363: Seasonal Grace: Simple Summer Shifts to Amplify Health & Happiness

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Courtney Townley 0:00
Welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast made for women who want their healthiest years to be ahead of them, not behind them. Join your host Courtney Townley right now as she breaks down the fairy tale health story you have been chasing all of your life into sensible action steps and lasting change.

Courtney Townley 0:28
Hello, my friends, and welcome to the Grace & Grit Podcast. This is your host, Courtney Townley, as always, I’m delighted that you’re here.

Courtney Townley 0:35
Before we roll into today’s episode, in case you missed it, I do want to let you know that the last episode of this show that I did, which was episode 362 is such a profoundly important episode, I had the awesome privilege of interviewing Dr. Mary Claire Haver, who is a menopause specialist, and she is advocating for menopausal care in a way that women so desperately deserve and need, and because my listenership is largely the midlife population rolling through the menopausal transition, I would hate for you to miss all of the goodness that is baked into that episode. So when you have a chance go back hit play on Episode 362 I promise you will not regret it.

Courtney Townley 1:32
Now many of you know, probably long time listeners know, that I live in the awesome state of Montana. I love living here. Winters can be a little long and hard, but they’re beautiful, nonetheless.

Courtney Townley 1:45
That being said, I think a large swath of the population lives here because it is so spectacular. In the summer, we have really incredible summers, and our summers are short. We have a short summer season. There’s a lot to do outside, as you can imagine. And I’m telling you all of this because if I am not flexible in my approach to my own self care in the summer, I can really get myself into a lot of trouble in terms of not enjoying my summer, because I have not extended myself the grace of allowing things to look different.

Courtney Townley 2:31
And it’s not just that the summer season is short. It’s not just that I want to be outside, but I also have responsibilities that shift in the summer. I have a child, he’s 14 now, which makes it a little bit easier, but still, I have a child who’s out of school, and I want to be spending more time with him, having adventures and helping him with his needs. And so all of that requires that I approach my self care differently so I can continue to take care of myself and really enjoy my summer.

Courtney Townley 3:09
Health and happiness really should not be at odds with each other in any season. That being said, I do see a lot of my clients rumbling with extending themselves the grace of flexibility during the shift that comes with the summer season. They feel that they either have to sacrifice their self care in order to enjoy their summer, or they have to sacrifice enjoying their summer in order to administer a high level of self care. And if you are someone who has rumbled with that in the past, or maybe you’re currently rumbling with it, this episode is for you.

Courtney Townley 3:59
More specifically in this episode, I am going to extend to you three invitations that will help you to both maximize your enjoyment of the summer and honor your need for self care. So those two things I hope at the end of this episode, are less at odds with each other.

Courtney Townley 4:21
Now the things I’m going to mention in this episode today are not earth shattering. Most of the things I talk about on this podcast are not and I also know that the power of health and well being is found in basic measures. So these things may be reminders to some of you. They may be brand new to some of you, but regardless, they are not complicated things. And rather than your brain going to a place like, oh, I need something harder, I would invite you to consider. For shifting your mindset to oh my gosh, like if it could be this easy, right? Why is that not a possibility? So for your consideration. All right.

Courtney Townley 5:14
So the first thing I would love to invite you to do as you continue out your summer is to really encourage you to embrace the opportunity to move your body more, and I’ll tell you why I wanted to start here. I was having a conversation with a client the other day who was expressing her frustration that she can’t get into the gym to do her workouts as she’s been doing them all summer and spring, or, sorry, all winter and spring. So she was feeling guilty. She was beating herself up. She was definitely kind of a hot, frustrated mess that things weren’t looking the same in the summer.

Courtney Townley 5:57
But I also want you to know that this client, in particular, her her business ramps up in the summer. She has multiple children who are home during the summer. Her life looks very different during the summer. She also lives in a climate where she, too, has long winters and shorter summer seasons, and she loves the outdoors, so as I was talking to her, it was really clear that her perceived solution to this was to get up earlier, to be more disciplined, to just make it happen. And I’m not saying that that isn’t a possibility, but also, knowing this particular client really well, I know that she’s already short on sleep. I know that she’s already very disciplined, and so I challenged her on that solution. What else might be possible here? Might it be possible to give yourself permission to spend less time in the gym for the next couple of months so you can be outdoors more.

Courtney Townley 7:08
I have mentioned Katy Bowman on this podcast multiple times. Katy Bowman, in case you don’t know her, she is a thought leader in the field of movement. She has a fabulous website. You should absolutely check out nutritiousmovement.com She is the author of multiple books about movement and baking more movement into our daily lives, because we all know that modern day culture has us moving less and less, which is hugely problematic, and it’s also the reason why exercise exists.

Courtney Townley 7:42
So let me just explain that a little bit more, the reason we need to go to the gym and do things like strength training and cardio is because we have created a lifestyle where we aren’t having to lift heavy things and walk up steep mountains and move in a myriad of ways throughout the day. And so exercise was designed to help counter that, and I think it is so important to remember this, especially if you are someone who is wrestling with giving yourself permission to exercise, perhaps a little bit less, when life presents you with an opportunity to move your body more. Case in point, during the summer.

Courtney Townley 8:35
Katy Bowman has a fabulous quote. I’ve used this in so many classes that I’ve taught over the years. I want to share it here, and it kind of speaks to this point that exercise is not is not necessarily. I mean, the reason we do it is because of this lack of movement in our day.

Courtney Townley 8:54
Here’s the quote: People have not exercised throughout history. Exercise is the modern man’s equivalent to nutritional supplements in the same way that supplements should not be the bulk of our diet. Exercise should not be the bulk of our movement profile. So again, exercise was designed as a supplement to keep us healthy in a culture where we’re moving less when you go through seasons of moving more, it makes a lot of sense that you perhaps would exercise less. It certainly doesn’t have to be all or nothing, but I just want you to consider the possibility.

Courtney Townley 9:38
The other thing I really leaned into with this particular client, was talking about the ebb and flow of discipline. We cannot push at the same intensity in the same dosage, 365 days a year when it comes to things like strength training and cardio and maybe even. Sort of the discipline of our eating patterns. Discipline ebbs and flows. So you will have periods of the year where you can dig in deep and make significant progress, because you have less stressors, because maybe there’s other things in your life, like season changes that are allowing you to kind of crank up the discipline.

Courtney Townley 10:26
But there are other seasons or periods of the year where we have to reduce the discipline because life just has a lot going on, and so we have to lower the bar of expectation in order to keep showing up for ourselves. And the example I always use when I teach classes on this is athletes. If you look at the training program of an Olympic athlete, they are not training at the same intensity all the time. They go through periods of pushing really hard, and they go through periods of resting really hard, so they are able to push hard again for a time. It’s known as periodization.

Courtney Townley 11:15
Now, as an you know, as a non Olympian, as a regular person, we don’t necessarily have those kinds of intense, organized training schedules, but life has a way of inviting us into the ebb and flow, and when we are Incredibly rigid in our approach to something like exercise, I think it actually becomes unhealthy, because we are paying a price either way. And what I mean by that is, if you, let’s just say, you go to the gym five days a week, and you go for an hour every time and you lift, you’ve been lifting really intensely for several months, when the seasons change, like summer and you have opportunity to move your body outdoors more spend more time with loved ones, have more adventures, but you say no to all of that in order to ensure that you’re still able to train at the same intensity. Is that really health?

Courtney Townley 12:20
I would argue, no, it’s not so the other thing I encourage this client to consider was that there’s so many benefits to moving our bodies more outdoors, because not only are we getting some exercise in but we are also getting sunlight in our eyes, and we are getting fresh air into our lungs, and we’re connecting with nature. There is so much benefit. And the last thing that we kind of talked about in this coaching call was was also getting out of this all or nothing mindset. It doesn’t have to be that I’m training at the intensity that I have for the past several months, and it has to stay exactly that, but it also doesn’t have to be nothing, so maybe you move your workouts to being at home, right some of and you may maybe even reduce your training time.

Courtney Townley 13:20
So instead of doing an hour of strength training, maybe you’re only getting in 20 minutes. I promise you there will come a season right around the corner, probably the fall, where you’re able to ramp things up again. So we finished on this note of really challenging her to consider the possibility that maybe self care this summer looks like riding your bike and swimming and playing with your kids in the yard and taking long walks and going on hikes. That does not have to be a problem. You can make it a problem, but it doesn’t need to be a problem. So again, this first invitation is to embrace moving your body more in the summer, because that really is such a like a clear invitation of the season.

Courtney Townley 14:11
The second thing I would invite you to do to get maximal enjoyment out of your summer and also still administer self care, is embrace the shift in the food supply. So very much, like we often can fall into these patterns of having a rigidity to what exercise is supposed to look like, to the point of it actually harming us. I think we also have a rigidity to the way that we eat, and summer gives us a gives us access to a bounty of fruits and vegetables that we don’t necessarily have access to all year round, at least not locally. I mean, in the age of modern benefits, we certainly can have access to fruits and vegetables all year round. But if you are really trying to. To Eat what’s locally available. We don’t have access to those things all the time, especially if you live in a climate like Montana.

Courtney Townley 15:09
And what I find so interesting is currently, there’s this sort of, you know, in popular culture of diet mentality, there’s a lot of dogma around, certainly only eating carnivore that’s being thrown around a lot. There’s a lot of fear mongering around blood sugar control, that somehow fruits became really dangerous because they are most they are carbohydrate. And of course, carbohydrates are going to elevate your blood sugar. That’s what they do. It doesn’t mean that you can’t eat fruit or that fruit isn’t good for you.

Courtney Townley 15:46
I personally operate from the perspective that I just think nature is so much smarter than humans. I just will always turn to the favor of the wisdom in nature, because there is a reason these things exist, right? And I have long believed that one of the healthiest things that we can do for our bodies is to optimize our protein and eat a ton of vegetables, because there is no carbohydrate on the planet that packs the nutritional value of things like fruits and vegetables, and because summer provides us with more opportunity to eat those things, why not embrace it?

Courtney Townley 16:39
One of the things that I love to remind my students of, and I actually learned this from Dr. Jade Teta, who is an integrated physician specializing in natural health and fitness and body transformation. I had him on the podcast years ago, and he we were talking about how to eat more protein and vegetables on a regular basis, because for people who are not used to doing that, it can be tricky, because protein and vegetables kind of need to be prepared. You know, you got to chop up your veggies, you got to have them on hand, and protein usually needs to be cooked and prepared in some way in order to be edible. Those two things can be a huge barrier for people, because it’s more effort than just grabbing bread out of a bag or grabbing chips out of a bag or grabbing crackers out of a box, right?

Courtney Townley 17:35
So the thing that we talked about, that I loved so much is he talked about the four S’s, and these are basically four categories of meals that allow us to really construct meals from those two primary ingredients, protein and vegetables. So the four S’s are soups, salads, smoothies and stir fries. And summer is an awesome season to eat a lot of those four categories. Again, soups, salads, smoothies and stir fries. All four of those meal groups mainly consist of protein and veggies, and it also keeps things simple. There’s not a lot of ingredients you don’t have to make it complicated. In fact, I would argue most nutritious food is not complicated. It keeps things simple. It keeps things nutritious, and it also keeps things tasting really good, because there’s no end to the variety of soups you can make, or salads you could make, or smoothies or stir fries.

Courtney Townley 18:51
And I know some of you might hear soups and be like, ah, summer, I have no appetite for soups, but things like pispacho ceviche, right? Like there are soups that are served cold, that I think are just you can pack so much nutrition into those so something to consider. So the second invitation, just to remind you, is to embrace the shift in the food supply, packing your veggies and fruits, especially what you can get locally. Because, again, I think there’s a wisdom to nature there that we should be eating what is local to the environment that we live in.

Courtney Townley 19:33
Okay, the third and final invitation I’m going to give you today, and this is probably the biggest and most powerful, is to embrace the experience of being in your body this summer. So many women that I work with rob themselves of the joys that come with summer because they are so consumed by how they look. I. Rather than allowing themselves to be consumed by the experience. So what I mean by this is there is a very big difference between thinking about your body and being in your body. They are not the same thing. So let’s just do a little exercise right now, right in this moment,

Courtney Townley 20:26
I want you to think about your body. How do you feel about your body in this moment in time and this stage of your life? How do you feel about it, if someone came up to you on the street that you know you hadn’t seen in a while, and you got into a conversation and they asked you that question, what would you say? It is very rare when I ask that question that a woman says, I freaking love it. I love my body, and then they go on to describe all the things they love about it, that doesn’t happen. The opposite happens. We talk about all the things we don’t like, the things we wish were different, the things that frustrate us.

Courtney Townley 21:12
Now I want you for just a minute to think about how you feel in your body right now, not about it, but in it that’s a very different exercise, and something that was a huge sort of epiphany for me was when I realized that my body is not the cause of my emotional pain ever. My thoughts about my body are, and man, summer invites us into having a lot of thoughts about our body, right? Because we’re wearing less clothing it’s hot out. We’re we’re, you know, swimming in front of people and doing all of our outdoor activities and all of that discomfort, wearing shorts, wearing a swimsuit, not wanting to wear short sleeves, whatever the whatever the thing is for you, all of that discomfort is a direct result of the thoughts that You have about your body, not about your body itself, like it’s not about the experience of being in your body. It’s about the way that you judge your body.

Courtney Townley 22:30
And here’s a really great truth sear this one on your brain. You cannot think about your body and be fully in the experience of your body at the same time. You if you’re a longtime listener, you often hear me say, you can’t be curious and judgmental at the same time. You can be one or the other. Well, the same is true here. You cannot think about your body and be in the experience of your body at the same time, because the second you start thinking about your body, you pull yourself out of the experience. And this is a really big challenge for most people right, to be in the experience and not be in their heads. The second you have a thought about your body, you are moving into your head and out of your body.

Courtney Townley 23:22
So rather than judging yourself by saying something or thinking something like, I have thick thighs. I have a fat belly. I wish my butt was smaller. I wish my arms were more toned. When you catch yourself in that language having those kinds of thoughts, I want you to start experimenting. Or I should say, I invite you to consider experimenting with shifting to being in the experience of those things. What do your thighs feel like in this moment? What does your belly feel like? What do your hips feel like? What does it feel like to be in those parts of your body?

Courtney Townley 24:07
I’ll give you a few examples here. Right thinking about how you look in shorts is a very different thing than being in the experience of liberating your legs from clothing when it’s hot outside, shorts feel damn good when it’s hot out, regardless of what your legs look like, you can think about your body on the beach rather than being in the experience of being at the beach. And man, how many of you have these stories? I remember talking to a client once who felt like she ruined an entire vacation or missed an entire vacation because she was so caught up in the thoughts she had about her body during the vacation. And that’s exactly what we’re speaking to here.

Courtney Townley 25:02
So the invitation is to be in the experience, versus being the watcher. There’s the thought, but then there’s the direct experience. And the beautiful thing is, there is no shame, there is no guilt. There is no pain when you are in the experience. And when I say pain, I mean emotional pain, right? Like you could very well have some physical pain in the experience of your body, but the emotional pain that we get so caught up in is coming from our thoughts and not the experience. So again, a great question to be asking often and much throughout the summer is, what does it feel like to be in this experience? What does it feel like to be in my body rather than thinking about it?

Courtney Townley 26:02
So really quick recap here the three invitations I’ve given you today to help you enjoy your summer more while simultaneously giving yourself awesome self care. Invitation one, embrace the opportunity to move more, because the summer presents us with a lot of opportunity to move our bodies more if we’re willing to be outside and say yes to those invitations that summer brings. The second invitation is to embrace the shift in the food supply, and the third invitation is to embrace being in your body, rather than constantly thinking about it. I hope that shifts something for you, from for you remember, this is all a practice, but even picking one of these things to try on, it would be really interesting to see how it changes the joy that you experience this summer.

Courtney Townley 27:05
All right, my friends, I hope this helps. If it landed for you, if you enjoyed it, consider either leaving a review for this podcast, they always help, and secondly, consider sharing it with women in your life who may need to hear it. I hope you have a fabulous rest of your summer. I will be back, of course, very shortly to give you another episode, but make the most of it right. Like making the most of your summer is a decision. That’s all it is. Don’t wait for it to come to you, just create it. Go out. Have a great rest of your week, and I’ll see you soon. Take care.

Courtney Townley 27:46
Thank you for listening to the grace and grit podcast. It is time to mend the fabric of the female health story, and it starts with you taking radical responsibility for your own self care. You are worth the effort and with a little grace and grit, anything is possible you.