall, I get to have the pumpkin spice lattes and I get to get out the chunky sweaters and I get to get out the booze. But we don't do that in the autumn of our proverbial life. We actually kind of encourage people to get out the lights and paint the trees and I actually was wondering, you know, what would this look like?

Janis Isaman: 27:27

if we actually just started celebrating like I get the pumpkin spice latte, I get the sweaters, and what is that for our body? And I know that that can kind of wander into a bit of that cliche, but if, instead of trying to pretend and trying to paint the trees, what would it look like for you if you were like this is the gift that I get in? This this is the. This is the piece that I get to have.

Janis Isaman: 27:55

And for me personally, a lot of that actually is just letting go of all the bullshit where it's like you know, I don't have to do a 21 day program. I actually gained. I gained weight during the last few years due to stress and I spent most of this year doing what would be considered a completely unconventional and probably scientifically inaccurate weight loss technique.

Janis Isaman: 28:20

I really focused on getting my stress down because, I'm like internally, you know, I had a ton of people that are like, well, it's just your age, just your age. And I'm like, no, it's not, it's my stress, and so I focused on like getting enough sleep, a lot of us don't get enough sleep, so like eight hours. You know, I focused on taking vitamins that would actually support stress, so getting those B12 vitamins. I focused on going for walks.

Janis Isaman: 28:51

You know, in my like, I'm a fitness instructor, so that's that's not what we tell people is going to help them lose weight, and I focused on yoga, which again takes the nervous system down, and I'm not quite back to my to my regular weight, but I'm three quarters of the way there and there's no part of like calories and calories out that I actually ever applied it and go on a diet. I really just focused on like let's reduce my stress, let's reduce my stress and you know I unsubscribe from email newsletters, things like that. Nobody's talking about that as a weight loss technique, but these are simple, doable, actionable, replicable things that in my day to day life I could actually do, and so for me, part of the fall of my life is like I don't care what somebody told me. I'm going to sort this out in a way that actually feels good to me, because I, you know that's one of the things we love about autumn we get comfortable, we and that doesn't mean complacent, that doesn't mean like, okay, this is the way my weight for the rest of my life. I'm going to hate my body for the rest of my life. It means settling into something that actually feels good, nourishing, helpful.

Janis Isaman: 30:08

And for you know, I just listed things I did that might not be something that resonates with whoever is listening. That may, you might be like it grows. I don't know. I can hear that, but I have done hours and hours and hours of my own practices to be like I know the doctor just told me something different, or I know this other practitioner or somebody just shamed me and said, well, you know your middle age, now perimenopause, and I'm like, no, like my body, information is saying something different. My body is saying it's stress.

Janis Isaman: 30:38

It's stress from a really crazy couple of years that were really high stress, and so what can I do about stress? Here is the smallest thing that I can think of that I can do every day without adding stress Go to bed, take a vitamin, go for a walk and be outside and I just did that over and over and over again, and it doesn't look like a linear path to progression either. There were bumps, there were, there were times when things you know and I think that's the other thing is just letting go of the idea that I'm a robot or like I'm a culture where, if I go to a bookstore, any kind of strategies are quite masculine, actually, to be honest, where they're like do this and then do it again tomorrow and it's gonna be crush it.

Christina Smith: 31:29

Crush it, you know, it's like it's so aggressive and it's like forcing, it's like there's like a force behind it rather than like so what I'm hearing is that that we usually we can spend, especially in the media. We spend so much time projecting what other people are going to see right, and this external validation of am I still attractive? Is this a pro, you know, and all of those things, rather than really tuning in and say like self validating this is like the same process that I take my clients through, just not through necessarily. Yeah, and exercise is that there's tuning in and going. Well, what is my body saying, or what are my feelings saying, whatever that thing is, and you know what actually feels good for me, what can I self validate that actually feels good for me?

Christina Smith: 32:26

And then make these small things and I think the the major thing that my clients focused on that is related is that central nervous system right, because whether we're tuning into our body to get into feeling or tuning into our body to see what physically it's telling us, there is a tuning in that has to happen and we have to start hearing those messages rather than going through that like suffering spiral that we do when we try to avoid it, like I shouldn't feel this way and what can I take and where's my magic pill?

Christina Smith: 32:59

I mean, that's where we want to go to when we're on the outside. And I gotta tell you, I love the autumn of my life Because, like, there is a party, that's like I'm glad I am not the object of everyone's like a vision anymore. Right like that. Don't have to be looking at me and they don't like I don't feel nearly as judged, I'm like I'm in my autumn, I you know the leaves wrinkle, they dry up and they fall off and like, and I'm okay with that, the tree is still beautiful when it has no leaves on it and and it's still functional. And so just reminding ourselves like really what our body is telling us is more important than what the media is telling us.

Janis Isaman: 33:49

And actually, to be honest, even your friends, your doctor, even actually your own brain so your body has a lot of information and at the end of it, we've actually been taught to override that again and again and again in a thousand million different ways, and so it actually for most people. It's a huge process to actually unwind all of that. And so what's being said here by both you and I work with on the same kinds of concepts in different arenas and specialty. It's simple words listen to your body but the reality is that it takes practice. It takes literal, daily getting into the trenches and doing that and then noticing when you're overriding it and noticing those shame pieces and noticing the narratives and three quarters and don't belong to you anyways.

Janis Isaman: 34:41

There's something that your dad's head or your somebody said to you at Christmas dinner 27 years ago, or you read it in a magazine, or you know you're getting it from a book that you read when you're 15 or whatever it is, and again that seems like, oh, that would be simple to identify, but really a lot of that is really deeply programmed to the point where we don't even know that it's there. So it it takes, it takes time. This isn't a thing where you're like, okay, I know that information I hear these ladies speaking got it, nailed it it is. I mean, it's years of of working on that, reinforcing and practicing it, trying it seeing what fits and what doesn't and then peeling off those layers.

Janis Isaman: 35:27

So it doesn't. You know even everything I said about the body. That doesn't just click into place where you come into my studio and you're like oh, I've got it I should then.

Janis Isaman: 35:39

So you know. That's that's why some of these concepts are so challenging, because they actually sound too simple to be real. But it's because when you actually it's not about the information, there's no trick, there's no information, there's no hack, there's no stat, there's nothing that is going to replace actually practicing it, and practice actually often takes support. It does take information and knowledge, but you also have to structure your life in order to do that. Like For me to take a walk every day.

Janis Isaman: 36:10

I have to put that in my calendar and whether that's physically on a calendar or actually just in my intellectual calendar has to be there, because that's the first thing when it comes to exercise that a lot of us will shove out of the way. It's like, well, I don't have time for that.

Christina Smith: 36:25

Right, this other thing happened, yeah, and I don't like going to the gym because I don't like going to the gym.

Janis Isaman: 36:31

But I will find time to put on a podcast and go for a walk because I like it and it's good for my body and I get positive reinforcement and there's things to look at.

Janis Isaman: 36:40

So there's also things that you have to have. You have to create that space for yourself to do the practices and then you have to create those feedback mechanisms for yourself and you have to read what your body is saying over and over and over and over and over and over and over again. Yeah, you get more and more nuanced with it, because those thoughts I mean. Sometimes I get frustrated with myself because I'm like girl, if you teach this, come on, I know, throw it out.

Janis Isaman: 37:13

And I just self-own that, because even with all that I do with clients and all that I do with continuing education and all of the materials I'm taking in, it'll still pop in there.

Christina Smith: 37:25

Yeah, and there's this process that I think people don't give enough credit to, which is slowing down, because in order to do all of that stuff, like, I have to consciously, mindfully choose, like hold on, christina, before we move on to the next thing. Like, how are we feeling? And there's a part of me that gets irritated by that right, my culture-trained kind of part of me. That's just like get as much stuff as you can get done, be productive, be efficient and just keep going. But there's, like what I have noticed no matter what kind of shift I'm trying to make, there is a slowdown.

Christina Smith: 38:05

I wrote a book about shift and it goes exactly how you just said like we get this.

Christina Smith: 38:10

In the middle of the transformation process there's this aha moment where it's like oh, I get it, I get it, I get it, I get it, I'm not supposed to eat sugar, right, like so I'm just not going to do that anymore.

Christina Smith: 38:30

But then it gets into what I call the F stage, because shift is like an acronym and that's like whatever F word you want.

Christina Smith: 38:38

But I use fortitude and fear, because this is where we have to start making new choices and in order to make new choices, we have to be mindful that we're even making a choice, because what happens is we just go through our day on all this default mode right and making choices that we've always made before, and until we like, slow ourselves down, bring our nervous system down, because our nervous system can't be up here when we're trying to make conscious, mindful decisions, it becomes a lot, lot harder. So really, the first thing that I would say for anybody is like slow down, start tuning in what is your body saying to you, and I think that's on the right path. So I know that we could continue to talk about this all day long, because I think we did last time, but I want people to be able to know where to find you. So where can they find you, so that they can start getting down to the bottom of what is the functioning piece that's happening here, not necessarily all the aesthetics.

Janis Isaman: 39:46

My business name is my Body Kitcher, which is three separate words. It's my, my Body B-O-D-Y Kitcher-C-O-U-T-U-R-E. So I can be found on my website, which is MyBodyKitchercom, or on the social media platforms. If I'm on the platform, it'll be under my Body Kitcher.

Christina Smith: 40:05

Yeah, and all those links will be below so that you guys can just easily click on them. But I highly suggest that you follow Janice, because I'm going to be, because I love to learn about this stuff and start getting real about what's happening in our bodies, rather than just seeing some aesthetic things, and I mean it hurts me so much when my clients think that their bodies are betraying them or doing something awful like that. So I know that this is a really good resource, because that's not what we're focused on. We're focused on what is your body telling you, and it's probably not that you're a jerk.

Janis Isaman: 40:47

No, we never really think about this, but we're animals and so dogs don't fight with their own biology. So putting yourself in a position where if you're 45 years old, then you're going to live till 85, where you're fighting your own biology for 40 years.

Janis Isaman: 41:06

That's a waste of time and energy and really to be a productive, happy, functioning person. We don't want to spend our time with these negative, gross narratives, fighting with it all, looking in front of the mirror, hating it. We're not seeing other animals on this planet do that, but we love to do it. We've been trying to do it. So starting now, you can start to soften that, and that's what.

Janis Isaman: 41:33

I would say it starts with a softening. It doesn't start with removing that immediately, but just for animals. So the more we can actually be in that animal body and we're not going to win over top of what our animal instincts are saying to us. So let's look at what part of that is trained, what part of that is verbiage that doesn't belong to us, et cetera. Let's try to soften into that so that we can actually enjoy the experience of our body for the next 40 plus years.

Christina Smith: 42:05

Mm-hmm, I love that. Thank you for that last thought. I think it's really beautiful. Dog doesn't worry about their own body. Well, thank you so much for joining us, janice. This has been lovely. I'm sure we'll have you on again because this has been so helpful I mean at least to me and I'm going to be looking forward to learning more about my body so I can be kind and soft with it. So thank you.

Janis Isaman: 42:31

Thank you, always a pleasure.

Christina Smith: 42:34

And thank you listeners for tuning in. We'll see you next week.