3 Reasons Walking Is Queen & How To Do It Correctly – with Dr. Mindy

Dr. Mindy  

On this episode of The Resetter Podcast, I am so excited to talk with you all about literally, my new favorite exercise, and this is coming from an ex athlete, so I want to dive into three reasons why you should bring walking into your life, especially if you’re looking to lose weight, and it’s it’s one of those exercises that I really think we don’t give enough credit to. And I will tell you again, as an ex athlete, my background is I was a competitive tennis player. And if you had told my 20 year old self that my 55 year old self would be singing the praises of walking, I’m pretty sure my 20 year old self would have rolled her eyes and laughed and said, I’ve become a wimp. But as you’ll learn in this video, or if you’re listening to this on the resetter podcast, what you’re gonna learn is why walking is your is a major, I mean, Major, fat loss tool, and we can all do it. And then what’s really cool is I’m doing something new, where at the end of this episode, I’m answering five very common questions that we are getting sent into us so and one of them may be yours, so stay tuned all the way through while I answer these five questions. And if you have a question, send it in to us. Find me on YouTube, and we leave a comment, leave a question, and we’ll make sure that I answer it on future episodes. So here you go. Hope it helps. Welcome to the Resetter Podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again, if you have a passion for learning, if you’re looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you.

Dr. Mindy  

So first, I want to give you a big picture on this. So the first thing to remember is what chemical reaction is happening in our bodies when we walk and as I go through the three major reasons why you want to incorporate rock walking, I will bring in the research for those of you that are the research hounds out there, but I want to start with this conceptual idea. So when we go walking, there are two things that are happening. The first is what we call bilateral stimulation. So you’re doing right foot, left foot, right foot, left foot. That bilateral stimulation is calming to the brain, so much so that walking alone will bring cortisol levels down. Now those of you who have read my books and watched some of my videos, or been listening to my podcast for years. You know, a principle called the hormonal hierarchy, and the hormonal hierarchy says that at the bottom of the hormone chain is our sex hormones, and I’d probably put thyroid hormone too. So it’s estrogen, progesterone and testosterone and our thyroid hormones, and above that, the things that will influence those hormones the month the most are insulin. So if you’re insulin resistant, you’re going to have an imbalance in those hormones. But then above insulin is cortisol. So those of you that have been trying to lose weight, and you’re getting nowhere. It literally could be too much cortisol in your system. So you’re dieting, right? You’re excess exercising, right? You’re doing all the right things, but stress is so high that cortisol, your body’s just saturated with cortisol, which makes you more insulin resistant, and then above cortisol is oxytocin. So when it comes to walking, because you’re moving forward and you have this bilateral stimulation, you are literally sending a signal to your brain, telling your brain to turn off the cortisol spigot, turn off the faucet of cortisol, we are moving away from the stress. So let’s put this in context. Let’s say you’re having a day at work, and all of a sudden something hits you, and you’re like, super stressed out, and something goes wrong at work. And so the best thing you can do is to get up out of your chair and go for a walk if you can’t, if you’re in a building and you can’t get outside, then just walk around the floor like the we should be training our bodies that every time a big influx of cortisol hits us, we go walk quite. Cortisol is the one hormone that has is built to make you move. It goes back to the primal days when there was a stressor. Usually it was because an animal was chasing us. So we always say it’s the tiger chasing us. So if the tiger is chasing you, the worst thing you can do for stress is sit there, because the body’s like, wait a second, we’re under siege here, and you’re not moving. So let me make more cortisol. So this is why we don’t mix longer fasts with longer exercise with stressful periods, because stress upon stress, upon stress makes us insulin resistant. So walking is the absolute fastest way to tell your brain, I hear you. It just got stressful. I’m moving away from the stressor. So I can. I’ll share with you that I’ve shared this with my reset Academy, that during the pandemic, I still have my clinic open. I loved my patients, I loved my staff, and the minute I got word that we might have to shut down, it was incredibly stressful. Now, as many of us learned over over that first, you know, the first couple months is that essential health care was allowed to be open. So I went from this place of being really stressed to being like, okay, I can my clinic can be open, but it’s going to operate in a very different way. We literally, the whole building I was in got shut down. It was locked so I had to hire a new person to sit in my clinic and just go down and let patients in to from the front door. They would have to text us when they got there. I would hire the new person. I hired had to go down and and let the person in. And then we had to rearrange our whole office so that nobody was in contact. We had to rearrange our whole schedule. It was a big deal. And at the same time, as a business owner, I was like, I need to make sure my staff gets paid. I had a stat. One of my staff members was a single mom. I had some staff had been working with me for a very long time, like their payroll was a lot more of a concern for me than anything else. So I was under a tremendous amount of stress. And as many of you experienced during the pandemic, there, it was like stress. We didn’t know what to do with we didn’t know how long it was going to be. We didn’t know where, where this this, this new plot twist of life, like where this was going to go, so I didn’t know how to soothe myself. So one day, amongst all the stressful moments, I started walking, I started realizing the minute my brains spun out of control, I would go for a walk, and one walk literally turned in to about five walks a day,

Dr. Mindy  

and they weren’t long. They were like 10 minutes, five minutes, 20 minutes, hour. I just walked until my brain calmed down, and then I would go back in. And do you know what happened in that time period is that I was in the best shape of my life. Well, everybody was gaining weight during the pandemic. Pandemic, I wasn’t because I was walking so much. So walking is an incredible way to bring those cortisol levels down and like, let your body sink into a rhythm that feels comfortable. So when we look at these three reasons we have to understand that walking is incredible. For the first piece of research I’m going to bring to your attention, which is when you have a normal regime of walking, and we’ll talk about walking protocols here in a moment you research shows that you have sustainable long term weight loss. So a lot of people go on crash diets. They do like, an intense fast or they do a six day a week workout where they’re like, absolutely double down on their workout. But really successful weight loss comes from the small little habits we do over and over and over again, and walking is one of them. It’s such a powerful tool that actually, the Journal of Nutrition found that walking just for 20 minutes a day for 12 weeks, cause people to lose a half a pound every week versus people who didn’t walk. We also have some really cool studies that many of you have heard, like the American Journal of Health Promotion and the American Heart Association came out many years ago, that they found that if you walk, did 10,000 steps a day, that remember when 10,000 steps a day was a thing? Where did that go? I. Like it was a trend, and then we stopped talking about it. But this study that was published in the American Journal of Health Promotion found that 10 step 1000 steps a day for six months on average, when the participants walked 4000 steps, or one mile a day, so they didn’t even do the 10,000 so that they still lost a half a pound a week, and they kept it off. So imagine if they had done the 10,000 not 4000 that they would what would have happened for weight loss. And the reason is because you are lowering cortisol. So it’s not just because you’re moving. It’s not just the action and the calorie output of this experience is because you’re lowering cortisol levels and you’re making yourself more insulin sensitive. In fact, there are some people that believe that if you walked 20 minutes a day for the next year, you’d lose around 25 pounds based off those statistics that I just read to you, those studies. Think about that. Think about that 20 minutes a day. Are you willing to do something 20 minutes a day for a year to lose 25 pounds? So this is what I mean when you look at the at the neuro chemical reaction that happens when you walk, when you look at the ritual and doing it on a regular basis like this is what happens. So second reason, what why you want to walk is that it prevents metabolic slowdown. So a lot of people are believing that when we are get start to age that we our metabolism slows down. Now I hope you all that have been following me know that I’m a big believer that really we need to work with metabolic switching and the two parts of of met of our metabolism to prevent that slowdown. So knowing what to eat and when to eat and building a fasting lifestyle really important for that metabolic slowdown, because it’s not like it’s the bot the that your body doesn’t become inefficient with its metabolism as you age. It’s just that you become less glucose sensitive as you age, and so you have extra glucose that gets stored in your fat. Now what’s interesting about this study I’m going to tell you, is that they have noticed in research that when people start to lose weight, that they start moving less. And it’s not just walking that they move less. They’re actually moving less in their day to day movements, and specifically and when they call the non exercise activity thermo Genesis. It’s called neat. Now, thermogenesis is just another fancy term for your metabolism. So as you are moving or as you’re sitting throughout your day, like fidgeting, moving around in different positions, those of you that toss and turn at night while you sleep, you’re actually helping your metabolism in these small little movements. So like right now, I like to talk with my hands. So I just thinking about this, I’m like, Oh, I’m I’m getting some metabolo. I’m giving my metabolism some help, because I’m moving around talking with my hands, or like, I know when I speak from stage, I don’t just stand in one position. I pace. Or if you ever see me after, you know, if you could see what my feet are doing as I’m doing a podcast, I actually tap my feet like I’m walking right, left, right, left. I do those fidgeting positions. If you listened to the podcast that I did with Katie Bowman about the movement diet, she points this out that we have become so obsessed with exercise and we forget that it is our movements throughout the day that can keep us in shape. But here’s what’s interesting, is that the American Journal of regulatory integrative and comparative physiology, this is a 2011 study, they found that as people start to drop weight, they naturally move a lot less throughout the day. Now I think there has to be some kind of evolutionary point to this. I think that the body is always bringing itself into homeostasis. So is it possible that as your metabolic health starts to improve, that the little behaviors your body does to speed up its metabolism that it doesn’t find those necessary anymore, these little, neat movements that we’re fidgeting and moving with our hands, maybe, as we are improving metabolism, we become let more sedentary, and we’re not doing these behaviors that were speed. Up naturally, speeding up our metabolism. So how many of you have said to me, God, I’ve heard this all the time, where people say I was doing really great with fasting, then I got stuck. My new response, based off of this research, is going to be, are you walking? Are you fidgeting? Are you moving? These movements matter. So if you’re stuck, it might not be that you got to hire a trainer and start to get fit. It might not be that you’ve got to do anything extra special then move your body and bring back these neat exercises, these neat movements, like fidgeting, shifting positions while sleeping, walking, even spontaneous muscle contraction, like as I’ve I’m reading this, I find myself wanting to contract my my thigh muscle, all of that matters for weight loss and metabolism. Pretty cool, right? Like this doesn’t have to be then weight loss doesn’t have to be like a major event. It has to be a lot of great minor events put together to create a major impact on your body’s ability to drop fat. Now there was a hallmark study done in 1988 in the Journal of metabolism. Now it’s long time ago, but it’s really worth pointing out that people who lose weight burn 18 to 25% less energy daily due to a decrease in these neat exercises. So it’s like the body’s way of balancing itself. So if you are on this path of weight loss and you don’t want to get stuck, come back to something as simple as walking, come back to something as simple as fidgeting. I’m a huge fidgeter, so I’m, I’m a big fan of this, or just moving like Katie Bowman, you know, express like, just start moving around like she was. She gave some incredible insight. Like that is one of the my favorite podcasts that I did this year on the resetter podcast. Because, you know, we think again that we’ve got to do these big things to stay fit. And what she showed is something as we age, as simple as like chopping your vegetables or whisking food, like something as simple as that can actually improve your overall anti age. I call it pro like a pro aging toolbox. It can help with pro aging. It can help with the decline that happens with aging. So again, we don’t want to take this out the walking out of the equation. Okay. Third thing that we know about walking is that it helps. It has a lot of other health benefits. So we already talked about the fact that it calms cortisol. Well, when you calm cortisol, guess what else you get? The Journal of Alzheimer’s research and therapy found you get better memory. You get a D key decreased risk of cognitive decline, especially, especially especially in post menopausal women,

Dr. Mindy  

and it’s all built around this neuro plastic change that happens when cortisol is out of your system. We also know that walking, this was a 2021 meta analysis showed that walking 20 minutes a day, again, significantly reduced blood pressure and lowered the risk of hypertension. We have seen studies that show it decreases heart rate, your heart disease risk. We know it stabilizes your blood sugar and that it’s been really recommended to people with type two diabetes, and all it takes is 20 minutes a day. We are not talking about large amounts. Now I will tell you, if you have a competitive, athletic brain like mine, one of the things that I’ve noticed as I’ve moved into my post menopausal years is that the harder I work out, the more I get injured. And I don’t want to be injured. I watched my mom have two hip replacements. I don’t want that. So I love to run. I that has always been my I call it my drug of choice. But as I’ve moved into my post menopausal years, in order to prevent a any destruction to my joints, I have stopped running, and when I first started doing this, I felt really hyper, critical of myself. I was like, well, look at you, like, Isn’t that fascinating? You were like, walking now. And then I realized, you know what, I’m going to call it my forward movement exercise, because it’s moving forward that calms the brain, that brings cortisol down, that makes me more insulin sensitive, that will balance my hormones and balance my balance my sex hormones and balance my thyroid hormones. Now if I do this forward movement in nature, I get the added benefit of nature, bringing this down, bringing cortisol down. So. I started going to friends, and I’m like, Hey, instead of us meeting, you know, at Ladies Night Out, instead of us meeting for a cup of coffee, can we go walk together? Because then I was like, oh my god, this is brilliant, because I’m walking in nature with a friend, lowering cortisol and I’m increasing oxytocin, because I’m now in connection with somebody. If you understand the neuro chemical upside of something as simple as walking, you will never look at it as a silly tool again, and you will see that is one of the most perfect exercises for us as we age. Now I have something I’ve been training I’m going to add, add this to the list of things to talk about on walking is that I’ve been really talking to my reset Academy about weighted vests and how important these weighted vests are, because when you put a weight, it’s called wrecking and when you put a weighted vest on you, that extra weight lowers cortisol too. This is why the weighted blanket works, that weighted part on your body calms you down. So now you’re with a friend with a vest on. Your nervous system is calming. Cortisol is coming down. You’re getting more insulin sensitive, your hormones are balancing, and you’re massively in flexing oxytocin into your body and into your friend’s body, because you’re doing it in community. When you start to unpack this, you start to see real clearly how incredible and walking is and how we can trick out walking. We can do walking from lots of angles. An interesting study I just found on rucking with these weighted vests on from it was a study that was done on post menopausal women that they’re even showing that that added weight forces the muscle the bones to be stronger, and you put calcium and keeps calcium and phosphorus within the bones. So again, I hope you see that this is the greatest gift you can give yourself. And I really want you to be in love with the aging process. I want you to be in love with the losing weight process. This the losing weight does not need to be torture. It can be fun. And the fasting lifestyle gives you a quick access there, and the walking with a vest on weighted vest with a friend, now we’ve amplified the fun, and you’re getting an incredible result. So there are my three major things, steps on why you want to walk what I do want to do now is switch gears and go into listeners questions. So this is something new that I’m doing on both my podcast and my YouTube channel. I’m answering your question. So I have a team of people that are scouring socials for your questions. So depending on where you are listening to this or consuming this information right now, if you have a question for me, leave it in there so that my team grabs it and I answer it in this format. So here’s the first question, if your blood it’s a blood sugar question, what is normal and why is it high while fasting? Okay, I’m going to give you American numbers. I apologize for the we will leave in the notes of wherever you’re watching. This the conversion. But a normal fasted glucose, which is blood sugar is somewhere between 70 to 90 nanograms per deciliter. So you want to wake up in the morning between 70 and 90 when you eat, you will see your blood sugar spike. It that spike should come down within 90 minutes of eating, it should come down to its pre glucose number. So if it’s coming down to the pre meal number, then you are, you and you’re waking up consistently between 70 and 90. We’re in good shape. We are in a very good fasted blood you know, blood sugar, health, the other number I profitize all the time is hemoglobin a 1c and how important you look at hemoglobin a one, see that your that your doctor does, and that it’s five. Now, with that intact, let’s talk about what we see when we fast, when you fast, your blood sugar should come down. If your blood sugar is not coming down, then it could be a couple of things. It could be your metabolic switch is a little rusty. It could be that you have a lot of stored glucose that your body is dumping, which is really good, and or it can be that you’re under stress, like, I’ve had continuous glucose monitors on and I’ve watched, like, you know, my blood sugar spike from a stressful reaction. So if it’s high while you’re fasting, it’s probably either coming from a cortisol spike, because there’s you, there’s a bunch of stress in your life. And that added stress of the fast has increased it so much the body is pulling pushing glucose out into the system, or the body is actually naturally doing it to get rid of stored sugar. An interesting fact that I haven’t taught in a while is that as glucose becomes mismanaged in your body, the first place that your brilliant body will put it is in around, you know, in the cells, you’ll try to drive it into the cells so that it can be used for energy. The second place is then, if, once the cells are flooded, it will put put it into the liver. The liver is a storage place for extra glucose. The next place it’ll put it is in muscles, because it knows that you need, you need glucose in muscles so that you can run from a tiger when you’re under stress. This is why walking releases that glucose stored in those muscles, and then the last place it puts it is in fat. So it’s like, you know, these places become like the pantry closet for extra glucose. So when you go into fasting, what your brilliant body does is it starts to release all these stored these stored sugar, all the stored sugar. So again, tying into why you would go walk during a fast. If it’s high and you want to bring it down and you’re fasting, go for a walk. Okay. Then number two, why does my glucose go very low during an extended fast. So a lot of people what, you know, I’ve been learning, and just teaching so many people fasting, I’ve learned that a lot of you are fasting too much. A lot of you are exercising fasting too much. And so in if your body’s been going at it for too long, sometimes it just, it’ll keep that blood sugar too low. So it could be too much of a good thing. The other thing that we’ve seen is, in my community, is that sometimes the mitochondria can be sick, and just like the mighty a sick mitochondria causes high blood sugar, it can also cause, or, you know, can cause, yeah, high blood sugar. It could also cause low blood sugar as well. So make sure you’re not fasting too much, make sure you’re not exercising too much, make sure you’re not stressing too much. If that’s not even an issue for the person that answer asks this question, then what I would say is make sure that you are going into shorter fast, because it’s going low. So we don’t want it to go too low. So just don’t go into maybe these longer fasts. Right now is too much stress on the body, so let’s be mindful of what the body wants. And in my book, too low is in the 50s. When you get it down into the 50s, and it’s going there pretty consistently, you need to think about, you need to break the fast. Think about the length of the fast. Super important. Okay, then number three, why does exercise spike my glucose? So it’s the same thing I mentioned before, where all of a sudden you’ve got this situation where you’re running, you’re exercising, you’re running from a tiger. And so what the bot the body is doing is it is trying to release all that stored sugar into the your system so that you can run that’s all it’s doing, is that and protein spiking your glucose. So, so that’s interesting. That will change the more metabolically healthy you get. I The when I put on my first CGM years ago, I started to notice that protein really spiked my blood sugar. And then I tell you now, when I am eating protein, I have a CGM on it lowers my blood sugar. So you become more efficient the longer you do metabolic flexibility at at taking the influx of protein, the glucose influx of protein, and your cells get more used to using it. Okay? Question number four is, if I can’t get my glucose under 100 in the morning, what should I do? So this is really a question of, how do you get your glucose down? So a couple of things. One, there is something I haven’t talked about recently that is worth talking about in this video, and it’s called the dawn effect. So some of you will consistently wake up in the morning and you will see that your blood sugar’s high, and it’s high because your body is pushing out all the stored sugar at night because it needed glucose in the system to be able to nourish your brain. So a lot of people have the dawn effect. Will Tell me, like, I went to bed and my glucose was like, like 120

Dr. Mindy  

and I woke up and my glucose was still 120 or it was 130 during the night, you may have dumped some glucose into into the system. So in that case, then what we want to do is a real simple hack, and it’s called the honey hacked you’re going to take a little bit of raw honey and you’re just going to put just a teaspoon, put it in your mouth so that at night, your blood sugar doesn’t dip too low, forcing your body to release stored sugar. So try that. See if the morning number changes. If the morning number changes, then yes, you had the DoT effect. That was exactly what that is. If the morning thing number doesn’t change, then the next thing would be that you just need to go into some longer fasts, because the longer fasts will help you ring out all the stored sugar. So try a 3648 or 72 hour fast, and then go back to some of the shorter fast and see if your morning glucose changes. Then the third thing is, it might be the dinner you’re eating. Make sure it’s not a high carbohydrate dinner, because if it’s high carbohydrate dinner, you’ve got all that glucose in your body. And what can end up happening is it could end up like just swimming around in your bloodstream, and it didn’t have enough time to be able to get it down into under that 100. So there you go. That’s my thoughts on the morning glucose. Okay. Number five is, how should I be exercising as it relates to each phase in fast like a girl. Okay, here is the fast like a girl exercise fasting cycle. We could call it the exercise cycle. Day one of your period is the day you start to bleed, like full on blood. You need feminine care products. From day one to day 10 is what I call the power phase one, and your body during that time wants to be insulin sensitive. You’re building estrogen. This is a great time to push your workouts. Now, many women tell me, I can’t I don’t want to push my workout. The first couple of days I bleed. I get that. I understand that. So maybe day two, you start to push your workouts. So a harder intensity, more what we call zone three and zone four exercise. You want to be out of breath. You want to be pushing your cardiovascular system those first 10 days. Now you can do other things. You can still weight lift. You can still apply metrics. Are great in power, phase one, hit training, great in power. Phase one, once you get into the manifestation phase, which is day 11 to day 15, what you’re doing there is you’ve got estrogen at her peak, you’ve got the most amount of testosterone you’ll ever have, and you have a little bit of progesterone. So when estrogen is at her peak, your ligaments are going to be very to really flexible and and easy to tear, especially ligaments that are attached to bone. So during ovulation, which is, you know, like your leg muscles, your shoulder muscles. During ovulation, it is really important that you don’t do quick movements. So high estrogen means high injury capabilities. So let’s avoid the hit training. Let’s avoid the Plyometrics, but you have all that testosterone during this ovulation manifestation phase. So why don’t you lift heavy weights, less reps. I did an incredible interview with Dr Stacy Sims on exercise and women. You can it’s on my reset or podcast. You can go listen to that, and we go through all different types of exercise. And she’s a big fan of low reps, heavy, heavy weights for females, especially perimenopause and menopausal women, so that she does, she believes, less than eight reps, so in the max weight you can do to build muscle. So that’s manifestation phase. Then you come out of manifestation and you can go walking during that time. But I would walk, and I would lift heavy weights, then you come out of manifestation phase, and you have a five day window where you can actually ramp that up, and you could go back to hit training. You go back to plyometrics. You can run a marathon from day 16 to day 19. You have lower hormones, really push your workouts. And then starting day 20, you need to think about recovery. So 20 until you bleed is your recovery phase. This is where we go into yoga. This is where we go into Pilates. This is where we go into walking and hiking. We you can still lift weights. They just don’t make you’re not pushing yourself, because whenever cortisol goes high, progesterone is shy, and you’re trying to make progesterone that week before your cycle, so and then once you bleed, it starts all over again. So I’m a big believer that workouts for Psych for women who have menstrual cycles should be done in a monthly format. So there you go. Okay, let me know if you love this new format where I am answering questions. It’s been fun for me, and if you have questions, please leave it in wherever you’re consuming this video. Leave me a question, and I will make sure I answer it. You might even put a little note. I’m going to give you a little trick. You might even put a note that says, please answer this on your pod, your we call them soul. Solo episodes. What I’m doing right now is a solo episode, so just put on there. Please, please answer my question in your solo episode, it’ll get a lot of extra special attention. So okay, as always, I hope that helps. Thank you so much for joining me in today’s episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we’d love to know about it, so please leave us a review. Share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is. You.