Rediscovering Fitness: Shame, Grief & Learning to Love Your Body with Dr. Diana Hill

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

On this episode of The Resetter Podcast, I am bringing you Dr. Diana Hill. So Dr Diana is the author of a new book called I know I should exercise, but there’s like, dot, dot, dot, 44 reasons we don’t move and how to get over them. Phenomenal title, right? And why I wanted to bring her to you all is a she has co authored this book with Katie Bowman. And so many of you loved the interview I did with Katie. We’ll leave a link here to that. But what these two women are out to do, which is really beautiful is help us go get back into a positive relationship with movement. And what’s so beautiful is that Katie is a movement expert and Diana is a clinical psychologist. So a little bit of a background on Diana, and then I want to tell you what you’re about to hear. She is an international trainer and a leading expert on Acceptance and Commitment Therapy and compassion. She hosts a podcast called The wise effort podcast, and she’s authored four books, including the self compassion daily journal. So that gives you a little bit of an idea of the lens in which you’re going to hear this conversation, and really, what we go through is, how do you love exercising? And what does that look like? Then we dive into, what do you do when you’re out moving your body and you’re like, I hate this, I hate this, and every cell inside of you wants to stop. We had talked about that. We then go into the psychological hurdles. And of course, they have 44 hurdles in their book, but we went through some really important ones, like, what happens when we’re grieving our younger bodies, and what happens if we have a lot of shame about our body and how about our identity? A lot of us were athletes when we were younger, and we’re no longer athletes, or a lot of us were identified as somebody who was thin, and now we have extra weight, and how do we handle those changes in identity? So I love this conversation, because it’s looking at Exercise and Movement from a completely different lens. So if you are really struggling to find your rhythm with Exercise and Movement, I hope you find peace here. I hope you find some insight. But most of all, I never ever want you to give up on yourself. I believe we all have a unique way in which we want to move our body, and I’m hoping that this conversation will hit you in a place that helps you understand your perfect path towards movement. Dr Diana Hill, I know I should exercise, but is the name of her book. And enjoy. 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.

So let me just start off by welcoming you to my resetter podcast. Exercise is a topic I cannot talk about enough. I absolutely love this topic, and you bring such a really cool new part of this conversation. So let me just start off by saying, welcome. Well,

Dr. Diana Hill  

thank you. And I think some people love the topic, but they hate the topic. It’s like, yeah, exercise is the topic. I don’t want you to bring up with me. So maybe we have people that are on both sides of the fence here. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

It’s funny you say that because, you know, I, as a young, the younger version of me, like, needed to move my body all the time. And then when I went through perimenopause, it was the first time my brain was like, You need to go move your body. And then my body was like, No, there’s nothing in here right now that wants to exercise. And so somewhere in my mid 40s was the first time I really had a realization that it’s it’s hard when your brain says no, and you know you’re supposed to exercise, but nothing in you wants to so can we? Can we start with what do you think the biggest hurdle is to people’s mindset when it comes to exercise, oh,

Dr. Diana Hill  

it’s hard to land on one. I mean, I think there’s hurdles around exactly what you’re talking about in terms of the physiology of it, right? We’re getting over the hurdle of inertia, and it’s kind of nuanced sometimes. Yes, we do need to listen to our body and and pull back and rest and do maybe it’s not exercise that your body is craving, but it’s movement, and those are two different things, right? So or or exercise is one component of a moving body. Maybe you need a slow walk outside that’s not exercise, but is getting your body connected to nature, connected back to yourself getting a little mental break. So one barrier can be just our belief systems about what constitutes exercise, how our head gets in the way of what is actually effective in our lives and what our body needs. But gosh, there’s so many environmental barriers that are there as well just our lifestyle that are blocking us. And then there is our emotional barriers, which I’m also really interested in, because when you talk about me as a kid versus me as a 20 year old versus me as a 4050, 6070, and beyond, there’s different emotional and sort of affective processes that are going on during those time periods that influence our movement. So

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

it’s interesting. You bring that up, because one of the things I always taught people when I was coaching them one on one, and I’ve been recently diving in the into this with our my membership group, is that there’s this interesting journey we go on with health where we hit a moment in our life where we’re like, I don’t really love living in my body, I need to make some changes, and then we have a really clear idea of where we’re going, what we’re doing, but the gap in between there is where we get lost. The gap between, I know I need to change and I want a new result. That is what I see is like a sand trap for a lot of people. And what I’m hearing you say is that that’s emotional, that’s like, that like, that’s an emotional gap.

Dr. Diana Hill  

I think there’s six things in that gap, and we often think it’s just motivation. We just think I’m not motivated enough, and if I get more motivated, then I’ll be able to cross over this hurdle. But when we look at the science of psychology, that the sort of the modern psychology, psychological science, there’s six processes, or six things that are going on inside our psychology. One is motivation, for sure, but there’s also feelings, you know. So maybe for some people, that gap is shame. They don’t. They can’t bridge the gap because they have shame around where their body is. They don’t want to go out in public, they don’t want to go to an exercise class, they don’t want to go for a walk with their friends because they’re don’t want to show up and have that sense of comparison or competition. So emotions, yes, are a big part of it. Maybe you’re going through grief. Grief is like carrying around lead bricks. And certainly, the older we get, the more, the more grief we have, right? Yeah, it’s the nature of growing older, so emotions are part of it. Then there’s our thoughts, which can be big thing, that can be a gap. And our thoughts include mental rules. Our thoughts include, I just don’t want to our thoughts include this forecasting of how hard it’s going to be. We kind of put that out there, like it’s going to be painful, with feelings, we have thoughts, we also have our sense of self. Folks won’t exercise or won’t bridge that gap because they say things like, I’m not, I’m not a runner, or I’m not the type of person who or I’ve never been an athlete, or I’m a reminder at work, and I need to get my work done. So that’s a big barrier. Is your ear, who you think you are and who you think you aren’t. Your sense of self is a factor. And then we also have our attention, our inability to be in the present moment, and our attention being scattered all over the place. And that’s it. That can be, you know, you may have the best intent intentions, but really poor attention. So you can’t get from where you are to where you want to go. Yep. And then the last one has to do really, with our ability to, kind of, like, take perspective on ourselves and our life in the long run, you know, to be able to think down the road when I’m at the end of the day or the end of the week, will, will I feel like I’m more who I want to be showing up my life, that I want to in a way that I’ve shown up if I have moved my body today, your future

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

self? Like future self, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s a big one, that my future self gets me through those tough days a lot, where I’m like, well, the today self doesn’t really feel like doing this, but the future self would really appreciate if I get up and move my body. And that has been a little trick that has worked for me, is to remind myself that it’s not just today version of me, but tomorrow is also a great way to get me going. So

Dr. Diana Hill  

yeah. So then you add to that trick by saying, Oh, thank you past self. Yeah. Not only do you think about our future self, but we acknowledge and and say thank you to our past self for setting us self for setting us up for today. Yeah, you know, like my past self that put all my little supplements in the little container. And, you know, like, Thank. You past self, you made it so easy for me to just to take my supplements at lunch. I really appreciate her. Oh

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

my god, I love that. I’ve never thought to go back and like, thank my past self. Yeah, I gotta, like, work with her. I love Oh my god, I love that. Yeah. Let’s start with this question, and to give you a little bit of an idea, and my audience might not even know this, that my undergraduate degree was in exercise physiology and nutrition, and I was a competitive tennis player at the University of Kansas, and so I like I’ve been studying exercise. I’ve been enjoying exercise for a long time, and somewhere in my perimenopausal journey, I really had to start reevaluating the way my relationship to exercise was because the athlete in me was push on through and that, yet the perimenopausal journey was not a push on through journey when it comes to exercise. So before we get into like the tricks to get yourself over that. Do we? Do we know what a 40 plus year old woman should be doing on a weekly basis when it comes to exercise like, do we have any kind of formula for that? So it

Dr. Diana Hill  

depends on that 40 plus year old five plus year old woman, because is that 45 plus year old woman have three kids and working in the home and on the floor picking up stuff and lugging sports equipment and walking their dog, maybe they don’t need quote to go to the gym an hour a day, right? Yeah, is that 45 year old woman working as a hair stylist on her feet all day. You know, her arms are up in the air. She’s doing repetitive motion. Asking her to go walk on a treadmill for an hour may not be the best idea, either. So I really believe in individualized approaches to movement and exercise. We need a variety of movements. Katie Bowman is my co author on this book, and she is the queen of nutritious movement. So she talks about movement in terms of nutrition. Are you getting the variety of nutrients that your body needs? And that includes rest, and that includes twisting to the right and arms over your head, and fast movement and jumping movement and on the floor, crawling movement and hanging movement, all of these. She has her a beautiful

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

I love pyramid of her pyramid, and I’d like the conversation I had with her about, like, getting out of that idea that you got to join a gym or hire a trainer like that. It’s really about movement of the body. So thank you. Yeah. So I’m

Dr. Diana Hill  

sitting on the floor. I’m a therapist. I sit for a lot of hours a day. The way that I work with that is I have walk whenever I can. I have a walking meeting with a session walking session with a client, or a walking meeting to prep for this podcast. I went for a walk and I listened to you talk, right? These are that’s me prepping as I’m as I’m moving, and now I’m sitting on the floor, which actually uses a lot more of my body than if I were sitting in a chair, because I have my legs crossed, I’m using my core to hold my spine up. I’m not leaning back into something that’s outsourcing my movement. And that’s all designed. It’s like built into the environmental design of how I live, right? To build a more movement rich lifestyle that’s unique to me for somebody else that is on their feet all day. You know, they may do something different than the way that I’m doing it. So it really has to be individualized. But certainly are the requirements that are out there are, you know, 30 minutes five days a week of cardiovascular exercise, and then the twice a week of strength training. Look, if you’re doing 30 minutes on an elliptical and then you’re sitting the rest of the day your body is not getting the nutrients that it needs, just like if you were to, you know, eat a little pile of, you know, something that wasn’t super nutrient dense, and not having nutrition in the other areas. So it really has to be individualized.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Is it fair to say we’ve over complicated exercise, like we’ve made it way more sophisticated than it needs to be. I think we’ve

Dr. Diana Hill  

over dissected it, maybe not over complicated. It great, because it can be such a rich dynamic part of our life, naturally incorporated into our lifestyle. Yeah, I was just, we were just working in the garden this weekend, and we picked a ton of fava beans, and then my son is, like, we’re watching a basketball playoffs, and my son is shelling fava beans while we’re watching the basketball. That’s, that’s a fine motor skill. I mean, it’s like, actually, really good for our hands. Our hands, our hands, yes, our we have these opposable thumbs, but we lost the rest of our hands, right? So he’s doing nutritious movement while watching the basketball game, and we’re sitting on the floor, and my other son is like, you know, gesturing and jumping up and down and cheering. That’s movement. That’s part of our life. It’s part of our family time. It’s part of our cooking time, and the. You can go and buy the little machine where you do the scruncher of the the fingers to strengthen your grip, where you could show some fava beans, yeah. And so, I think the dissecting of movement into trying to, like some of it is, is has to do with capitalism and selling stuff, right? Well, it’s all of healing products. Yeah,

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

all of health is like that. I have, I have become completely addicted to understanding our primal design. And when I go back and I look at how we were designed back, and how the hunter and gatherers moved, or how the hunter and gatherers ate or they fasted, it’s just effortless. It was because they were working with their design. And then I fast forward to nowadays. We have this really big statement that’s coming out for menopausal women, that you need to lift heavy stuff. And now you’ve got all these women that are like, Oh my god, one more have to I have to go to the gym, and I got to lift all this heavy stuff. And we’ve lost sight of, how do you do this effortlessly all day long, which to me seems like, if you could make it flow with your daily rhythm, then the mind it will will be looking at it with more joy and not looking at it with dread.

Dr. Diana Hill  

So it’s effortless, but also effortful at times. You know, when I’m when I’m lugging groceries from the car to my all, like, pack them in, you know, I’ll pack three in, one side, one or the other. Like, this is hard, but the way my mental processing of that, my mindset around it, is, this is me lifting heavy things, which is what my body is meant to do. And it’s, it’s, it’s uncomfortable, but we can be with the discomfort when we connect it to something that either is meaningful to us in some way or that has some kind of purpose to it. Like I’m feeding my family. I’m like, this is this feels good to me, or I’m taking care of my body by I mean, you know, it’s actually good for us to lift uneven things like Not everything has to be so, you know, even on both sides all the time, that our bodies were meant to be dynamic like that, and they actually help us not fall as much right in the future if we have that kind of imbalance type of movement. So some of it is also just getting more cognitively flexible around how we’re moving our bodies, why we’re moving our bodies, and kind of breaking out of those confines of what exercise is supposed to be, because as soon as it becomes a supposed to and a should, then it becomes a rule, and then it becomes a box. And then actually, we get demotivated. We don’t want to do it because we want to, especially when we come a little bit rebellious in our menopausal years. We’re like, F that any of those true so, so it’s good, it’s good for us rebellious folks to break out of those rules and redefine it for ourselves. But connect it to something meaningful. Connect it to what’s important to you, and then you have intrinsic motivation. You have a motivation and a fire that comes from within, as opposed to the extrinsic, external things that are pushing you. And when you feel pushed, we become like mules. We just dig our, you know, feet into the ground.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

It’s so true. And that was what I learned from my last conversation with Katie, is I really started to see how many different movements I was doing during the day. Like, was I gripping? Was I chopping? Was I bending? Like it really opened my mind to see that I could be actually working out and exercising all day long, just in very different variations. And it was, it was freedom, that conversation I had with her, because I thought this is a totally aligned way to look at why we need to exercise in the first place it. You know, we’re not gaining weight. We’re not getting poor health because we didn’t join the right gym. We’re getting it because we didn’t create the little, tiny habits every single day. We’re not looking at those little moments where exercise is possible, like you said with the fava beans. So

Dr. Diana Hill  

there’s the cognitive flexibility around it, and there’s also the emotional flexibility around it, where we’ve gotten weaker over time, in our ability to be with discomfort and our ability to be with uncomfortable feelings, because we’re also sold this message that we’re always supposed to feel good, we’re always supposed to be happy. Take this medication and we can get rid of that feeling for you pretty quick, right? And we’ve lost our capacity to be with the discomfort, but also see the value of discomfort. There’s competency and mastery that you build by tolerating discomfort. I have, I have two kids that are both on mountain bikers, and one’s a he does enduro racing, right? And so enduro racing is you, you ride a. Bike up a very, very steep hill, and then you go down the hill very fast. And the uphill is the endurance part. It’s the this is uncomfortable for the reward of the down. And we need to as sort of as a species, because so much of our environment is built around making us more comfortable. And this is what you do with fasting. Is you you are developing not only the health benefits of fasting, but there’s mental benefits. There’s psychological benefits to riding that edge of discomfort and seeing that it doesn’t kill you, right? You know, like, we say things like, oh my gosh, this so uncomfortable. I’m going to die. No one’s no one’s ever died of discomfort, of embarrassment or the discomfort of anxiety, but a lot of people have become very unhealthy because they’re unwilling to be embarrassed. They’re unwilling to be the person at the airport like me. That’s like doing the yoga stretches while everyone’s sitting down in their seats, right? So there’s that as well. Is part of the breaking out of this, these confines of what exercise should look like, that it should be contained to some location, in a certain outfit with a certain body shape and size and a certain age. And if you don’t fit that mold, then you’re gonna, you know, be embarrassed in some way or uncomfortable in some way. Okay, so

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

what do you say? This is something I’ve heard over the years by patients so much that, you know, they roll their eyes at me and be like, I know I’m supposed to work out. I just hate it. And what I equated that to is it’s painful, it’s uncomfortable. Going back to what you just said. So what do you say? What do you do if you literally, physically hate working out?

Dr. Diana Hill  

I would want to look at a few things, right? So one is the hating of working out related to a history. So I’m a psychologist. I can’t not go there. Yeah, I don’t. So is there? Is there a history there? Like a history of being forced to work out a shame history only exposed to one form of movement. Some people, maybe they associate it with like gym class or in school, when everyone had to run the mile and they were the last one, or they felt shame around that, right? So it may be a mismatch of what you were exposed to as a kid in terms of joy, of movement, right? Working out is different than than movement. So have you ever had a time when you’ve experienced joy and you have a history that contributes to that hating of it? So that’s one part I want to I

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

don’t want to lose this thought. So are we? Are we designed to enjoy movement? Yes

Dr. Diana Hill  

and no. So we have two systems going on evolutionarily. We have evolutionarily, a system that is there to preserve resources, right, so the sedentary Don’t, don’t expend energy unless you need to, right? And when we’re in a state of safety or a state and that is a very good time evolutionarily to be inactive. Now we’re using that inactive inactivity time of like scrolling on the couch time right when actually we should be active. So we actually need to override that system to some degree, and that requires some degree of discomfort in overcoming of that inertia. There’s another part of movement that actually is quite reinforcing, like, why is it that when I start running 10 minutes in or when I start playing pickleball, or when I start kicking the ball around with my kid, I start to feel good? And that part comes from the evolutionary benefits of if you were moving in the wild, say you needed to go get food, say you needed to run away from a predator, say you needed to run to get somewhere to before nightfall, your body needs to tell you, keep going, good job. And so you get flooded with a number of different types of neuro hormones, I mean, including dopamine, which includes makes us want to keep going, right? So the craving neuro hormone, but other things like serotonin, that gives you that sort of satisfaction, right? The endocannabinoids, which make you feel good as well. And that’s why, when we start moving, we get that reinforcement to continue. So both are going on, right? We were designed to move and we were designed to not move, right? And probably our day should look like that. We should have some active rest times where we’re shut we’re shelling fava beans. That’s not like a big output, right? But you got to feel pretty safe to shell a fava bean. Yeah, right. Nothing’s got to be coming after you. And then we do need a little bit of sprinting, or a little bit of going up a, you know, steep hill every once in a while, because we also our body needs that as well, or lifting heavy things.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Is there anything we can say to ourselves when we’re sprinting uphill and, you know, I don’t know about you, I’m sure people listening have this happen, but my brain sometimes, literally, is like a petulant child that is like, I hate this. I hate this. I’m uncomfortable. Do I really need to be doing this? Like I start negotiating with myself? Are. There tricks in though, in those moments that you can use to get you to that place where the endorphins kick in.

Dr. Diana Hill  

Yeah. So one of the really interesting pieces of research that’s come out more recently is around the power of self compassion and physical activity. There was a study done with over 500 participants in the UK where they looked at people’s ability and self efficacy around movement, so they asked them questions, like on a scale from zero to 100 how likely are you to move your body and go exercise, even if it’s raining outside, even if you are really tired, even if you really don’t want to? Right? And folks that scored higher on this measure of self compassion, which I’ll describe what it is we’re more likely to overcome that barrier, right? So if you have a petulant child, well, we’ve all had some form of Excellent thank you for making me feel normal. Maybe you have a petulant pet, which I actually have more of right now, children are less petulant. It kind of comes and goes. My dog is more petulant. If you’ve had a petulant child or a petulant a petulant pet or a petulant friend, maybe you’ve had neither of those, or petulant partner. Okay, one of those, you’ve had one of those. Hopefully, what do we know about what’s not helpful? You know, like we kind of have some common sense around this, berating them, blaming them, criticizing them, kicking them, telling them what a loser they are. Like that is that going to increase or decrease their ability to get up that hill? I mean, if you just had that inner voice going in the same way that you would would be like the worst parent ever, right? And what self compassion is is not it’s not self esteem. They’ve done tons of studies on the differences between self esteem and self compassion. So self esteem is just like pumping yourself up. You’ve got this, you’re the best, You’re the strongest, you’re the greatest, right? The cheerleader of the 1980s self compassion is different. Self Compassion is this is hard. Yeah, I hear you. It’s hard. What you’re doing right now is hard, and I believe in you, and you’ve done hard things before, and I’m here for you, and I’m listening to you, and sometimes that voice is not the most helpful voice to listen to. You need to get get into your heart. You need to dig deeper. There’s a bigger reason why you wanted to go up this hill. What is that reason? And remember that right now, especially when you’re at the steepest part, and be kind to yourself fierce self compassion. Be kind to yourself with a fierceness to it, with a like encouragement, the way that a really good parent would encourage their kid to go to school, even if they really don’t want to go to school, when they know that today’s a day when it actually, it’ll probably get better for you, like, I know you you know, you know you’re scared, but things will turn around at 10 o’clock, you know, by recess. So one of the things that we can start to do is start to use a different way of relating to ourselves, which is not either, you know, pounding down the petulant child child, but not listening to the petulant child either, like, you don’t just say, Okay, you’re right. This is too hard. I’m gonna, I’m gonna stop you. Like, pep talk. Third Way is self compassion, yeah, pep talk, but it’s, yeah. Compassion is different than puppy. I mean, we can smell puppy. Like, Pep Talk has a falseness to it. Compassion has a I understand and I get that this is hard for you and I and I’m with you in it, okay, and I’m not abandoning you in this. It’s a little different than the, you know, the coach that’s the saying, it’s

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

like, it’s like somebody working out with you, cheering you on. You’re you, you being your own trainer, your own person that’s believing in you and supporting the negative thinking is what I hear yeah

Dr. Diana Hill  

and validating you, yeah and validating, validating you. You know, like the validation has a quality of, I mean, this is a lot of what I if you do as a therapist, is I almost always start with some degree of validation, of understanding, yeah, and then through that understanding and that out of validation, through that acceptance, we can produce change, yeah, but, but if you start with change and pushing the other person will push back. And this is the foundation of a lot of what’s called motivational interviewing, which is the science of motivation change. What would you say? I want

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

to go back to this shame piece, because this is something that I’m seeing in more and more in women is that a lot of us have shame around some aspect of our body. A lot of us have decided we want to guilt ourselves all the time, and we’re not even aware of it. And my experience with fasting is that one of the biggest hurdles I had with women is that it was really reconnecting them to their bodies, and they were going to have to now have a relationship with their body and a relationship they’ve never had before, and there’s shame, there’s fear, there’s guilt, there’s trauma in their bodies, and now they have to. To face that as they go into this fasted state. I think it’s the same thing as when we go into exercise. It’s like, it you know? It’s like the Body Keeps the Score. It is a house of memories that sometimes we don’t want to connect with. How do we help women who feel disconnected from their bodies and movement is not doesn’t feel safe, it actually feels more traumatizing.

Dr. Diana Hill  

Well, okay, there’s many layers to my answer, because I want to start with the emotion of shame itself, and the science of shame and the evolution of shame. So humans evolved many different emotions, shame being one of them, for a reason, we we evolve shame because it’s actually a social emotion. It’s, it’s, it’s one of the emotions that is deeply connected to our desire to belong, hmm, and if, if we didn’t belong in some way, right? It’s very dangerous for us as humans not to be part of the group. So we evolved this emotion of shame, which actually has this sort of closing up quality to it, shutting down. Make Yourself Smaller. Hide this part of yourself. Don’t ever let anyone see that part, because they would never love you if they saw that part. And for some of us, that’s actually our physical body selves. You know, a lot of women will talk about, like, covering parts of their body when they are intimate with their partners. They won’t let their partners, oh, don’t touch that part, because that part doesn’t deserve love. So true. These people, partners you’ve been with for 10 years, 20 years, you still feel it, yeah, you know, or you know, when you’re getting naked, you’re kind of like, hide in this angle, right? Yep. So there’s this shame, this like, this part of me is bad, and the difference between shame and guilt is important as well, because guilt is I did something bad, and it motivates repair. Guilt actually makes us go, like, apologize. But shame is I am bad, and therefore I need to hide this part of me, and then it festers. And what happens is it’s a lot like black mold and like the bottom of your, you know, kitchen cabinet, that as long as it doesn’t get any air and nobody sees it, including you, because you hide it from your very self, then it gets bigger and stronger and grosser, like black mold of me, right? So, so So that’s shame. And if you’re experiencing shame, I want to say that’s human. It makes you human, human. And if you connect to that shame in a way that’s like, oh, that’s the part of me that wants to be loved, that wants to belong, then now we have the answer to shame, which is, it needs love, it needs air, it needs to you know, kind of you can, just like, crack, crack at the door open a tiny bit. Maybe you look at that body, body part in your mirror, in the mirror, and you put your hand on it, and you breathe with it, and you say, Hello, shame, hi, old friend. Hmm, you know, I haven’t really ever looked at you. I haven’t really looked at you through eyes of love before. And what would that be like? What would it be like to just, you know, do a little bit of opposite to shame action. Like, you know, you got shame around the cellulite on your thighs. What if you were to, like, wear something that shows that? But, you know, you do it as an act of love, and you do it as an act of, almost, like an act of activism, really, of, like, I’m not gonna, I’m not gonna hide you anymore, right? So that’s that’s one part of it. But the the other thing that you were asking about is, how do we make contact with our with our bodies in a different way? And this is what my whole my dissertation and masters was all on, interoceptive awareness and and as well as like, how to help retrain our awareness of our of our bodies, our physical selves, intercept of awareness is like awareness of your heartbeat and your breath and your hunger and your fullness and your emotions and everything that’s going on in the wilderness inside of our body, and what has happened over time, as we’ve become so disembodied, we don’t know that language. We don’t it’s just it’s like so foreign. We’re so numb to it, and so it does require some listening in. And one of the things that happens with fasting, which is so interesting, is that I think sometimes our head, like, kind of quiets down a little bit, totally does. And we can start to we can start to listen same thing with a movement and exercise. Our head can quiet down a little bit, and we can start to listen to this, this, this body that has so much to tell us. Yeah, it’s got and we haven’t been listening enough.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Yeah, and you know, that’s the one surprise I had with fast like a girl going out into the world, is how many women discovered new parts of themselves from fasting, because it is the total connect, reconnection to your body, and then your body starts telling you things without food, like, I’m angry, and then, like, oh, wait, I’m depressed, but I don’t have my go to tool where I would go eat. And all of a sudden, I used to say that fasting was like a mirror. It could show you what parts you could nourish and you can work on, and you wouldn’t be able to see. See those if you you hadn’t taken food out of the equation. And I’m wondering if exercise. I’m looking at that now and thinking maybe that’s very similar. Maybe it’s when we look at why we don’t want to exercise, when we look at the discomfort when we exercise, there’s a story there that we can we can honor and can put us back into relationship with our bodies. Is that, is that a bit of how you’re seeing this?

Dr. Diana Hill  

Yeah, I mean, I think exercise helps us with embodiment. You know, a lot of people, I’m a longtime practitioner of yoga, and how many times at the end of the yoga class, tears come, right? And I don’t even know why they’re coming. It’s just something has moved through me, you know, and it needed to move through my body. And maybe when we go for a walk and people talk about the clarity that comes or that they connect with people that have passed through their movement, right through going through a walk on the beach or a walk of a mountain, or connecting to something much bigger than them, you know, connecting to a tree or a mountain or the sky, you start to see things, you hear things, and it’s it is a similar state of that expanse of awareness that can happen, I think, with fasting. Fasting, I think, helps with the that sort of interconnected space that we can get into as humans, in part because we’re pulling away all of the distractors that are just usually in our way right now, that are usually filtering, yeah, world, it’s just you and you. It’s helpful for that. Yeah, yeah.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Sort of left you and you, which is what I what I love about it, and you’re left to nourish yourself, guide yourself, which I think it with exercise is the same way. What about grief? I think grief is really interesting, because I think a lot of menopausal women are grieving their younger selves. And when it comes to exercise, I know I grieve my you know, 20 year old athletic self who craved craved exercise and could build muscle like nobody’s business, and you know all the things that made exercise effortless, she’s not around anymore. I don’t know. She left the building, and it becomes a different version of me that has to get me moving and I grieve the younger self, but that’s part of aging. What do we do with grief?

Dr. Diana Hill  

Oh, gosh. Well, my favorite, what do we do with grief? Comes from Francis Francis Weller. He got the book The wild edge of sorrow, and he talks about the five gates of grief, of becoming an apprentice to grief. For one, like we the grief is not something that we actually do anything with are going to get rid of, we’re going to get better at, and we better get better at it because there’s big waves coming. You know, in the first gate that he talks about is everything we love we will lose, yeah, yeah. We will lose our eyesight. We will lose, you know, this form of movement at some point right there, it’s not going to be there for everything. Everything everything is impermanent, right? And then he also talks about the grief around the parts of ourselves that haven’t known love. I think there’s awakening up, waking up to that in menopause where we’re like, oh my gosh, yep, if I could go back and talk to my 20 year old self about that part of herself, I love her. Like, like, how you know, How dare that be taken from her, that she couldn’t get up and be bold, or have, you know, these experiences that I wish that she had because she didn’t love that part of her, so the parts of ourselves that haven’t known love. And then he also talks about that what we wished for but didn’t receive, hmm,

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

ooh, that’s gotta be a big one.

Dr. Diana Hill  

Yeah. With our, like, our expectations of our life, like, I kind of wished for some women, it’s like, I wished for a marriage that would go on forever, but I got a divorce. I wished for a child, and I couldn’t have one. I wished for X, Y and Z, right? There’s grief around that, and grief around our bodies that which we wish for. We didn’t, we didn’t receive around our bodies, right? And then the sorrows of the world is another one. We all gotta get better at that. Yeah, we do being having compassion for the sorrows of the world. And then we have our ancestral grief, which is a whole nother big one we can think about our mothers and our mothers mothers and their relationships with food and their bodies. And I mean, I don’t know, I remember so distinctly watching my mom in the mirror being like eight, and watching her button her pants in the morning, and the way that she looked at herself with disgust, yeah, you know. And then and me taking that on, like there’s something wrong with her body, so therefore there’s something wrong with my body, right? And like, adopting that from for myself, and I have grief around that, for her and for me, because I love her body. Birth me, yeah? I mean, like, I love her body. Thank you. Thank you to that belly. Yeah, for having beautiful and so. So I do think you know, I lead these retreats, and I lead one in Costa Rica. Every year, and we we do grief rituals. We go around the gates and we honor each one of these in it. We can honor grief in lots of ways. Grief does have a heaviness to it, a slowness to it, and there’s ways we can move with the heaviness and slowness. Movement processes our emotions. We know that when we move our bodies, the stress, neuro hormones kind of move through us too. They don’t get as stuck. So I really recommend when people are grieving any one of those. Maybe you’re grieving the loss of a pet or a loved one, or one of those other gates. You’re grieving the sorrows of the world. A really wonderful thing is to go for a walk. It’s a really beautiful expression of grief, and if you can make it a meaningful walk, where maybe you’re placing a rock somewhere to honor somebody, or you’re connecting and doing some kind of prayer or kind of mantra or something that breathing exercise that connects you to whatever it is you’re grieving that can be really helpful as well.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

One of the ways I like to think about grief is that it is really an expression of love. And you said that as somebody who’s been grieving this year, I was lost a very dear friend in October. He was 54 and then I had a home in the Palisades that you know no longer is accessible to us. But what I learned is that in honoring grief, I really, really understood love. It was like love. I could understand love at a bigger level, because I lost two things I loved dearly in a matter of a short period of time. And I’m wondering in menopause if there is a bit I know Francis Weller’s work, and I think there is something that could be really profound about us honoring that at 55 which is what I am right now. I’m not going to have the body that I had at 35 and I may never have that body back again. And I loved that part of me, and I’m wondering if there are ways we can sit and honor and grieve what will no longer be, because I’ll never have that 35 year old again,

Dr. Diana Hill  

right, right? There’s a ways to honor that, and there’s ways also to connect with, what is it that I loved about that like, what are the values underneath that you know? Like, for you, what did you love about that body? Like, what was it? What did that body

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

well, I loved how strong she was, like, I loved how strong she was, and I loved how effortless it felt to move her body, like I would go for a run, and it was like the best drug on the planet for me. And now, if I run too much my joints hurt, so I go for a walk, so it has to be a little bit different. So I loved her exuberance and how powerful she felt in her body. 20 years later, I don’t feel as powerful in my body, and so when I work out, it has a very different experience for me. I do a lot of walking, I do a lot of yoga, and most of that is for my mental health and the body, the body’s just along for the ride. I think a lot of women probably hit our age, and it’s like, I’m not trying to impress anybody. I’m not trying to like, and especially like those of us that are out on socials. I always tell my following, like, I don’t really care if you think my arms are like, amazing or like, I’m the fittest 55 year old that you ever saw. I actually care more about working out for my own self, not for what other other people think, which I think that is a that is a real switch, and all of a sudden you have to motivate yourself differently, because I’m not motivated to impress anybody else. I’m motivated to just feel good in my body and my brain. So the motivation lens changed, too.

Dr. Diana Hill  

Yeah, so when one practice with grief, grief is closely related to love. Yes. I mean, the other side of grief is love. The size of your grief is the size of your love, right? And but grief and gratitude are sisters as well. And so we can say thank you, thank you, you know. And anytime that memory of that powerful, exuberant self shows up like, Thank you, oh yeah, when you get a glimmer of her, yeah? And I’m so appreciative, as opposed to like, Oh no, I can’t have you, which is attachment, clinginess, non acceptance, right? So we want, in one hand gratitude and the other hand acceptance. And acceptance is not necessarily having to like something, but the actual the word acceptance, the root of the word acceptance, is to receive. I don’t have to like it, but I can receive it. Yeah, and when I when I open both of my hands on open one hand to gratitude, thank you, and the other hand to acceptance. I receive this. I receive where I am right now in my life. Then you also are opening up to a you that 20 years down the line you will look back at you and be like, Oh, I remember. Or, gosh, when I was, yeah, you know, I used to have, I was, like, so free and who I was, and I didn’t care what anyone think. And that was such, like, a beautiful thing of my men, you know, like early menopausal years were just so rad. And I would, I would love to have that again. You’ll have something else. You’ll have wisdom. And so we, what we know about wisdom is that it doesn’t necessarily grow with age, but it does. It does grow with openness to experience. So it’s associated with the psychological construct of openness. And that wisdom is this combination of knowledge, cleverness, life experience like problem solving skills, with heart, with heart, and compassion and values, and when you combine that you know you you have something that is can handle the grief and the loss, but and honor it with wisdom and also honor where you’re at right now, in the here and now, there’s really fabulous things that you wouldn’t trade for when you were 20 or 30, like I wouldn’t, I wouldn’t give them up. Yep, and I loved when I was 20 and 30 as well. What I had then, what I just heard,

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

is really cool. I hadn’t really thought about it like you may be losing one thing, but with with you, as you get older, you’re getting wiser, and so you it’s actually you’re losing one thing but gaining something else. And like, absolutely what I would say when it comes to working out for me, what I lost was the desire to look a certain way so that I could be worthy to the people around me, I could feel like enough to the people around me and and I’m happy to have lost that in exchange for I’m actually now working out for me and how in the state I want to be in, not necessarily a byproduct of an external appearance. And I think a lot of women going through menopause, this is what we go through, is we go into this coming I call it returning home, back to ourselves, where we’re like, wait a second, I all of my lifestyle tools now are for me. They’re not for the other people around me. And I loved how you said that. It’s like you gave up one thing, but you got something else. And when I put it through my own lens, that was beautiful, I’m like, Yeah, well,

Dr. Diana Hill  

and here’s yeah and here’s the twist. When you start making it that way, it does become for other people too, because you show up differently for other people, right? When your lifestyle tools are about helping you be more balanced, about helping you feel more like you’re growing, you’re wiser, you’re stronger, you’re you know all the things that healthier, whatever definition of your lifestyle tools benefiting you are, right? Then you show up for your family members better. You’re less irritable, you’re more compassionate, you’re more present, you’re you’re showing up at work with more creativity, more openness, more, you know, thinking outside of the box, all the things that benefit our world. And I really see it as a flow. It’s not either or. We don’t have to choose, but when we start to engage in that, in that flow of well being, or flow of compassion, or flow of a different type of lifestyle, you see that your fasting doesn’t just benefit you, yep, I know that. Like when you’re done with your fast, you are so clear. Your work is so creative, your team is like you got energy for your team. You got energy for your whatever your plant, whatever it is that you want to express yourself in, you’re going to express yourself more fully, and you show up more as the genius that you are. And so that’s the sort of regenerative nature of things that we can engage in, regenerative lifestyles, that it’s not just about me and it’s not just about you more it’s about we and but it does start with your relationship with yourself, because that’s usually the one that needs to get unlocked, especially for women, because we’re so used to it, to having a be for everybody else, right? So we have to sort of target that first and

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

talk a little bit about you mentioned earlier, about our identity gets stuck in the way explain that a little more, because I can tell you that my identity, when it came to working out, was I’m an athlete. I don’t really have that identity. I don’t identify as an athlete anymore, and it’s been the example that I’ve used a lot is I used to love to run, and then I started injuring myself all the time, and I started walking, and I felt really lazy. I was like, Oh my God. Like, I can’t believe that I’m not pushing myself to the same level that I used to push myself. And then I had to redefine walking as forward movement. I’m like, Mindy, you’re just moving forward, just moving forward at a different pace. What? What I want to point out is that that was the identity shift of, I’m not an athlete anymore, so now, how am I going to work out what? And it almost freed me in some level. But I’m curious when we have people that are like. Well, I don’t do yoga, or I don’t dance or I don’t it’s like this identity piece has to come into play for people.

Dr. Diana Hill  

Yeah, it’s a major barrier for people. And you know, our identity, we are, our mind wants to categorize things, because it’s metabolically expensive to have more than one category overlap, like we takes too much mental energy. So I just need to categorize when we do this with other people, I’m going to categorize you as this, not that based on what I see about you, what clothes you’re wearing, how your hair is, and what house you live in, right? I’m just going to put you in that category. It’s easier, and then we put ourselves in our own categories because it’s easier. But what happens is those categories create boxes in which we confine us, and what if one of those categories falls apart? Right? Then we don’t know who we are anymore, or we never leave that box to expand our identity to multitudes, right? One of the exercises that I’ll often do with clients in session is I’ll just ask them repeatedly over and over again, who are you? And they’ll say, like, I’m a mom, who are you? I’m a therapist. Who are you? I’m a nd. I just keep on going at who are you? Who are you? Who are you, who are you, until you get to the point where you’re like, Oh, I’m everything, I’m you, I’m love, I’m like, I’m not one thing. Because sometimes you’re not a mom, sometimes you’re not a therapist. All of these are sometimes, and we have to get more flexible with our identities, with our categorization of things, because otherwise, you won’t go to I just recently, a year or so ago, started doing African dance with one of my good friends, and I’m like, I’m not a dancer. There’s no way, right? There you go dance, because I bought these big jumps and, you know, I can’t do that, right? I’m not a dancer. Well, guess what? If I said no to that I’m not a dancer, then I would have missed out on this incredible experience with a friend at the beach, learning a new skill, discovering parts of my body that I never knew could move like you know, my hips could move separately from my other parts of my body, I had no idea. So our identities keep us stuck, and this is where we also in these years, it’s really fun and exciting to start to push those limits, you know, and our kids can be great teachers of that. Our friends, we can, we can push each other as friends to start getting outside of our identities, of who we are and who we aren’t, and dropping some of them, because going back to Francis Weller, you’re going to lose those identities too. Everything you love you’re going to lose. So might as well get more flexible with them, and that’s what will allow us, you know, sort of longevity wise, to be more adaptable as we age, because so much is changing and will change. That’s the one guarantee. Yeah, you

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

know, I really like that thought, because I feel like menopause is a redefining of identity in general. And I think, you know, you a lot of us go from I was a mom, well, I’m still a mom, but my adult children, mommy, adult children looks a lot different than like, you know, teenagers or like me, I was in clinical practice. Well, I’m still helping people. I’m just not in clinical practice anymore. So it’s what I’m hearing, is, if you have an identity, that you should move your body in a certain way and that you don’t move it in another way, it’s time to re evaluate that and potentially take on a new identity. Is that what I gleaned from what you just said,

Dr. Diana Hill  

yeah? Or just be flexible with identities altogether Yeah. Just put a sometimes comma, sometimes next to all of them, yeah, and then a question mark too, because there’s some that you don’t even know yet you haven’t even explored, you know, and that’s where movement can be really fun as well. Because, you know, everything from like, I’m not a soccer player, and then you have a kid that loves soccer, and all of a sudden you’re kicking the ball around in the backyard, and you’re like, Whoa. I had no idea, like, this is a new identity, you know? So it’s more about being flexible and being adaptable and in the service of what like, in the service of fun, or in the service of joy, or in the service of connection, or in the service of service of, you know, giving you’re using your physical body to for transportation or for helping a friend move. You know, all of the physical bodies that would talk about the Palisades. I’m close to you, and I’ve also been impacted by fire multiple, multiple times here in Santa Barbara, mud flow, our physical bodies can be powerful resources to help each other, you know, to move to dig out of mud, to, you know, get animals out of places where they’re, you know, in danger. And then all of a sudden, we can drop our identity, right? It doesn’t really matter who you Yeah, so

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

you can try it on, and then you can let go of it and try another one on. I like that idea. I like that idea. Play with it. Yeah. So your book that you and Katie put out, I love the title. I know I should exercise, but very, very creative. What can people expect in this? And for those. Ashley, those women that are really struggling, trying to find their way with exercise, what? What can they find in your book?

Dr. Diana Hill  

Well, it’s 44 reasons why we don’t move and how to get over them. And we sourced our our audiences, like, what are, what are the reasons why you don’t move? And they’re very nuanced. They’re very specific. Like, I can’t I, you know, I have five kids, and I can’t get out, get them out the door. We have stuff on menopause. We have stuff on not enough time, and we approach it from these two angles. Katie’s a biomechanist. She’s got creative ways to move that are not on a Stairmaster for 45 minutes, right? She’s got creative ways to stack your life, build movement into your life. I’m a psychologist, and I look at it through a psychological lens, and through the processes that are inflexible, that are preventing you from moving your body. And so we tackle it from these two it’s really unique, and then we tackle it from these two angles, and we teach these skills that, although these examples are very nuanced, could be applied anywhere and everywhere, so that hopefully, by the end of reading this book, and you can kind of flip through it, it’s one of these, like open to a page and read that page and get inspired. You’ll have to read it from beginning to end, but hopefully as you move your way through it, you will be able to apply this to your unique reason why you are struggling, either moving your body differently or moving your body more or maybe taking a rest, because maybe that’s what you also need. So true. So true.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Well, Diana, how do people find you? And is the book is out now. It’s been out for a while. Yeah,

Dr. Diana Hill  

the book is out. Okay, yeah, it’s definitely out. You can get it anywhere. And I’m on socials at Dr Diana Hill, mostly Instagram, and then I have a newsletter at Dr Diana hill.com and I have a meditation there, which is the like my new go to, which is how to sit with an uncomfortable feeling. Because often tell you you should just sit with discomfort, but people don’t know what that means. Like, what are you actually doing there when you’re sitting with an uncomfortable feeling? Are you with an uncomfortable feeling? So I have a meditation on my website at Dr dianehill.com that walks you through that, and a lot of other resources there, amazing.

Dr. Mindy Pelz  

Well, I love what you gals are up to. I really think a better converse, a deeper conversation, I shouldn’t say better deeper conversation around exercise needs to be had, and it feels like you two are having it. So thank you. 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