If you have hypothyroidism, Hasimoto’s, PCOS, endometriosis, IBS, Crohn’s, or other gut and hormone related issues, doing intense exercise like HIIT, bootcamps, CrossFit, spin classes, and heavy cardio is exactly opposite of how you should be supporting an already stressed the f*ck out body.
In this episode Kacey talks all about why that is and how to design a workout routine that works with your body to allow it to rebalance and heal.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and please leave a review!
If you have hypothyroidism, Hasimoto’s, PCOS, endometriosis, IBS, Crohn’s, or other gut and hormone related issues, doing intense exercise like HIIT, bootcamps, CrossFit, spin classes, and heavy cardio is exactly opposite of how you should be supporting an already stressed the f*ck out body.
In this episode Kacey talks all about why that is and how to design a workout routine that works with your body to allow it to rebalance and heal.
Remember to share this episode if this helped you today and please leave a review!
[00:10] Kacey K: Welcome to the simply healthy You Podcast. Your place for overcoming overwhelm with your health to reach your fullest potential. I'm your host, Casey Kanan. I am so pumped to have you here. I am a recovering, burnt out high achiever who is diagnosed with an autoimmune thyroid condition by my early thirty s.
[00:27] Kacey K: I didn't realize that running myself ragged.
[00:29] Kacey K: In the name of being superwoman and determined to achieve all the things in life was killing my body. I created this podcast so that you don't have to continue the struggle like I did for over a decade. I sat down, studied the data, and simplified what it means to prioritize your own health needs so that you can be the best for all the things on your to do list. Everything you hear on this podcast, I have tested and implemented in my own super packed life with my family to bring you the tips, tools and strategies that will keep your life simply healthy.
[01:06] Kacey K: Hello. Hello and welcome to another episode of Simply Healthy You. I'm your host, Casey Kane, an integrative health practitioner and certified Holistic nutritionist with a Master's in Psychology and I'm here to bring you science based conversations to help you live a healthier and happier life. This might be an unpopular opinion today, but exercise can't fix anything in an already stressed out body. I've talked about this a little bit on my Instagram recently and I thought it really deserved a full podcast episode. I've talked about hormones a lot, I've talked about stress a lot. I haven't really talked about exercise in an entire episode and kind of the role that it plays in this whole thing. Especially if you have hypothyroidism, hashimoto's, PCOS, endometriosis, IBS, crohn's, or any other gut and hormone related issues. Even if you haven't gotten one of those formal diagnoses yet, if you have any kind of gut or hormone related issues going on doing intense exercise like hit training or boot camps or CrossFit or rowing or spin classes any heavy cardio marathons, any of those things. It's actually exactly opposite of how you should be supporting an already stressed the fuck out body. So when you have these kinds of things going on your body as you know well, if you've been listening to this podcast, your body is stressed the fuck out already to add exercise on top of it, especially intense exercise like any of those things, you are really setting yourself up for failure. I mean, you're setting yourself up for a health trap there. It's a harsh truth. I know it's not popular. Many of us do enjoy exercise and or we know that it is beneficial long term for our health and so we have learned to incorporate exercise in our life. But this is a harsh truth that I have to help my clients come to terms with, many of which do not even know if they are on a path to one of these diagnoses yet. If you are still someone who has the gut symptoms that I've talked about, has the hormone symptoms that I've talked about, you might not have any sort of formal diagnosis yet. But we don't need to get to the full blown disease state to know that what we are doing is not good for our body. The conditions and the dose make the poison with exercise just like anything else. So if you think about it, when your body can't balance its hormones, right, you have painful and irregular periods, you have heavy bleeding, you have clots, you have migraines, you have mood swings, you have chronic fatigue, you have poor quality sleep, you have hot flashes, you have skin issues, you have hair issues, right? Any of those things. When it can't balance its hormones already, you start to have thyroid issues. And you're not also absorbing nutrients properly because of chronic stress, leaky gut, you've got digestive issues, you have bloating gas. These are all signs that something is not working properly in our digestive tract, which means we're not absorbing our nutrients properly, which is probably why we are also having hormone issues, right? It's all a cycle. We know it's all connected. If you don't if this happens to be the first episode that you're coming into on this podcast, please go listen to previous episodes because all of this is connected, right? So you've got chronic stress already, you've got leaky gut, you've got imbalanced hormones. Adding exercise is like squirting gasoline on an already pretty strong fire, my friend. You're going to burn out real fucking fast. This is where we see adrenal distress, right? This is where we start to see adrenal maladaptation. This is where we start to see our bodies entering the multiple of the seven stages of chronic stress. What does this look like when you're going down this path? This looks like chronic fatigue. It looks like weight gain. It looks like migraines, painful and irregular periods, hot flashes. Oh, yes. Most of the symptoms that we were already talking about, right? Poor sleep quality, skin and hair issues, brain fog, digestive issues. Then we also start to see increased blood pressure, we see increased cholesterol, high blood sugar. And that's just a few of the things that we are going to start to see elevate as we continue down this path of chronic stress. And if you do have a formal diagnosis already, you're also going to see worsening symptoms of whatever it is that you've been diagnosed with. So your PCOS is going to get worse, your Hypothyroidism is going to get worse, right? You're going to see your numbers on your labs not doing well. You will be in constant fight or flight, and there is no healing happening when you are in that state. I have had some clients who, despite not knowing exactly what their labs are doing, because I have obviously only been able to provide labs for a short period of time now at this point. So I've worked with a lot of clients who have seen success and starting to come out of fight or flight. They are starting to see that healing happening. It takes a lot of fucking work. It's not complicated, but it is hard fucking work. I say that all the time. And I think the exercise piece is something that many of them had to get in check. Many of them were thinking that more exercise was going to solve the issue of weight gain, right? What have we been told all of our fucking lives? You need to exercise five days a week, no rest days. You need to exercise all the fucking time. You need to be doing super intense workouts. I was in the beach body world for a long time, right? The workouts that they create are fucking ludicrous. You don't need to be jumping around and doing all these ridiculous moves, one, in order to get an effective workout. In fact, many of those things are not useful at all. You don't need to do crazy moves to have an effective workout. And many of those moves are not actually going to be strengthening muscles that you are using in your everyday life. Like if you're doing a grocery carry and you're trying to get as many fucking bags on your arms as possible. So you only have to take one trip from the car to the house. I know you do it. When I used to go to the grocery store, I don't go to the grocery store anymore. I get everything delivered. When used to go to the grocery store, that's what I would be fucking doing. Of course, when you're doing that, do you think a jumping burpee is going to help you be better at carrying groceries from your car to your house? Absolutely fucking not. You know what is some good old fashioned bicep curls, some push ups, right? Some back exercises, some core exercises so that you can have a strong upper body, strong legs, do some squats, right? That's what's going to help you get those groceries from the car. That's what's going to help you lift that 50 pound bag of dog food that you're carrying around, right? Like when you're carrying your kids around 30 pounds each or even more. That fucking burpees aren't going to help you with that. They're just jacking your heart rate up and making you feel like you're doing a lot. You feel like you're doing a lot because you're sweating a lot, right? All that a lot of that does is increase your heart rate. And yeah, sure, you're burning some calories while you're doing it. But when we're talking about overall health and longevity and we're talking about overall vitality and being able to live your life with higher functioning, right now, that's not doing it. That's not strengthening your muscles. And what it is actually doing is increasing your cortisol levels. Exercise always does this, by the way. This is not just when you're stressed out, but that's the purpose of exercise, to increase your Cortisol levels a little bit, increase your adrenaline a little bit. That is a normal response in an otherwise healthy body. We get that increase, we get that adrenaline going, the endorphins are going and that signals the body to release excess sugar into our blood and sometimes a little bit of excess fat that helps us burn off some of that glucose that maybe we are holding onto. All a normal process that's supposed to happen. What is supposed to happen afterwards is our body comes down, our muscles repair. It puts that energy into our muscles. We get stronger, we have better overall health, better cardiovascular health, right? All those things. So that's the normal process. But when you are in an already stressed out body, your Cortisol is likely already too elevated. You probably are starting to experience an increased permanent blood sugar level, a permanent blood cholesterol level, because you're not burning those things fast enough. Your body is in constant fight or flight and you're not actually using it, right? This is what happens when we have chronic stress, when we worry about something all the time. You may be sitting at your desk and your body is in chronic stress. It's in fight or flight. Your body thinks, and I've talked about this many times before, so please go back to the other episodes, previous episodes about hormones. Your body thinks you are about to fight off a fucking bear or that you are living through a famine, right? So it is doing what it needs to do to keep you alive. At that moment. When you don't burn off that blood sugar that it pumps through that sugar that it pumps through your blood, when you don't burn off those lipids that it starts pumping through your blood, now you start to see permanent, long term, chronic issues that we have going on, right? That's where we start to see this happening. So if you are exercising now, when all of that is already going on in your body, well, now you're elevating those levels even more. And yes, you may feel good after you exercise. I was talking with a client yesterday, a 60 day client who we've been talking about her exercise. Her stress levels are very high. It's very clear from her symptoms. We haven't even done her hair tissue mineral analysis yet. And it's very clear from her symptoms that her body is stressed the fuck out. She's had a history of trauma and anxiety and depression already, like a lot of things going on with her and she knows this. But exercise does make her feel good afterwards. So she thinks that she's doing something positive. You are still going to get that rush of adrenaline for a while until you hit full blown adrenal exhaustion, which is what we are trying to avoid. My friend. We do not want to keep pushing ourselves to that point. But she feels good after. She feels like she has more energy. Of course, because that adrenaline is kicking in. And when your Cortisol and melatonin are already so messed up and messing up your sleep and everything else, that adrenaline is a nice rush. It's a nice feeling to have energy for at least a couple of hours of your day. After that exercise. So I get it. But it's actually worsening your symptoms, right? It's actually worsening the whole thing for you. Now, this doesn't mean that you can't exercise at all. And this is what we work on a lot inside of Simply Healthy Academy where we actually have a strength and conditioning coach. And it was the purpose of me bringing her in, I think, over a year ago now, to the program to help clients design programs, exercise programs that are going to be a fit for their current stage of their healing journey. I know that this drove me nuts when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto's and was given little direction at all on what to do as far as diet or lifestyle factors go. They wrote me the prescription for my synthetic thyroid medication. Here you go, on your way. And I had always used exercise as a stress reliever. I am one who loves lifting. I love lifting heavy, I love lifting hard, I love having muscle on my body. And we do need exercise for optimal health, whether you enjoy it or not. Daily movement is absolutely something that we need if we are trying to live our most vital life and have a full long life. We know this. We do need exercise. So what do we do? What can we do if we know we are in this stage of healing where our body is very stressed out, our body is very taxed? What do we do to keep our daily movement in? Well, for some time it may just be going for walks, right? And that is where a lot of my clients start, is learning to find places in your life where you are getting movement right. Cleaning your house, that counts. Playing with your kids, that counts. If you're not sitting on your butt, movement still counts as movement, right? We don't think about that much of the time. Now, a lot of us might have desk jobs even if we are working from home. But the beautiful thing is you can get up from your desk, you can go walk around the building, you can do some flights of stairs, you can walk around your house if you have two stories. You can do walks up and down your stairs a few times. You can carry your kids up and down the stairs a few times. That counts as movement. And movement in a way that is gentle and movement in a way that still keeps your muscles going, still keeps your joints moving to eliminate that joint pain and stiffness that we end up getting when we are too sedentary. And that counts. All of that counts. That is often where a lot of our clients have to start when they are in a stressed out body. After that, we help clients figure out where they can start to push more. So what I learned through my journey is what I could do to support my body and get my movement in in more than just walking. Yoga is a great one that can be much more gentle on the body. Pilates lighter versions of it can be very gentle on the body. I also learned how to work with my cycle for times when my hormones would be more receptive to pushing a little harder. When you are already in that stress stage and your hormones are affected. Because cortisol is affected, right? Cortisol is our stress hormone, but cortisol also affects our reproductive hormones. And again, go back to previous episodes for the full breakdown on this because here I'm really just talking about exercise so we know that our hormones are affected when we are stressed out. So I learned to work with my reproductive cycle. If you are someone who is still in your reproductive years, working with your cycle allows you to understand and learn when you can push a little bit harder, when you can lift a little bit heavier, when you can run a little bit harder faster. And the other thing that we do a lot with our clients, so we work with their cycle on this. We start slow with things like walking and just regular daily movement, regular life movement. Then we start to build in strength training because it is important as women that we be lifting weights, especially if you are getting close to menopause age or if you are post menopause, you need to be lifting weights regularly. So we learn to work with our cycle and then we learn when we can push a little bit harder. We also take a lot of rest time between sets or exercises to make sure that we are not raising cortisol levels to detrimental levels. So this looks like if you're in your follicular phase of your cycle, so between your period and ovulation, this is a perfect time for you to be pushing a little bit harder because your hormones are going to be more receptive to that. They're going to be working with you and helping you get more energized as you're gearing up for ovulation. So this may look like strength training, but making sure that you are lifting weights, that you can only do six to eight reps max, like you are going heavy here, heavier than you probably ever have before. Because most exercise programs are not designed thoughtfully with women's hormones. And so they're going to tell you do ten reps of a ten pound weight or something like that. So you're really pushing hard here six to eight reps max and you are gassed out and then you are taking a two minute break. Now, what are you doing during that two minutes? Because a lot of my clients are like, well, this is one going to take a long time. It doesn't have to, we don't have to do that many sets, we don't have to do that many exercises because it is going to take a little bit of a longer time taking those breaks in there. So you can still stick to 30 minutes and build up over time as you heal. That's the beauty of this. We get better and better as time goes on if we are doing things properly and supporting our body properly. So during the two minutes of exercise, I'm currently following this program right now because I am still in my healing phase. So I'm taking two minutes rest in between and I'm doing a lot of stretching, I'm doing a lot of mobility work, I have a lot of tight muscles still. I have pelvic floor issues I've talked about many times. I've shared that journey, especially after having two kids. That seems to be where I hold a lot of my tension and stress. And so I'm doing stretching and mobility work in between and it actually works out great. It helps a lot. I get a lot of stretching in that I wouldn't otherwise get in. And so you take that break and then you do your next exercise. Now you could repeat that move if you're doing bicep curls. You could do two to three sets of bicep curls with your two minute breaks in between or you could do a bicep curl, you could do a row, you could do more of a total body and just change movements each time with your two minutes in between. There are a lot of different ways that you can do this. A lot of different ways to be flexible and focusing on the basic movements and doing the basic movements properly while taking the rest in between is a way that you can still achieve your exercise goals, get your daily movement in while also making sure that you are not stressing out your body. It is possible. And this again is one of the many things that we help our clients do and navigate in Simply Healthy Academy where again we have Coach Kelsey who is our strength and conditioning coach. Her and I have worked very closely every single round that we have been working together to make sure that our recommendations are in alignment based on our client's health status. So she is always checking with me on how someone is doing on their healing journey and how they are working on rebalancing and whether or not it's time for them to take that next stage. So a lot of the times in the beginning, like I said, they'll be doing a lot of walking, a lot of just regular life movement things and counting them as their exercise, because, again, it counts. You're moving around, you're using your muscles, you're using your joints. And then about halfway through the program, her and I check in again to say, okay, where are these people? Are we going to start moving them up to kind of the next level of their exercise plan? What is that going to look like? What would you recommend? And then Kelsey designs it for them. I don't do the exercise design part. I just simply tell her kind of where someone is at in their healing. It is really one of the beautiful things about our Simply Healthy Academy team and our customized approach to our clients. Even though it's a group coaching program, everybody gets something slightly different. Like, yes, there's a lot of overlap because we have a lot of women who are in a similar stressed out state for different reasons, but similar stressed out state in their body. And so it really is one of the beautiful things about this program and what we've been able to do and how much we've been able to personalize and customize within a group coaching program. I mean, again, I love this, and I will brag about this program every opportunity that I get because you need to be in it. You'll never find something like this on the market. There is absolutely nothing else out there on the market like this program and how we treat our clients holistically and personally. At the end of the day, you cannot out exercise your health issues, but we can show you how to exercise and heal your gut and your hormones. It is a delicate balance, and we do do it all in Simply Healthy Academy. I really want to caution you, if you are someone who is exercising with health issues, to really be careful about what you are doing. Because you are likely, while it might not feel like it right now, you are likely depleting yourself faster and faster every time you exercise if you are not doing it in a way that is conjunction with what is going on in your body already. So Simply Healthy Academy is always open enrollment, so click the link below this episode in the Show Notes to check out the website with all the details and submit an application today to get the best price. Groups always start in May and November every year and run for 20 weeks, so the sooner you get enrolled, the more extended we can make your payment plan as well if you need that. There's no additional fees for that. We offer it all the time. So if you need an extended payment plan, that is an option for you, as well as an early bird discount, depending on when it is that you were enrolling for the upcoming round. If you have questions, I always offer free 30 minutes zoom consults as well. So happy to chat with you more about your specific situation and whether or not Simply Healthy Academy would be a good fit for you. Spoiler alert it is. I help everyone. So every woman with everything. Because you probably aren't the unicorn that you feel that you are. We often feel very isolated in our health issues, but it's probably not the case. I've probably worked with many clients like you before. So anyway, thank you for joining me on this episode of Simply Healthy You. I hope that this has helped to inform you on how you can incorporate exercise into your life, no matter where you are on your healing journey right now. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe to this podcast and leave a review. I greatly appreciate your support. As always, stay curious, stay healthy, and until next time, take care.
[21:03] Kacey K: Thank you so much for listening to the Simply Healthy You podcast. If these episodes are resonating with you, go ahead and click that subscribe button and leave a review with all the great nuggets that you're taking away from today's episode episode. I promise you, I read every single one of them, as your feedback is really valuable to me in creating future episodes. As your host, I look forward to having you join me for the next episode. But in the meantime, remember, keep it simple and eat more plants.