556: Kristin Weitzel on Women’s Health, Fitness, Recovery, Ice Baths and Supplements

Child: Welcome to my Mommy’s podcast.

 

This episode is brought to you by LMNT. LMNT contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000 mg sodium, 200mg potassium, 60 mg magnesium. With none of the junk. No sugar. No coloring. No artificial ingredients. No gluten. No fillers. It turns out that a lot of us aren’t getting enough salt and LMNT is my solution. Athletes, any of us who use sauna, people who follow a low carb or paleo type diet, and moms (especially during breastfeeding) have an increased electrolyte need and electrolyte deficiency can cause headaches, cramps, fatigue, and weakness. LMNT was co-founded by my good friend Robb Wolf when he was looking to increase his athletic performance, and it now has thousands of avid fans including Olympic athletes, pro athletes, special forces teams and moms and families around the world. I drink LMNT almost everyday to support my workouts and hydration levels and my favorite flavor is definitely watermelon.  As a member of our community, LMNT has a very special offer for you. Claim your free LMNT Sample Pack – you only cover the cost of shipping. Get yours here: DrinkLMNT.com/WellnessMama

 

This podcast is sponsored by Hiya Health… a new type of childrens vitamins.  Typical children’s vitamins are basically candy in disguise — filled with two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals, and other gummy junk growing kids should never eat. Hiya is made with zero sugar and zero gummy junk, yet it tastes great and is perfect for picky eaters. Hiya fills in the most common gaps in modern children’s diets to provide the full-body nourishment our kids need with a yummy taste they love. Manufactured in the USA with globally sourced ingredients each selected for optimal bioavailability and absorption. Hiya arrives straight to your door on a pediatrician-recommended schedule. Your first month comes with a reusable glass bottle your kids can personalize with stickers, then every month thereafter Hiya sends a no-plastic refill pouch of fresh vitamins — which means Hiya isn’t just good for your kids, it’s also good for the environment. To check them out, go to hiyahealth.com/wellnessmama and save on your first month at this link!

 

Katie: Hello, and welcome to the “Wellness Mama Podcast.” I’m Katie from wellnessmama.com and wellnesse.com. That’s wellness with an E on the end. And this episode is all about women’s health, especially fitness, recovery. We talk about ice baths, red light, supplements, and so much more. I’m here with Kristin Weitzel, who is a nutrition specialist, fitness trainer, advanced breathwork instructor, cold exposure coach, and high-performance mavin, and we go deep on a lot of these areas today.

 

And so, when I reconnected with her recently after meeting several years ago, and I got to attend an amazing event that she put on where we talked about a lot of these topics. And so today, we go deep on the most common challenges facing women, especially when it comes to health, some very female-specific solutions. How we can shift our language around some of these things for better results. The importance of breath and some easy ways to optimize yours. What fitness variance is, and how our cycles influence our training. Optimal ways to incorporate fitness and recovery. We talk about ice baths. How our bodies are like batteries and how to charge them. Her top supplements and much, much more. So let’s join Kristin. Kristin, welcome. Thanks for being here.

 

Kristin: Thanks so much for having me, Katie. Happy to be here.

 

Katie: I’m so excited to chat. I recently got to attend an event that you put on of just women, and it was incredible, and made some new friends who I think will become lifelong friends. And it made me also really realize the importance… We know it logically, but the importance of women in community, and having female friendships in our lives that are supportive, and encouraging, and also, like, that challenge us. And that was such a beautiful group for that. And we’re gonna talk about some of the same things we talked about at that event today, because you have such a wide amount of knowledge on all these topics. But before we jump in, I have a note in my show notes that you went to Burning Man for 13 years. And I would guess that might be an experience quite a few of our listeners have not had. So, I would just love to hear a brief recap of Burning Man and how it changed you, because you said it was quite impactful for you.

 

Kristin: Yeah. It was super impactful. And I think it sounds sometimes like for people who are not into, like… First of all, Burning Man is not a festival, right? It’s a cultural experience, a gathering of people and art, where people get to share different experiences. But I think for people who haven’t done a lot of the festival scene, maybe it feels like, “Oh, it’s hippy. It’s a music festival.” Sort of none of those things, in the most beautiful sense of that. It is quite often, for the people who go to Burning Man, or if you haven’t been and you decide to go, I think it is a journey, for sure. A journey where you get to meet mother nature, and all her dusty, warm, and cold desert-style nature. And in the midst of it all, it is a beautiful experience.

 

You sort of get the journey that you need. And when you go, right, everyone gets a little something different every time. It is the third-largest city in Nevada during the week that it’s set up, 70,000-plus people. It was 20,000 or so when I first went. And yeah, I first was drawn to it and decided to go… My first year is a very long story I won’t go into, but I ended up sort of going alone the first year, thinking, “I have some friends there. How hard can it be to find, like, a few RVs?” And then I showed up and realized it’s 20,000 people, and there’s hundreds of thousands of RVs. But I think the point of it is to just say that I was really pushing my boundaries to do something that was different.

 

Consequently, in years after that, I took my best friend out there. We decided to form a camp, Camp Anita Cocktail. It was named after a drag queen that was unfortunately killed in the Stonewall Riots. We wanted to kind of give homage to the LGBT community. We worked in spirits in our early days, in consumer packaged goods, so we wanted to have something that was communal, and a bar seemed to be the thing. But I will just say, in the 13 years of going, I met lifelong friends. I have friends all over the world. I’ve traveled all over the world, and been able to visit and see them and learn about different cultures. Half of our camp was Australian. And if you know any Australians, I know I’m generalizing, but they tend to be wonderful travelers. They are very open-minded, and really flexible when things don’t go exactly according to plan, which is a very big part of Burning Man. And just being out in the playa, as we would call it, I met my partner, who you met a long time, of 12 years. We’re not together anymore, but we are very, very, very close friends, and that’s been a wonderful relationship.

 

So, the art, the culture, there is music, of course, and the opening of yourself to, really, it’s the first time, I will say, then we’ll close my conversation on Burning Man by saying it’s the first time in my life that I recognized energy, a collective energy, let’s call it the collective consciousness, when gathered together and directed in one direction, this direction of sort of positivity and community that is out there, then really magical things happen, like, beyond coincidence. And so, it was the first experience I had of feeling like, “Oh, wow. When a group of people gets together and really can set their goals or their sights on making the human experience more beautiful together, we can make that happen.” And so, that’s why I love it out there, you know? There’s no way to describe it. It would take five podcasts and I wouldn’t even do it justice. So, I encourage anyone to take the leap if they feel like they can go at least once in their life.

 

Katie: Well, and on that note, the community topic is one that I’ve mentioned many, many times on this podcast because I think it’s so important. And there’s so much science that backs that up of, like, truly, without strong community, we see health effects just from the lack of community. And that is, in my personal opinion, maybe the biggest strength of blue zones, is their beautiful community that they have. And so, I have been encouraging people for a long time to intentionally create communities that have that shared focus and that positivity, because we need them in today’s world certainly more than ever, which you did with that wonderful event as well. And I know that you work with women in many, many different areas of health, and have a lot of expertise in a lot of different areas. I’m gonna work on hopefully tying them all in today.

 

But I’d love to start broad, and just talk about, maybe identify some of the common areas that you see women most challenged with in their health, because now, it’s starting to become more widespread knowledge that many of the studies are done on men, because men are easier without the hormone fluctuations, so we have a lot of data, but we don’t have as much women-specific data. And I love now seeing this movement of women who are basically becoming scientists themselves, and looking at their own data and doing experimentation, and it’s really cool to see that. I know that you’re hands-on with a lot of these women who are working through challenges. So, what are some of the common ones that you see?

 

Kristin: Yeah. I see a lot of different things. The one thing I will also say about that weekend is what I love is that we had a photographer there. Great. And most people wrote me and said, “I got, like, one picture. It was of, like, my foot, or the dog, the adorable dog there.” But that, to me, spoke volumes, because when people put their phone down in this day and age, post-apocalypse that we’re going through, you know, we continue to unfold this life that we’re leading in a very high-stress environment, post-quarantine or wherever we’re at, that we get a chance to be with each other, and really with each other, like in the moment that you and I are in right now, we get to, like, just really speak to each other with our phones on silent, and not 42 things and tasks happening at one time. It’s paramount in my mind that we have people like that in our lives, whether they’re men or women, but women are having those types of people in their lives that can really have active listening conversations, sharing where they’re at.

 

The biggest things I see is challenges coming to me with females who are wanting to work with me these days a lot around stress and anxiety, I think because of what we’re coming out of, and continuing to, you know, lean into, and we see happening globally right now. A lot of short fuses, heightened emotion, and some depression. And that’s, I would say, the biggest thing, and a lot of that is leading into sleepless nights, and the less sleep we get, the more sleep deprivation we have, the harder it is for our bodies to recover. And so, that becomes this, like, snowball effect, right? Which is why people and sleep should be our baselines. Interactions with other humans and sleep should be important baselines for us to focus on.

 

And then there’s, you know, a lot of, I like to say, women will come to me and say, you know, “I wanna lose weight.” And we’ve heard that since the dawn of time, I think, in the fitness industry and nutrition coaching. But when women come to me and say, “I wanna lose weight,” I’m like, “Great. Let’s first talk about the fact that what you wanna lose is probably body fat.”

 

Recompositioning your body is what I prefer to say, because that’s literally what we’re doing, recompositioning the body, by learning how to build muscle, which burns more calories, and getting to a place where we understand the talk in the mirror. So, I’ll give them what they want. “You wanna lose weight? Great. I’ll help you lose body fat. I’ll help you recomposition your body,” but I’m also going to give them what they need.

 

A bit of that’s my opinion, and a bit of that is through experiential practice in my own life and my other clients, that there are many, many things that we need in the health space that we don’t even know we need until we…this is why we get a coach, until we get someone to help us along the way. Yeah, and I think those are the big things. You know, the one thing we talked about at the weekend as well is negative self-talk, that none of us females in the world are doing ourselves any favors by getting up in the morning and looking in the mirror and not loving the skin that we’re in.

 

This is just what we need to do. We need to understand. I have a sign on my mirror and over my doorway in my bathroom, because there’s a mirror in there, right? And I’m gonna look at myself, and probably I’m gonna make some judgment. My ego’s gonna be like, “Oh, you have this thing, or this wrinkle, or this pimple, or your hair isn’t…” Whatever. It says, “You are effing magic. Don’t forget you are effing magic.” Because that is. Like, every woman who’s listening to this right now, and your audience, some of whom I’m familiar with, you know, you have such a reach to female communities, and I want everyone who’s listening to this podcast, if they take nothing else away from it, it is that you are perfectly beautiful, and in the way that you’re meant to be right now for a reason, that you are stunning, that you are working to support your communities, and live into your best health the very best way that you can.

 

And energetics around our mindset and the way that we speak to ourselves is more important than anything else that you’re doing on a day-to-day basis, especially when you wake up and you set the course of the day. So, it’s just a reminder to say nobody’s perfect. Not me, not Katie, and that we all are beautiful in bringing this really unique nature of ourselves into the world, and that’s what we need to lean into. And all the other stuff should fall away.

 

Katie: I love that. And I am deeply grateful every day that I get to be part of this community of women and moms. I think, like, women, especially, and moms, in a very unique way, are a force of nature in so many ways, and we have influence of so many other people in our lives. And so, any time we can support women, we support, really, everyone. And so, I’m very grateful I get to be part of that. I also love that you brought that up, because I think words matter so much, and especially the ones we say to ourselves. Like, often, we’re more aware of the words we say to other people, but the questions and statements we say to ourselves really set the tone for so many things in our lives.

 

And I’ve started to notice the dichotomy between, to your point, even the way women talk about things like weight loss, versus the way men talk about it, because women typically talk about losing weight, which, psychologically, your brain never wants to lose anything. So you already have this mental resistance set up because you’re trying to tell your brain something it doesn’t want. Whereas, I hear guys say things like, “You’re looking lean,” or, like, “You’re cutting,” or, like, things that, like, “Oh, well, that actually sounds way better than what I’m doing.”

 

Kristin: Like, active. Yeah.

 

Katie: Yeah. And so, I think there’s, like, a lot we can be aware of in our languaging around that. But you also mentioned some of these things, and especially breath, which we did a lot of at the event, and I think that’s an often overlooked one, that’s an amazing, beautiful, free tool, and that, for all the moms listening, can be done as a family, and it helps really, like, set the tone of your home, and also of your own sympathetic and parasympathetic balance, and it has so many ripples, but it’s easy to kind of discount it because it’s not, like, a tangible supplement you’re taking, or a food that you’re eating, and there’s not this direct relationship like we can more easily see with that. But I know you’ve done a lot of work with breath, and I think it’s one of the most underused tools that we have. So, talk about why breath is so important, and maybe some things we can try to learn from our own breath and to kind of optimize that space.

 

Kristin: Yeah. It’s the number one thing. When people ask me what they can do to improve their health, the number one thing I always say is breathe better, learning and understanding the breath in the body and how we biomechanically work. In some way, that doesn’t have to be, like, nerdy science for 10 hours, but just, we understand that breathing, more easefully breathing, less breaths per minute as possible, can really serve our bodies the very best way. It’s sort of interesting. It’s like meditation, right? For moms out there. It’s like, “Take the supplement, do the thing.” We like to do the doing, right? We have a lot going on, we’re affecting a lot of people. We like to do the doing. And this is sort of the doing of undoing, right? So, meditation is like, that we’re doing a thing that’s undoing layers of stress, undoing past traumas, undoing things that our body needs to unwind, especially as we’re juggling so much in this world. And breathing, I think, is a more accessible tool, even, because you have something that you can pay attention to or tap into.

 

So, the first and most important point about breathing, I always like to remind everyone, is concentrating on, can you just check in once a day and see the way that you’re breathing and how it’s correlated to your emotional state? So, right now, I’m talking, so I’m breathing out of my mouth, and my nervous state is pretty good. I’m pretty grounded because I feel like I know Katie, and I love Katie, and I’m excited about the prospect of the podcast, and I feel safe in my house, and I can see and understand that correlates to when Katie’s speaking, maybe I’m nasal breathing, and nasal breathing is giving me a more prevalent state of calm. It’s keeping me downregulated, meaning less stress. And that’s what we need to check in on every day. And it’s not a long process. It’s just taking 10, 15, 30 seconds. And if we are in an agitated state, maybe we notice we’re on our phone, our mouth is open, or we just had a little snippet with our kids, and maybe our mouth’s open or we’re agitated and it’s like, can we take 30 seconds to just lightly touch our lips together, inhale for a count of four, exhale for a count of eight, really long, nasal exhales, and just breathe in and out through our nose.

 

The long story short on the science, the rabbit hole of science, and you can see… I don’t know if anyone will ever see, but behind me, I have always my little lung diagram. So, I use it so much, is that the thing that gets oxygen into our system is carbon dioxide. And we have always sort of surmised, and maybe, you know, we didn’t totally get this in school, that if we want more oxygen in our system and we wanna feel better, we’re gonna breathe more. We’re gonna take in more air. We’re gonna mouth breathe. When you mouth-breathe, your shoulders go up and down, up and down, you breathe from your chest, and you get less oxygen into the bottom of the lungs, where blood is pooling more, where we can have a gas exchange.

 

You can get oxygen in you and on the blood, on your hemoglobin, into your blood cells, but if that oxygen doesn’t get into your tissues, your brain, your body, your muscles, it’s not recovering you, it’s not serving you. And so, in order to do that, we have to have enough carbon dioxide rising in the body, and in our body, to make this gas exchange. That’s the plain science of it, is we need enough carbon dioxide at a certain level to have the oxygen pushed into our tissues. And so, plenty of stuff online to read about that if you wanna get into the nerdy science and biology or physiology of the human respiratory system, but suffice it to say, that nasal breathing serves us better, because it keeps us in a calmer state. It is the way that we filter and condition air.

 

So, especially now, when people are worried about immune systems, and sickness, and illness, and all that, there’s a filtration system built into the nose. It conditions the air to the right temperature, by the few degrees that you need to take into your lungs to be optimized. It filters the air, and it helps us with something called nitric oxide. Nitric oxide is made in the nasal cavity. It keeps blood pressure lower. It helps vasodilate, which is, like, opening the arteries, opening your body, to be able to lower your heart rate, lower your blood pressure, all of that. We do not make those things, or filter the air or anything when we breathe through our mouths.

 

So, noses are made for breathing, mouths are made for eating. And just checking in, as a very solid baseline, every day, to say, “Can I be nasal breathing mostly when I’m not speaking? So, 70%, 80% of the day, can I be playing with my kids if we’re not talking and we’re all nasal breathing?” And if you watch young babies, they will nasal breathe more often. And their bodies, their bellies, like, we are trained as women, right, to be like, “Suck it in” or whatever the thing is socially, that’s not great for us, but babies breathe, you watch them breathe, and their big old bellies come out. It’s like making pot bellies cool again, right? They breathe, they have diaphragmatic expansion, they’re taking in air, they’re, like, laughing or nasal breathing. And we can learn a lot by just kind of looking to that, and saying, “Oh, this is how we came out. This is how it works best for functioning in our bodies and our lungs.”

 

Katie: Yeah. So many things I’ve learned from watching my babies, especially, like, their squat form is absolutely perfect. And they first start walking and I’m like, “Oh, I got to get back to that good of a squat form.” And that’s another area that you are well versed in and that you and I got to chat at the event quite a bit about, is the difference of women in fitness. And I think that’s an area that has historically been more male-driven, and there are differences in how women train, and how women recover, and how we can actually use some of those differences to our advantage, especially even… You talked about our cycles and how learning how to train in different parts of your cycle can actually help you not just get stronger and see better results, but also recover better and have lower risk of injury when you understand how to work with your body in that way.

 

And I think also, fitness can be a hard thing for a lot of women, just based on time, and just based on the frustration of trying to figure out what is the most effective way to train, and all of the programming that seems to have existed for a lot of decades about, you know, go do hours of cardio at the gym, which I don’t recommend. But I would love to hear kind of a broad take from you on females and fitness, and what we can do kind of maybe 80/20 approach of getting the most benefit.

 

Kristin: Yeah. When I work with women one on one, even in groups, we talk a lot about what fitness variance is, meaning what you do over the course of the week matters. We’re gonna talk about over the course of a week, but the landscape then changes over the course of a month, because if we are in our reproductive years, then we can apply the landscape of what we do over the course of the month in the most effective and efficient way. And fitness variance overall is just, you know, are you getting some mobilization? So, mobility. We wanna have something that might be like a yoga, a Pilates. It could be something as interesting as there’s things out there called functional range conditioning, or Kinstretch, or Kelly Starrett and Julia Starrett have a program called The Ready State, which is great. This is all mobility, right? So, how do we mobilize, how do we move our bodies in space in a way that our nervous system gives us range of motion?

 

How do we strength train? Right? So, let’s talk about strength training. Everyone on this podcast, if they have capacity for it in any way, shape, or form, heavy is relative. We need to be lifting heavy shit. We need to be having resistance that creates some muscle on the body. It is not about just looking lean or getting on a stage and posing. It is about longevity. It is about bone density and your health as you grow, so you can be, like, strong, and there, and ready for action, ready to help, you know, raise your kids to the successes that they’re going to be. And then also, you know, you wanna be able to step off the curb when you’re 80 and not fall over. And so, strength-building helps with that.

 

So, some kind of strength training. And again, heavy’s relative. It doesn’t have to be something that scares you, nor it should be. And then, building in some things like a little bit of cardio, right? Conditioning. So, we do want a little bit of cardio, like, steady-state cardio, which is probably a heart rate very, you know, average somewhere between like 115, 120 heart rate, mild form of, like, level three exertion, etc. We want that. We used to walk lots and lots and lots of miles. Our body likes to do this, and this is a little bit more than getting steps in. Steps are great and important. Movement is great. Something that’s a little bit faster-paced than getting steps in. But the one thing it is definitely not, like you were speaking to, is it’s not 14 Peloton classes in a week.

 

It’s just, we are crushing ourselves by doing too much cardio chronically. That’s the average generalization I see, is too much cardio, not enough weight training. We do wanna have some cardio. Cardio I love is I have my clients do sprint work. Some of them love me. Some of them are like, “Good coach, get this done and move on.” But getting some kind of sprint work in. So, that’s, like, short bursts of sprints, on a bike, on a rower, on the street, in a pool. We see it a bit in HIIT training, right? Effective HIIT training will have some sprint efforts in it. Those sprint efforts are super important, and potentially even done with nasal breathing. So, getting that right variance of what you do over the course of the week matters.

 

And then, once we understand the variance of the different tools that are out there, so, like for a listener, they could be like, “Hey, I’m gonna do yoga for a week. I’m gonna strength-train for a week.” They could do all those things, and then what we essentially want to do is we want to scaffold those against the month, or over our month, in the reproductive years, so that we can say, “Great. These 10 days…” which, this is true, there’s about a week’s worth of time. There’s tons of research on this, or a lot of studies around females in this one area since the ’80s that talks about the propensity of estrogen to build more muscle and maximal power during about 7 or so days of the month. Because our months are all different lengths, I talk about day 6 of our cycle to day 16, or something in that window-ish. It’s within there, some way, shape, or form, knowing that the first day of your period is day 1, and that day 6 to 16, somewhere in that range, those are the times to be like, “Let me just apply strength training.” And also, like, you’re gonna ovulate in there, which means probably you can take one less rest day, because you’re strong, you have propensity to, like, not have the muscle breakdown that you might have, and also probably a higher propensity to recover, depending on your genetics. But that’s a good window for us to really, like, if we’re gonna go hard, like we do now all the time, that’s a window to go hard.

 

And then, I can even use this last example, which is, conversely, you know, that last few days before your period kicks in, like yesterday, it was three days before my period. I did a big ARX training. It’s, like, an eccentrically-loaded really strong strength training. And I watched my numbers. I have less capacity for power. I’m a lot more tired. I feel like I’m not scoring as high. I don’t wanna beat myself up about that, because we’re so competitive with ourselves, and I just really, I had one exercise left, but at the end, I said, “Look, you know what? I’m not doing that exercise. My body’s done.” Like, we have to be sensitive enough to know when it’s that time in the cycle. I’m on a protocol, so I wanted to weave in one strength training session for the week, but it wasn’t an optimal day, and I just did a little bit less. And that’s what we have to do, is we have to organize that our monthly cycle and aligning our cycle with the way that we’re training and understanding our hormones affect our personality, our mood.

 

Like, two or three days before my period, my mood’s a little flat. Doesn’t mean I’m on the couch crying necessarily. I don’t have a lot of PMS. I’ve worked hard to regulate that, but my mood’s a little flatter, right? Maybe we’re, like, a little less interested in sex. Like, cool. Like, maybe not. Everyone’s a little different, right? But just getting sensitive to that and having some self-awareness really help the overall arc of fitness. And then again, it needs to be said one more time, which is, put some strength training into your routine, ladies.

 

Katie: Absolutely. I 100% echo what you just said. I think that combination of mobility, strength, and sprinting is magic, especially for women. And I’ve seen results with that that I did not see from years and years and years of doing what I thought you’re supposed to do in a gym, where you just get on a treadmill, or you get on an elliptical, which doesn’t hit some of those things, and you’re not challenging the muscle.

 

And we know from high school biology, muscle burns more than fat, but until you actually, like, see it in your own body, and feel that difference… Especially the sprinting. I don’t feel like there’s a lot of encouragement in the mainstream fitness information for women to sprint. And I’m, like, now a sprinting evangelist, because I’m like, it doesn’t take a long time. You don’t have to do 50 of these. It’s actually, you can get a lot done in a short number of sprints, as long as you put a couple minutes of rest in between, and that helps you get leaner, because it’s signaling your body, “Oh, I’ve got to be able to move quickly. So I need muscle, and I need to, like, reduce excess body fat that is not helping me move faster.” And when you combine that with a couple days a week of strength training, it’s amazing, the results. So now I’m very much an evangelist on those areas as well.

 

Kristin: I love it. Let’s keep singing those praises, Katie. It’s important. And you’re right. The people who are looking for time efficiency, I’m sure you have a lot of listeners that are like, “But I don’t have the time.” You’re talking about, like 16, 18 minutes tops, if you warm up your body a little bit correctly before you do some sprint work, and you’re done. You’re, like, done. And that could be your day. And, like, during quarantine, my neighbors were like, “Who is that chick running down the road?” But it didn’t matter. Fifteen minutes, you know, and I can get it done.

 

Katie: And if you’re a mom and you have kids, even, like, 10 and up, they’re so much fun to go sprint with, because they very conceivably can be as fast as you or faster, which is a great challenge. And, like, my teenage son is fun to sprint with because I’m like, “Oh, you got fast all of a sudden.” And now I’m getting challenged by him. So, yeah, big fan of that. And I think also that, just to mention the note of there’s so much data about the strength training workouts, especially, and maintaining lean muscle mass as being a marker for longevity and reducing a lot of these problems we see as we get older. It also tends to make you look younger, because you have more support below your skin, which is a thing that a lot of people are concerned about.

 

But when you add in these workouts, I also have learned this lesson, semi the hard way, you do have to learn about recovery, and you have to be intentional about it. Because when I started making that switch, I was trying to eat the same way, and trying to, like, still do a bunch of fasting all the time, and not recovering, and not realizing, like, “Oh, when you’re actually burning so much more by sprinting, you have to intentionally make sure you’re recovering, actually fueling your body, actually sleeping in a deep enough state to recover.” And then there’s so much that we can do once we get those basic things dialed in that really helps with recovery. And I know you cover a lot of these, but walk us through what we need to know about recovery.

 

Kristin: Yeah. I mean, the first best thing to do that’s sort of the easiest low-hanging fruit is getting yourself a recovery breathing protocol. So, a recovery breathing protocol just means when you’re done with whatever workout or training you’re doing for the day, that you find a space that’s safe, or chill, park, couch, wherever you’re working out, whether it’s your home or the gym, and you try to throw your feet up, either legs up the wall, feet on a bench, or just, like, put your feet flat on the floor and your knees bent. And you just take three minutes, which is… What I love about three minutes is that it’s the length of a song, like your average pop song or something, and you just put a song on your headphones, etc., or whatever’s playing over the loudspeaker, and you do three minutes of nasal breathing.

 

So, 2X breathing. So, inhale for whatever the count is, maybe four, exhale two times that long. So, exhale for eight. If I inhale for 5, I exhale for 10. It’s downregulation breathing, and it is telling your nervous system, “Okay. That big sympathetic, weightlifting, spinning, whatever thing I just did, where my nervous system is on fire in the sense of, like, I’m being chased by a tiger or a lion, or I’m out in the fields and I’m doing stuff” is what our body thinks. We’re setting our nervous system up to say, “Okay, great. Let’s put ourselves into rest and digest.” And in that rest and digest moment, our body flicks the switch and says, “Okay. We can start recovering now.” And that means start recovering now, versus an hour and a half later, when you finally get home and you’ve, you know, cooked dinner, or, for many, many women who are on the go, they won’t start recovering till they get in the bed at night. And so, it’s, like, finally lying down and then downregulating our system. So, having a three-minute downregulation practice. Look, you could take five if you want, but just short, after the end of a workout, and making that the most important part of the workout, so that your body can begin to recover.

 

The other thing that’s really overlooked with females is not getting enough protein. Protein equals recovery, especially strength training. Amino acids equal recovery. We have, like, a different leucine proposition in our bodies than men, that we have to get enough of the amino acids to our brain to really kick in recovery in high gear. Stacy Sims, Dr. Stacy Sims, talks a lot about this. And men just have to get it to their muscles, right? It’s, like, just a little bit. They have a longer window that they can consume protein. We probably have, like, 90 minutes, before or after our training, we wanna get protein in our system. So I always have amino acids in my system when I go, in my water, when I go to a training, like half an hour before, during the training, and then I always have a protein shake very shortly after.

 

I’m also training relatively hard most of the time in my life. And so, protein’s super important. And we’re undereating protein across the board. Again, a lot of these are general statements. You may be listening to this, like, “I’m eating plenty of protein.” But, you know, far too often, people show up, we’ll actually manage and look at what they’re eating over the course of a week from a macronutrient standpoint, and I’m like, “You’re at 50% of the protein that you should… You need to eat for your body to be well fueled for what you’re doing.” Right? There’s no should. It’s just about necessity for fuel.

 

Katie: I’m so glad you brought that up, because that’s another lesson I learned the hard way, especially when I started working out a lot more. I assumed I was eating enough protein, because I was like, “Oh, I’m not feeling hungry between meals and whatever.” And then I actually tracked it, and was like, “Oh, I’m not even close to the minimum amount of protein I need to maintain, much less to add muscle.

 

And the beauty of it is… Like, I actually had an adjustment period where I was like, “Oh, my gosh, I have to eat so much food.” And now I’m eating more than I’ve ever eaten, by a lot, and getting leaner and stronger. But the other benefit of that is when you get your protein levels optimized, you have so much energy. I remember that switch so vividly, that first two weeks of just feeling like the energizer bunny. I was like, “I’m gonna organize everything, and I’m gonna…” Like, I had so much energy. And I wish I had learned that 10 years ago, but I’m glad I know it now, but I’m so glad you talk about the protein thing. What are some general guidelines that you give women on how to know if you’re actually eating enough protein? Because I have a feeling the actual numbers will surprise a lot of people listening.

 

Kristin: Yeah. I mean, I wanna make it easy. There’s a range. It depends on if you’re an athlete, or you’re aging, or you’re menopausal, or you’re… There’s a lot of nuance in this, but let’s just talk about it from a baseline. The best range to look at is, “Can I get to one to one? Can I have one gram of protein for every pound of body weight I have on my being?” So, one to one, it’s like easy math, right? So, I know if I weigh 147 pounds, I’m eating 147 grams of protein. It’s also important to notice, or to note that just because something looks like, at the store, it’s some, you know, a certain number, 128 grams of chicken doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s 128 grams of protein. It doesn’t translate exactly like that on the macro scale.

 

So, it behooves people to get a food tracker. Some people use MyFitnessPal. I’m a big fan of Cronometer. I like their data. I know the way that it’s tracked and assessed, and there’s, like, no anomalies in the system. You know, there’s a number of other reasons I like Cronometer, but whatever you’re using to track, there’s enough technology out there now. You don’t have to track for a lifetime. I recently had a woman on my podcast. I have a podcast called the “WELLPOWER Podcast,” and she’s tracked food every day for almost four years. It’s incredible. It’s amazing to listen to, and she’s gotten it down to a science of, like, maybe 90 seconds over the course of the day, because she has certain recipes that are in there and whatnot.

 

You don’t have to be that. But you do have to say, “Hey, I wanna take one week every quarter, and I wanna track my food meticulously, and also track it well.” And by that, I mean, did you have a glass of wine? Put it in. A lot of times, people are working with me and they’re like, “I left out the chocolate cupcake and the wine.” It’s like, put it in. It’s still macronutrients. You can still meet your macros. I’m not a fan of the word “cheat meal.” I think we can have treats, and we can expand upon the eating lifestyle choices that we make, and have some things that we really, like, love or make us feel good in some way, as long as we’re sort of keeping them in our bubble of macronutrient ratios.

 

And so, it’s like, track everything. You gotta track the wine, you gotta track the, I don’t know, the Snickers bar or whatever. And then you can kind of see. And it gives you a real-world perspective. You can’t manage what you don’t measure. And so, we need to know. So, yeah, protein one to one, that’s my big tactical piece of advice, feeling out what that’s like for someone. And it usually feels like, “Whoa, this is a lot of protein.”

 

Katie: And I’ll also say, from a mom’s perspective, for anybody listening who has kids, getting them to get enough protein also has a big impact on how they tend to sleep and how they feel throughout the day, and their energy level staying stable. And I’m noticing that, especially with my teenagers, who are athletes, way fewer mood swings, way better sleep and recovery when they are. So, I use an app called Real Plans. I also track with a tracking app, but Real Plans let you make a list view of recipes that you’re gonna do, and see the macros for them, and then repeat them, and it gives you a shopping list. And so, to your point, you don’t have to track every day, especially if you develop a couple weeks of meal plans, and you just repeat them on a family schedule. And that also makes it easier for someone else in my family to go grocery shopping if they need to, because the list is there, or to make meals, because the recipes are now familiar. So that’s been a game-changer for me as a mom.

 

I also know, on the recovery side, you’re a big fan of a couple other things that we got to do at the event, which were red light and cold. And I think probably people here have heard me at least mention these in passing. I’ve talked about red light for a really long time, but I haven’t gone deep on the science of these in a long time. So I would love for you to kind of go through why these are two tools that you turn to often.

 

Kristin: Yeah. For sure. I love them both. I start most mornings with red light. I have a panel here, and I have a FlexBeam here. A FlexBeam is, like, portable red light therapy. And I’m traveling quite a bit, so I can, like, kind of strap it on and go, or just put it over my belly or my chest or my spine at night. It helps with sleep scores. And I’m using red light all the time, and it is… The short story on red light. It’s been studied for hundreds of years. It’s been around for thousands of years, because it’s been around in the sun. There’s different wavelengths of light that we get from sunrise and from sunset that help set our circadian rhythm, which is great for sleep. There are other benefits those wavelengths have for our body. And in this day and age, when we’re indoors so much and we’re not outside in the same way that we used to, it’s important to be able to get these wavelengths, the nanometers of red light.

 

And the biggest benefit is, like, our body is like a battery. And the mitochondria, which are the powerhouses of our cells, can be charged by specific wavelengths of red light. And so, quite often, when you’re hearing these, you know, commercials, or marketing around red light therapy, it’s like, “Here’s the 15 amazing things it does, 20, 30 benefits.” But when you get your mitochondria more empowered, or more powered, like, more fuel in the tank for the cells to behave more optimally, everything in the downstream effects of that just systemically helps you be optimized as a human being. So, red light therapy can help with, like, scar tissue and wound healing. And then sometimes I’ll use the FlexBeam on my shoulder if I’ve, like, gone too hard at the gym, because I wanna recover those muscles quickly.

 

But it can also help with things, like, going on in our gut. Light will penetrate, more or less, depending on the wavelengths, up to 10 millimeters. And so, we can get it into our tissues, our muscles, our bones, all of that, and the powerhouses of our cells are then sort of fed with the red light. And that, from a sleep standpoint, from a downregulation standpoint too, it’s, like, nice to have some warmth emanating from it and all of that. It’s a nice time to downregulate during the day. And if you can stack it, it’s even better. That’s why it’s like, get in front of a panel, breathe or meditate, put on the FlexBeam, I’ll drive down in my car to the gym or wherever I’m going. And there’s a ton of benefits in that regard.

 

You know, we used to wheel patients out of the hospitals into the sunlight to be able to help them heal faster. And then, of course, pharmaceuticals came along. It was a lot easier to give someone a pill, but they lost a lot of the benefits of the other things that came through that light. And that’s why, you know, one of the reasons why red light therapy still, I think, is in favor, and I think it’s more and more becoming popularized for recovery and for mitochondrial function, cellular health.

 

Katie: Yeah. I’m a big fan as well. And yeah, you have some great resources about it I’ll make sure to link to as well.

 

This episode is brought to you by LMNT. LMNT contains a science-backed electrolyte ratio: 1000 mg sodium, 200mg potassium, 60 mg magnesium. With none of the junk. No sugar. No coloring. No artificial ingredients. No gluten. No fillers. It turns out that a lot of us aren’t getting enough salt and LMNT is my solution. Athletes, any of us who use sauna, people who follow a low carb or paleo type diet, and moms (especially during breastfeeding) have an increased electrolyte need and electrolyte deficiency can cause headaches, cramps, fatigue, and weakness. LMNT was co-founded by my good friend Robb Wolf when he was looking to increase his athletic performance, and it now has thousands of avid fans including Olympic athletes, pro athletes, special forces teams and moms and families around the world. I drink LMNT almost everyday to support my workouts and hydration levels and my favorite flavor is definitely watermelon.  As a member of our community, LMNT has a very special offer for you. Claim your free LMNT Sample Pack – you only cover the cost of shipping. Get yours here: DrinkLMNT.com/WellnessMama

 

This podcast is sponsored by Hiya Health… a new type of childrens vitamins.  Typical children’s vitamins are basically candy in disguise — filled with two teaspoons of sugar, unhealthy chemicals, and other gummy junk growing kids should never eat. Hiya is made with zero sugar and zero gummy junk, yet it tastes great and is perfect for picky eaters. Hiya fills in the most common gaps in modern children’s diets to provide the full-body nourishment our kids need with a yummy taste they love. Manufactured in the USA with globally sourced ingredients each selected for optimal bioavailability and absorption. Hiya arrives straight to your door on a pediatrician-recommended schedule. Your first month comes with a reusable glass bottle your kids can personalize with stickers, then every month thereafter Hiya sends a no-plastic refill pouch of fresh vitamins — which means Hiya isn’t just good for your kids, it’s also good for the environment. To check them out, go to hiyahealth.com/wellnessmama and save on your first month at this link!

 

You’re also a fan of ice baths. And I was so excited, because you were able to get all of the women at the event, I think everybody who was there, got in the ice, including people who, at the beginning, were very adamant that they don’t get in cold water, and then everybody was, like, giddy happy after. I love the mental benefits of ice bath, but then there’s also some amazing physical benefits, and I feel like some important guidelines to know, because it is an area where, like, to the extreme degree, more is not always better. Like, there’s some great ranges. So, talk to us about ice baths and why we can all do them, even if we think we hate the cold.

 

Kristin: Yeah. It was just yesterday, someone was writing an Instagram post that became, like, a lot longer post. Someone’s being like, “I’m, like, mad about having to go in the cold, but I know I need to.” I wanna say that cold therapy, sometimes called cold water immersion, ice baths, ice plunges, deliberate cold exposure, river swimming, all of these things, they are amazing for your body, and your mind, and longevity. Because we talk about cold exposure, right? This is a big area that I play in. I run an instructor training, Sherpa Breath and Cold, and Sherpa actually stands for, I think it’s an important acronym in this conversation, which is, it stands for surrender, history, exposure, respiration. So, breathing is really important. So, the way that you breathe is gonna dictate how well you can do in extreme temperatures of cold or heat.

 

Respiration, performance. We use cold a lot of times to potentiate workouts and to increase our performance, our power output. And, adaptation, A. Adaptation. And adaption is sort of the key to this. We are giving ourselves a minimum effective dose of cold exposure to be able to adapt the body systems, because every time we adapt and recover from that minimum effective dose of stress we’re giving ourselves, and cold, and this holds true for heat as well, but let’s just stick with ice. That adaptation is making us sort of stronger, better, faster, smarter, all of those things, more confident.

 

Like you spoke about, there are mindset benefits to getting in the cold. And I think it behooves to say, too, that, you know, you can start in small doses. It’s just the minimum effective dose for you. Cold exposure is not something that, you know, if I’m backing out at 10,000 feet, maybe your doctor should know what you’re doing. If you have a pacemaker, diabetes, if you’ve just become pregnant and you’ve never done ice before, maybe it’s not the time in your life to, like, pick up ice and ice baths at that moment.

 

But we have the propensity to set our breathing in such a way that we can get in the ice, we can tolerate that ice, right? We can do hard things. Anyone can do anything for three minutes, and we get into the ice bath, maybe two or three minutes to start. And then we get out, and our body has a parasympathetic rebound. It releases all these bliss chemicals, oxytocin, and really getting in and doing something that’s a really big challenge, and then getting out and knowing you conquered it gives you this level of confidence that, especially when I have first-time ice plungers or ice bath bathers, they get out and it’s like, they’ve just, like, you know, seen the light, right? It’s, like, hyper level of focus. They feel very giddy. You have neurochemistry that’s boosting in your body to help with that as well. And I will say this. For all the women that are coming to me with, like, depression, anxiety, trouble sleeping, this is a practice that really, really can help with those things, right? The mood-boosting benefits, the sleep benefits, the de-stressing benefits when you get out of the ice.

 

And the other thing that’s important to talk about is, you know, cold showers and cryotherapy are other ways we can do cold therapy, like, deliberate cold exposure. But when you look at the research and the literature, again, it’s widespread across different, like, you know, it’s probably more men than women, and it’s in rivers, and it’s in ice baths, and it’s in cold water, and it’s just one arm in cold water. But when you look at all of the literature, we can see that the benefits towards longevity, towards cellular upregulation and just optimizing your health, they really come from the ice. They really come with 10X the benefits.

 

That shouldn’t deter anyone here who’s like, “I don’t have access to that. Let me try cold showers.” It is invigorating. Definitely helps with sleep, can help with, like, onset muscle soreness from the gym. And just, if you’re feeling a little low mood, low energy, a cold shower, as you can imagine, really boosts those things. And from the sleep front, if we’re doing those things, we don’t wanna do them right the second before we go to bed, but an hour or two before sleep, around sunset, is a beautiful time to do it, because it sets the body up for rest. And in that rebound I talked about, that parasympathetic rebound, your body can kind of settle in, maybe you have a meal, and then you can sleep more easefully.

 

Katie: Yeah. And I think you’re right. There’s so many levels of that. And I’m a big fan as well of the actual ice, and getting submerged. I had a researcher recently from Stanford who did the CoolMitt study with athletes, which is its own cool topic. But his point, what I pulled from that podcast, was if all that’s within what you have available is a cold shower, if you can make sure it hits the glabrous region, so, your face and your hands, like, put your hands up at the water too, you’ll get that drop in body temperature a little bit, and you’ll get some of that release of hormones if that’s all you have available.

 

But if you’re actually trying to do, like, longer ice baths, and get some of that, like, fat-burning effect, he said you can use the reverse. You can actually wear scuba boots and/or, either put the gloves on your hands, or keep your hands only out of the water, because that’s gonna cool you, and you’re gonna hit that point faster if your hands and feet are being cooled. So, if you’re trying to actually, like, sustained time in the ice bath, you can use that to your advantage in the opposite way. But it’s one of those things, I’m with you. You have to try it to feel it, because before you’ve tried an actual ice bath in ice, it’s easy to think, like, “That’s gonna be horrible and I’m gonna hate it.” And once you actually try it and you feel that rush of all those neurotransmitters, you’re like, “That is awesome. I wanna do that again.”

 

Kristin: Yeah. You were like so pro-style at the weekend. It’s always beautiful to have some women that are, like, as pro-style as you were in the ice bath, because it helps other people who are there who are newer to it see that it is possible. You know, that it’s doable and you can keep a smile on your face. And, you know, I always say, like, I’m a firm but fair guide when it comes to cold, because it’s like, some women are there. And you saw some of it. It’s like, “I don’t know if I can do this,” and they, like, kind of look up at me and they, like, “Oh, maybe I don’t wanna get out right now.” And I’m like, “You’re doing great. You’re staying in.” And then it’s, like, another community device, right? You’re like, “Okay. This person’s not gonna really let me get out right now.”

 

And then you get over that hump, right? Because I think you’d agree to this, that… I’ve seen it. I’ve put over 2,000 men and women in the ice at this point, and there’s this point, there’s a turnover point that I will continue to call the turnover until… Everyone calls it the turnover. That’s, like, a physiological and mental state shift, where your body is shunting the blood from your periphery to your core, it’s protecting your organs, it’s slowing your heart rate. This is why neck, face, palms of the hands, soles of the feet, help temp down. It’s a great tip to say, if, like, you’re nervous about it or you wanna go a little longer, or if it’s your first time and you wanna put on some, like… I don’t ever let people put on booties or gloves.

 

I’m that coach. I’m like, “Nope. We’re just doing in it. Let’s go.” But you could do that and you could stay in… Maybe if you’re staying in a short time, but it feels a bit safer. I mean, it’s all very safe typically, but it feels a little bit more doable, right? So, you can manage in that way, but getting your neck under the water is interesting, because women will go in, or men and women, and even my athletes will go in initially, like, up to the chest, and they’re like, “This is great.” And then I’m like, “Hey, we’re gonna get the shoulders under and get the neck in.” And there’s sort of a response that’s like, “I don’t wanna do that. That’s gonna be harder.” But the reality is it actually makes it easier to get your neck in, because this is the same as, like, your palms or your face. We have mammalian dive response, our body cools, and it may be a shorter period of time that you’re in there, but it makes it easier because your body’s just, like, it’s having the turnover.

 

And then the other thing that happens is this beautiful surrender. There is nothing, if you are not a good meditator or not a good breathwork student, I mean, there’s no good and bad in that world, but if you’re feeling like you’re challenged with it, get in the cold. You will experience what it’s like to be absolutely 110% in the now in that moment. And you will surrender a little bit in that turnover. And the turnover happens around 30 to 45 seconds. So, that’s my advice to the listeners. If you’re trying anything cold, 30 to 45 seconds. Maybe as much as a minute for some people, but that turnover will happen. The time will get shorter until you turn over. So, if you go for it, and you get in a tub of cold water or cold ice at any temperature, give yourself that first, like, 45 seconds or so to just experience it, breathe calmly as you can through it, through your nose, because that will happen, and all of a sudden…

 

I’ve had women go, at the 30-second point, look at me like, “I’m not gonna make it 10 more seconds.” And then 10 or 15 seconds go by, and they go, “I could do this for, like, six minutes. This is easy.” Like, a big shift, and you see it. And it’s the most beautiful moment to watch someone in the cold, because you just see a shift in their eyes, the recognition that, like, “Oh, wow, I’m confidently doing this thing that I didn’t know I could do.” And yeah, it’s just like this beautiful moment to see them sort of surrender within their own power.

 

Katie: I’m so glad you mentioned the meditation side of that too, because I think we’ve all by now heard that meditation is great, and it’s great for your brain, and we should all be meditating. And also, I was that person for a long time, that didn’t know how to meditate. And getting in the ice is great, because it takes your focus to your breath, and I’m like, “Oh. This is what you do when you pay attention to your breath, and you just be.” And my mind couldn’t wander to my to-do list because I was focused on breathing and being calm. And it was a beautiful experience in that surrender. And also, to loop back to the idea of community that we talked about at the beginning. This is a thing, especially if you’re new, I really encourage, do it in a group. Like, find a group to challenge to do it with you.

 

And for many years, all I had was one of those horse troughs from Tractor Supply, that’s inexpensive, and we would invite neighbors over, and everybody would bring a bag of ice, and we would just, on Saturday mornings, fill up the cold plunge, take turns doing cold plunges, and then make brunch together after. And it is so much easier, I find, to stay in when you have a group and it’s, like, a community activity, and you’re encouraging each other. And that was what we had at the event as well. I also realized at the event, I was like, you know, mimetic theory at work, “If I can get in and make this seem easy and fun, other people can hopefully get in with the mindset that this is easy and fun.”

 

And it just gets easier when you’re in a group. And I know we’re getting close to the end of our time, and I hope we’ll do another round soon, but I’d love to briefly touch on some of your top supplement recommendations for women. You mentioned the protein and the aminos. I’m also a big fan of the Kion aminos before and after a workout, and/or even on non-workout days, separate from food, for recovery. But what are some of the other ones you turn to often?

 

Kristin: Yeah. I love that. Katie, you’re so smart. I just wanna take that moment and honor how much research… Because I met you years ago, and you’ve always been smart, but just how much research and energy and effort you’ve put into continually focusing on optimizing a wellbeing of you, your body, and your family. It’s incredible. I want you to hear that, because it’s important that we have this autonomy, to do this as women. It really is. We have to say, “I’m gonna take this into my own control.” You know, and we control a lot of other things in the world that we’re trying to control, a lot of other things that are out of our control. So this is something that we can control, which is, like, the research, it doesn’t have to be hard. You have so many podcasts out that will just help women, and I encourage everyone to listen to all the stuff you’re recording. It’s why I even started a podcast in the first place, is we need more info coming from credible sources. And we do our research. That’s what I know about us.

 

And, yes, the aminos thing is really important. And yes, I’m a big fan of Kion. The reason we wanna have a Kion on our rest days too is because our body cycles amino acids every six hours while it’s recovering. We might as well…we need to keep having them. Magnesium’s a big one. It’s a low-hanging fruit. I think we need to get magnesium glycinate, citrate, or I use Magnesium Breakthrough from Bioptimizers. I really like them. Like, whatever’s out there that makes sense, but magnesium is great. I mean, I take a lot of supplements every single day, 65 pills or something probably, but I’m an experimenter, and, you know, there’s vitamin D deficiency in the world, so that’s always a good one as well. D3/K2 blend.

 

And the other thing is, I wanna say this, which is do a little bit of lab work. It’s important for you to understand, and anyone who’s listening, to understand how the lab work affects what we’re taking, right? We don’t wanna be overdoing it. At one point, I was taking iodine, because I had read of this big, really smart male who was writing about iodine, “Take this iodine. It’s amazing.” And I was, like, taking it and I was, like, sweating profusely all day. And I was like, “Something’s going on with my body. I don’t know what’s up.” And it’s like, kind of a mini fail. I took it because I read, because it was good for someone else, but what I didn’t need was extra iodine in my system.

 

So, just understanding those types of things. I have some other, like, fan favorites. I’m a big proponent of having a protein shake that you love, really, like, dependent on what style of protein you eat. That’s an important supplement for me in helping, just regulating blood sugar. You know, if I mix my protein and my carbs together, I have less of a glucose spike than I have if I’m just eating rice by itself, or carbohydrates by itself. So, knowing how we mix our foods.

 

Definitely, supplementation is important. And then one other thing I will say is, like, the biggest supplement I’m taking right now is, like, I’m taking a hair supplement, because after, post-COVID, I had a lot of hair loss. Some women have been experiencing this, and people haven’t been talking about it a lot. It’s pretty scary. It will come back. It’s not a permanent hair loss, but I probably lost, I wanna say, like, 30%, 40% of my hair fell out, and it’s a daunting thing, right? You’re like, “What’s happening? Is this aging?” And a lot of it was, like, a post-COVID thing, and so I think it’s important to talk about. I think I had a third…. I’ve been taking this brand called Fully Vital. I really love it for women. It is non-pharmaceutical. There’s, like, a roller, and all the things you do with a little serum and pills, but it’s beautiful. It’s been really helpful to me, so I’m sensitive to that as a supplement, that it’s outside of the box. If you don’t have that issue, it’s not an issue, but for me, it’s been, I’m starting to see my baby hairs grow back and it makes me feel like, “Whew, okay.” You know, I’m in it to win it. Yeah. I think those are my, like, top.

 

The top ones that I’m taking right now, nicotinamide. I take NAC quite a bit. There’s been a lot of controversy, as I’m sure you know, about them, pulling that off or keeping it on. Yeah. And there’s some good…just, anything that precursors NAD. I’m sure you’ve spoken about NAD in the past, but anything that will precursor that. It’s a couple different ways to do it. It’s really, I think, from a longevity standpoint, beautifully done.

 

And can we also say this one quick thing, which is, I love collagen as much as the next person, and protein, and all of that, but we need to start to get to the place where when we’re having collagen, it benefits our body, and it can benefit our tissues and our joints and everything, but a lot of women come to me and they are overconsuming collagen, just meaning they’re going through, like, a whole, you know, bucket in two weeks, with this promise, this marketing promise of, “It’s is gonna make me look 10 years younger.”

 

And that’s not what will happen, right? There’s other things we need to do, like wearing sunscreen that’s safe, and things like that, that will protect our skin, and, you know, eating the right foods, so that we can do that. I like to talk about that a little sometimes because… I don’t know if you see that with women writing you and asking you, but it’s good. Collagen is great. And also, there’s a lot of marketing out there in the world.

 

Katie: Yeah. I’ve become a big fan of homemade soups and broths to get the collagen, but with protein sources from meat also in the soups, and then also the Kion aminos for, especially the leucine content being in the right range makes a big difference. And it’s such a bioavailable protein that I feel like it helps fill in those gaps, and does some of those things people are hoping collagen is gonna do, but also red light’s great for that. And also, cold exposure is great for skin, and also all these other things we’ve talked about. So, it’s multi faceted. Well, as we get close to the end of our time, a few other questions I love to ask, the first being, if there is a book or a number of books that have profoundly impacted your life, and if so, what they are and why.

 

Kristin: Yeah. My mother always says I never read. I’m like, I never read fiction because I’m always reading, like, self-help, and science, and physiology, and, like, she makes fun of me for that. But, you know, thinking long and hard about the book question is, there’s one book that just stands out. I bet someone else has said this to you in the past, but it really gave me some more internal awareness, and got me to know myself better, and that was a book called “The Artist’s Way.” And “The Artist’s Way,” it’s a beautiful opportunity. I think the other reason it’s sentimental is I lived in Argentina for a year, and there were 12 women, and we met every week for a year. Like, if one of us was traveling, we wouldn’t be able to make that week, but we were diehard. There was, like, no falloffs.

 

It was 12 women. We met every Wednesday. We would each bring some snacks, or treats, or light food to share, healthy. And we would do a chapter in this book. And then we’d do the homework. We’d go away and then we’d come talk about it. And the homeworks are just, like, taking yourself out on a date on your own, right, to a place, and, like, going and sitting somewhere and having, like, a healthy meal, or journaling, or just spending time with yourself and understanding what and who you are in the world, what you want, making your own choices, how you like your eggs, you know, all of that. And then an exercise that’s big in the book too is something called morning pages, which is, like, getting up and writing some free form about how you feel, without judgment.

 

So, it sort of separated this whole piece that gets talked about a little bit in the philosophical energetics world, which is, like, how do we take this inside voice that’s in our brain, our thoughts, our feelings, and how do we separate it from, like, the human being on a cellular level that we are enough so that we can recognize that we are not just our thoughts and feelings, right? Cause we can get caught up in that rumination so much. And so, I feel like “The Artist’s Way,” it’s a beautiful book. It’s in, like, its 22nd rendition edition now. It’s a beautiful opportunity to go through it. Written by a woman who’s really…walks you through that path slowly enough that you start to unpeel the layers of yourself, and really… Yeah. Hear your internal voice in a way that’s loving and kind.

 

Katie: I love it. I’ll make sure that’s linked in the show notes for you guys listening, at wellnessmama.fm. And also, where can people find you online, keep learning from you, and are you gonna have any more women’s events at any point that we can go to?

 

Kristin: I mean, I was pleasantly… It was beyond expectation, the women that showed up to that. I loved the size of our group, and what happened was just really magical. There’s been enough call to action that I’ll probably do one of those a year. It’s quite a bit that goes into it, as you know. People can find me really easily @warriorwomanmode on Instagram, warriorwomanmode.com. Sherpabreathandcold.com is where my instructor trainings are. If anyone is running a facility or interested in layering in breathwork and cold exposure to what they’re doing, or wanna become an instructor, I have several of those trainings around the country coming this year. And it’s a good opportunity to really learn about how we can work with the breath, and guide others, using the breath as a variable and cold as a variable.

 

And it’s easy to find me on any of those places, you know? I’m, like, constantly popping off on social, trying not to be over-opinionated, and also being opinionated. And then “WELLPOWER Podcast.” I did two seasons. It’s coming back in full force next week. And so, plenty of action there. It’s really a biohacking roadmap, and a little bit of a foray into some advice. Just advice. You know, I’m not a doctor, but I’ve got a lot of research under my belt, and a lot of years of experience, like you. So, those are the places people can find me pretty easily.

 

Katie: I will link to all of those as well. And any parting advice for the listeners today that could be related to something we’ve talked about, or entirely unrelated?

 

Kristin: I wanna hearken back to the beginning, when we first spoke about the things that women show up with. And we can do hard things, right? And then, specifically, I’ve always… You know, I’ve run a platform, “Warrior Woman Mode.” And so, men don’t always love the name, ironically enough, but women seem to, and I am a big champion for many males who I do work with in the athlete space, but I have a lot of passion around this notion that women are both equally sensitive as they are powerful, and that sometimes we do ourselves a disservice by not recognizing that we can do hard things, that we have much more capacity than we can ever even dream of, if we set ourselves and our sights on positive self-talk, which you mentioned in the beginning, on putting the very best thing that is available in our local area and with our budget in our bodies, when it comes to fueling our bodies, that we get into community with other people, that we’re sharing and actively listening to people, meaning not on the phone 24/7, and really connecting with those…maybe it’s even just a few people in our tribe, and all of those tools together… And getting some movement, right? Movement is key. Movement is life. Movement will continue to help us live long and healthy, get fresh air, get sunshine.

 

And as we wrap all of those things together, we get to recognize what our capacity really is, because I guarantee anyone who’s listening to this, no matter how successful, or famous, or in love with yourself that you are, that you have more capacity that’s hiding in there. There’s more capacity for changing the world, changing your environment, and really bolstering your communities. And so, I want that reminder to be the thing we end on, because it’s so important, right, to feel into yourself and know that you can be anything that you dream.

 

Katie: A perfect place to wrap up. Kristin, thank you so much for your time today. I’m so glad we got to reconnect here and share this conversation. Thank you.

 

Kristin: Yeah. Thank you.

 

Katie: And thanks, as always, to all of you for listening and sharing your most valuable resources, your time, your energy, and your attention with us today. We’re both so grateful that you did, and I hope that you will join me again on the next episode of the “Wellness Mama” podcast.

 

If you’re enjoying these interviews, would you please take two minutes to leave a rating or review on iTunes for me? Doing this helps more people to find the podcast, which means even more moms and families could benefit from the information. I really appreciate your time, and thanks as always for listening.