373: Your Body’s Dashboard: Understanding the Metrics That Drive Health w/ Laini Gray

Transcripts are auto-generated.

Courtney Townley 0:00
If you are a midlife woman who is sick and tired of allowing the bathroom scale to determine your success along your health journey, this Grace and Grit Podcast episode is for you. Today, we are breaking free of the weight obsessed mindset and exploring what really matters along your health journey. So get ready to revolutionize how you measure success? Because there is a whole world of meaningful metrics waiting to be discovered beyond that one number on the bathroom scale.

Courtney Townley 0:30
Welcome to the Grace and 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 0:59
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace and Grit Podcast. I am your host, Courtney Townley, and today I am joined by my dear friend and colleague, Laini Gray. And if you’re a long time listener of the Grace and Grit Podcast, this is not a new name to you. You have heard Laini Gray on this show so many times over the years, and I’m really excited to tell you that Laini and I have decided to have her on the show once a month through all of the rest of 2025 and why? Because I feel like Laini and I really naturally compliment each other’s expertise.

Courtney Townley 1:34
We both are in the wellness industry, obviously, but we kind of have different zones of genius. And I feel like when we have conversations and when we share content together, it better serves you. So I’m deeply passionate about helping women to develop the mindset and the habits they need for lasting behavior change. And while that’s an interest of ladies too, she brings this incredible wealth of knowledge about the intricate biochemistry of our bodies, especially at midlife. So together, we’re able to offer you both the how and the why of making meaningful health transition at midlife.

Courtney Townley 2:12
When we get together, we tend to coordinate our outfits. I don’t know how that happens, but if you’re watching us on YouTube or you’re seeing a video clip, we always tend to wear the same thing. I don’t know how that happens, but we do always have fun. We have great conversations, and those conversations tend to be a combination of sharing our own personal rumbles of traveling through midlife, but also the rumbles that we’re facing with our clients who are traveling through midlife.

Courtney Townley 2:39
I’ll just give you like a short little intro to Laini, but then I’m going to have her introduce herself, because, of course, she will share with you what she wants you to know. So I’ll tell you this, for over two decades, Laini has been working with busy, motivated women to uncover the root causes of their hormonal imbalances, their gut health issues and other chronic symptoms, combining functional lab testing, personalized protocols and education, she empowers her clients to take control of their health by creating sustainable habits that restore balance and energy and joy to their lives. She is funny, she is smart and she is a damn good human so Laini, welcome to the show again.

Laini Gray 3:22
Well, thanks, Courtney. I mean, I don’t really have to say anything else, right?

Courtney Townley 3:28
Tell listeners something they may not know about you, because, again, you’re a familiar face around here. You are definitely familiar in the ears of listeners. Yes, yes, but tell them something they might not know.

Laini Gray 3:39
Oh, well, let’s see, well, business or personal, that’s kind of fun. I was like, Ooh. I was gonna say I’ve seen Lenny Kravitz in concert seven times. I didn’t know that. Very exciting. Yes, no. But really, I’m really passionate about women’s health, especially at midlife, having gone through life with not really any major health concerns or anything like that, just the typical, oh, I had some PMS, some headaches, some gut issues, you know, nothing crazy. But then hitting midlife felt like a ton of bricks, like I did not know what was happening in my body. I was super upset, super frustrated. I’m like, it was really difficult. I struggled to find good health care practitioners and how to help me navigate through this. And so by the time I realized, like, you have the knowledge, get sit down and figure this out, reach out to people that know more. And so I did. So I’ve spent the last five or six years really diving into midlife women’s health, hormones, all of the things. And so I love any opportunity to share that with people so they feel empowered about this stage of life. Because even though it feels a little chaotic. It’s also exciting. It’s an exciting time of life like this is we’re here. We made it. Let’s keep going, definitely.

Courtney Townley 4:47
We decided that we would start this series of conversations with today’s episode, which is really going to be about understanding metrics that drive health. So I titled this your body’s dashboard. And we’re really going to challenge the traditional weight focused approach to health tracking and introduce listeners to a more comprehensive way to monitor their their wellness journey. Because I know that you have probably a million stories around this as well, but I can speak from my own experience that working with so many midlife women over the years watching them apply incredible effort to improve their health, only to allow the scale to rob them of that goodness. It’s so painful to watch, and in fact, I would so I would go so far as to say that solely using the scale as a measurement of progress is a recipe for inconsistency and so much needless suffering.

Laini Gray 5:50
I agree wholeheartedly, wholeheartedly that it’s it’s so incredible that I knew we were going to talk about this, but that’s that we’re still doing that, that women are still doing that, that that’s the only thing they’re gaging. They’re so conditioned when they’re happiness on right? I literally saw something the other day. It says, If you want to be happy, don’t listen to the news and don’t get on the bathroom scale, right? And it’s true, don’t get on the scale like it’s amazing what it will do to your mood. You’ll start off on a good day, and you get on the scale, and then you we’ve let it a lot. We’ve allowed it to totally shift our entire focus for the day based on what this number says.

Courtney Townley 6:25
It’s so true. And I love that you bring that up because I have literally coached on, I don’t know how many coach coaching calls over the years where a woman will tell me, like, how amazing she was feeling and how strong she was feeling, and all the good work that she’d done in the past week, and then she got on the damn scale, and all of that got eradicated, and just with one number, yeah, because she put all of her stock in her six, all her stock for success in that one number. So I want to say here and now, in case you are new to the show and you have never heard me go on this rant before, that you can lose a tremendous amount of weight and still be metabolically obese. You can rock a bikini and you can hate your life. You can have perfect, Instagram worthy physique, whatever the hell that is, and have a wildly dysregulated nervous system or really wonky hormones. And I know Laini that you and I both have stories in our own personal life, of kind of chasing the number or chasing the physique, only to kind of find out that, Oh, that wasn’t actually telling the whole story. Do you have something you want to share on that?

Laini Gray 7:33
Oh, completely. And I think this is, I mean, I remember this conversation I had, and it was back. It’s been over 10 years ago, probably closer to 15 years ago, and I was really hung up on this five pounds, five pounds, Courtney, five, just five, right? I mean, my pants fit. Nothing was wrong. Five pounds and I was doing blood chemistry. I was had been gaining muscle, I was doing body fat, all these things. And I was so hung up on this five pounds, and I was teaching a class about gratitude, or something like that, about how we have so many things to be grateful for, and I asked myself the question, what would losing five pounds change in my life? Yeah, would I have more friends? No, would my husband love me anymore? No, would I have a better job? No, do you know what I started thinking about, all the things that were wonderful in my life, and five pounds didn’t affect any part of my life. Yeah. I was like, stop it. Why are you thinking that your life isn’t successful or happy because of this five pounds, this number on the scale? When you feel good, you have people that love you, you have a great job, you have this family. It was ridiculous. And I was like, at that point, I was like, I really have to shift this, because we talk about it all the time. You should love yourself. You should look at all these things. Guess what? We have to remind ourselves that too.

Courtney Townley 8:51
Yeah. And you know, what’s ironic is by focusing, hyper focusing on those five pounds. Because, let’s be honest, it wasn’t just focusing, it was hyper focusing. Yes, and it’s costing you time in your relationships. It’s costing you confidence. It’s costing you energy you could be spending elsewhere, like it’s literally taking away from the things that we delude ourselves into thinking it’s going to enhance. Yes,

Courtney Townley 9:13
yeah, I’m gonna share one story. I have so many stories, but I think one of the most like poignant moments in my life, having to do with kind of chasing a physique and or body even body fat percentage, because I think I was very in the throes of that for a period of my life, but when I had my son, I’ve shared this story many times, but it’s just again, such a pivotal moment in my life. I always say that a lot of women entered motherhood like, you know, like all grace filled and beautiful rainbows, butterflies, I was not at all that picture, okay? I was a train wreck. And I remember feeling like everything was imploding, right? My marriage was imploding, my health, like health on every level, like my mental and emotional health, especially because my whole identity had been obliterated. It seemed overnight with this like seven pound gelatinous blob that I was gifted, and the only thing people wanted to talk about when they came over to visit me was how quick I lost the baby weight. And at that moment, I think I’d already been in the throes of working with a lot of women on this very issue. So it was already kind of in my brain, but I think in that phase of my life, I really started to see, like, What the hell are we doing? Like this, the way that we’re defining health, and the way that we’re sort of conditioning women to think about health, which is really a number on the scale, is absolutely insane. So good.

Courtney Townley 10:44
I love that we both have those. And again, I know we have a lot more than that, but for time’s sake, we’ll kind of move on. I would love to explore with you, like, why we have been so fixated on the scale. Like, how did we get here? How did we get into this place of feeling like the scale harbors all this amazing information about our life.

Laini Gray 11:05
You know, it’s really interesting. It’s our society has trained us to do this, right? And it goes back decades. All of a sudden we started talking about a certain body type, and all of a sudden this was marketed to us from our doctors. It was in the commercials. And there was a size that you needed to be, and there was all of these things. And we started, I mean, I’ve seen commercials of women tried to lose weight 50 years ago, right? And we’ve carried this on and on and on. And then we have this whole model industry where we see these skinny models, and they look happy, and they’re out there doing all the things. And so we have this really unrealistic expectation of happiness. I think part of it is yeah. And so we equate looking like something else with happy, and they’re totally different things,

Courtney Townley 11:52
yeah? And I want to, I want to, I want to speak to this really quickly, because I think it’s, it’s so overlooked in modern society, and it’s so important to highlight that I feel like we swung on a spectrum from hyper, focusing on thinness, that kind of being this, like pursuit, to now almost being like elite level fit. And look, I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with pursuing being fit, like, come on. Obviously, that’s what we want for everybody, is to kind of go that direction, but to become 14% body fat with a six, six pack abs and competing in the CrossFit Games at midlife. Like I think people underestimate the cost of that, and so I just think that that kind of goes along with this conversation of the expectations that we have for what our body is supposed to look like at this age and stage of life,

Laini Gray 12:49
I’m gonna jump in right there and say the other piece of that equation, because we’ve also been learning, thank goodness, that we should love ourselves and appreciate that we have different body sizes and so We do, we have people that are still going crazy with the exercise, with trying to be the next level of everything. And then we have that camp of this is who I am. Love me, how I am, yeah, right. And so that’s why the health metrics are going to be really important that we talk about. So the size may not matter necessarily, but what’s going on inside? What are the other markers of health that we really need to look at?

Courtney Townley 13:23
Absolutely. Yeah, so let’s be very clear on what the scale does tell you. It tells you your relationship to gravity. And I like when I have conversations with my clients who are on a weight loss journey and they are using the scale as kind of a one of many metrics that they’re tracking. I often remind them that obviously, in a week, you’re going to see the scale go all over the place, right? It doesn’t just stay at a consistent level and just nicely dip down. That’s not the way the scale plays. But I think what we can reap value from is that when the scale goes up pretty significantly in a short period of time, it’s marking inflammation, and that can be a really powerful use of the scale to see and question, okay, what did I do in the last 24 hours that might have caused this kind of inflammatory response? Do you have more thoughts on this, like the value of the scale?

Laini Gray 14:17
Yeah. I mean, when you said that, I mean, my mother had congestive heart failure. So she had to weigh every day, because it was going to say how much water was being stuck around her heart. So that’s how she determined how much of her medication she would take. Was what the scale was, because it was determining how much do we need to pull off the body so that your heart can function. So that is a really good thing. When your scale jumps up five or seven pounds overnight, you did not gain five or seven pounds of fat overnight, just like you didn’t lose five pounds overnight either. That’s not how metabolism works, but it’s a clue as to what is the body holding on to, or what did it clear out. So it can be a very useful tool just to assess what’s happening on a daily basis.

Courtney Townley 14:59
Yeah, and I. Think it’s important to mention too that it’s not just about the weight gain, like if you lose a significant amount of weight in a relatively short period of time, and you’re not trying, you can’t think of any reason why that would be happening. That’s really good to know, because there’s probably something going on that needs to be addressed. So what your body weight doesn’t tell you, and what the scale doesn’t tell you is a much longer list. It doesn’t tell you about the amount of muscle mass you have on your body. It doesn’t tell you how efficiently your cells are doing their job. It doesn’t tell you how much you like yourself or the life that you’re living. It doesn’t tell you how emotionally or mentally healthy you are. It doesn’t tell you about the health of your relationships. What would you add to this?

Laini Gray 15:43
It doesn’t tell you a lot of things, right? It doesn’t tell you how well your digestive system is working. It doesn’t tell you how your lipid panel is it doesn’t tell you how your neurons are firing in your brain and how your memory is functioning, right? Your brain function. All of these things that make you you, that make you live an exciting life are not assessed by the weight on the scale. Yeah,

Courtney Townley 16:06
yeah, I love it. It’s such a good reminder. Okay, I want to pause right now and just have listeners ask themselves this question, and we can both kind of consider this as well, but think about a time when you felt your absolute healthiest. Was it actually about a number on the scale, or was it about how you felt, how you moved, how you showed up in your life, how you connected with other people? Like, what would you say is true for you?

Laini Gray 16:31
I will say, when I am the happiest in my life, my stress level is down. I wake up rested. I’m giving back to the world. I feel like I have purpose. I’m connecting with my friends and family. I’m having fun, I’m eating good food. I’m outside. Usually has nothing to do with the number on the scale.

Courtney Townley 16:52
Yeah, absolutely. And even at your healthiest, like, like the healthiest you have felt in your life. Do you think that you were at your lowest weight? No, no, I will say that’s absolutely true of me too. My lowest weight, I was the most miserable, yeah, totally. Because what it took for me to be there was a full time job,

Laini Gray 17:11
yes, and I really like ice cream,

Courtney Townley 17:15
right? Yeah. So listeners, whoever’s listening to this today, I hope you will extend yourself the courtesy of asking yourself that question, like really consider where you felt your healthiest and was that your leanest weight? For so many of you listening, it’s probably not going to be Yeah, and that’s such a great thing to recognize. So one of the things I know both you and I emphasize as coaches, is to not just measure progress in your health journey in one way, right? We should have a multitude of ways. And why is this true? Like, why do you tell your clients that’s important?

Laini Gray 17:53
Because we have to think about how you’re feeling. What’s your energy level at right? They come. When clients come to me, they’re usually exhausted. They have no energy to get through the day. They’re bloated, they’re constipated, they just don’t feel good. They don’t they’re not enjoying time with their family. They feel overstressed at work. And so the scale has nothing to do with that. It was we’ve just established. So we have to talk about, okay, how are your bowel movements? How is your energy? Did you sleep well last night? These are important things to talk about so we can assess how progress is, is going with our plan?

Courtney Townley 18:24
Yeah, for sure. And I would add to that, that, like, I’m, you know, I’m always saying, like, health is not just physical, it’s so multi factorial, yeah, right. It’s mental, it’s emotional, it’s spiritual, it’s the health of our relationships. Like, all of these things play a role, and so different metrics help us to capture different aspects of health. So we’re not just looking at a blood profile, we’re not just looking at a hormone panel, we’re not just asking ourselves the question, how do I feel today? All of those things are important, but any one metric on its own isn’t really telling you the full story. I would also say that, you know, for a lot of my clients, when they’re tracking multiple metrics, it really helps them to stay motivated. When one metric isn’t moving in the direction they want it to go. Yes, so someone’s weight might not be moving down, but their cholesterol number might be improving.

Laini Gray 19:19
Yes, this is super important, because they’re doing all the right things. I literally just had a message today. I’m feeling a lot better. My bowels are really good, but the weight is not changing, right? I mean, she literally started with the things that were going well, but then she’s still really put the butt in there, but, and then, how do we get the weight to change?

Courtney Townley 19:39
Yes, right? Yes. And how often do we see this with strength training? Right? Women are getting stronger. They’re getting their they have more mobility. Their quality of life is going up because they’re getting more resilient in their body. And yet the scale is not moving. And so they again, because we hyper focus on the scale, we take all that goodness and chuck it in the dumpster and.

Laini Gray 20:00
What a tragedy it is, especially because when we’re doing the exercise, when we’re eating, well, we actually are feeling good about ourselves. We’re feeling good, we’re feeling like we’re progressing, we’re doing we’re taking care of our health. We’re moving more we’re like, I feel more alive. And then, yeah, getting really sad about this one little thing,

Courtney Townley 20:19
absolutely so the takeaway here for listeners is with metrics. Make sure that you’re tracking multiple metrics along your journey, and we’ll give you some ideas here for metrics you can track. But I do just want to kind of give a little plug here for a little class that you and I are teaching inside of Rumble and Rise soon. It’s basically a class that I we teach every month called Base Camp, which is all focused on biochemistry. And this class is just taking what you’re hearing today on the podcast. It’s just going deeper.

Courtney Townley 20:54
We’re going to talk about specific tests, about things that we should be looking for in specific tests, the frequency with which you should get those tests, things of that nature. So if you are enjoying this conversation today, you want to kind of expand the way you’re thinking about collecting metrics along your health journey. We’re giving this to you totally free, so you can head on over to graceandgrit.com/metrics, and you will just put your little email address in there, and we will send you the replay of the class.

Courtney Townley 21:25
What you’re about to hear here, in terms of the types of things that you can track in your health journey, are the types of things we’re going to go deeper into in this class. So the first category of metrics is what we call the qualitative metrics. So the definition of this, I’m just going to read it, because I think it’s just really straightforward. It’s non numerical, descriptive measures that provide insight into a person’s overall well being, health behaviors and experiences. These metrics capture the subjective aspects of health that cannot be easily quantified, but are equally as important in understanding and improving well being.

Courtney Townley 22:07
This would include things like your energy levels, your mood stability, your sleep quality, your digestive regularity, your stress resilience, your joint mode, like we could go on and on, right? Like there is no end to this list of things that we could track in terms of just kind of quality of living. How rested do you feel in the morning? How happy do you feel about your life? What else would you add to this list? Laney,

Laini Gray 22:35
yeah. How much time do you have with family and friends? Are you connecting with people? That’s one of the biggest ones that I feel when I talk to people, I’m like, What do you miss? Do you have a support system? And they say yes, and I’m like, How often do you see them? Not often enough. Yeah. Well, that’s a metric right there. If you’re not seeing people that lift you up and encourage you to keep going, that’s something we can work on. Yeah.

Courtney Townley 22:56
And also, I think another important one is just, how much are you enjoying your health journey, how much are you enjoying your life? Yeah, oh, completely. If you’re not able to rate that fairly high, you need to take a look at that, because I guarantee, if you find more ways to enjoy yourself, your health metrics are probably going to do a lot better.

Laini Gray 23:15
And we have science to prove that now. We have science to prove that your quality of life, how happy you are, and how connected you are and how much purpose you have in your life directly relates to how healthy you are,

Courtney Townley 23:26
yeah, absolutely, which I can totally see. So, you know, when we hear this, like these qualitative health metrics, it’s like, well, how do you track that? Because it’s not just a number, but we can make it a number. Like the thing that I’m constantly using with my own clientele is just the scale from one to 10, yeah, so for any of the things we just mentioned, your happiness level, your sleep quality, your energy levels, you can just rate those things on a scale from one to 10. One being terrible, 10 being exceptional. Where would you rate yourself? And then you do that each week. And hopefully, if you’re taking measures to improve those things, you’ll be able to scale yourself higher. Wow. What are other ways that you can think of for how people can measure this type of metric?

Laini Gray 24:12
Well, I mean, I think journaling is really important for sure. You know, starting your day and ending your day with what went well, what can I do better? And actually making a note of, Oh, I did have coffee with a friend, or I did go, you know, have a conversation at the gym. Because when you start remembering and writing these things down mentally, you put that you create this like savings account of good things that are happening in your life, right? And so it’s really important to write them down, or we forget. We have so much on our plate, we forget the good and then focus on the bad Absolutely.

Courtney Townley 24:43
How often do your clients complain to you? Do they just don’t have the motivation? Yeah, and it’s like, well, how often are you looking at what’s going well? How often are you acknowledging what’s going well? Because if you did that, as often as you’re acknowledging what’s not going well, I guarantee you’d find motivation. Yeah. Oh completely, because acknowledging your wins feels good it does, and we want to do more of that. And also, I think, just describing how certain things feel like, just checking in with your mood like and seeing like, how often am I saying that I feel happy or light or peaceful versus depressed and angry and hostile, right? Or even with your digestion, like, do I often feel bloated? Is that a word I’m using a lot? Those are all metrics that we can pay attention to, very different from what we’re about to go into here, which is quantitative metrics, which is something entirely different, much more specific, but again, when we’re considering the whole human we have to have really both camps of metrics to be able to get a pulse on on someone’s health.

Laini Gray 25:50
And I’m just gonna interject real quick, Courtney, because you know, when someone comes to work with either of us, and we’re always talking about tracking things, when someone comes in and says, Well, I feel like crap. When’s the last time you felt like crap. And you can’t tell them I felt like crap five days in a row. You have to be tracking these qualitative things. You have to be tracking that. How many days did you have a headache? I have a headache a lot. Or, you know, it needs to be tracked. You have to track it so that we can make changes, so that we can see the progress

Courtney Townley 26:18
Absolutely. And I know I’ve had the experience a lot. I’m sure you have too where you have been working with a client for a while who has been tracking both quantitative and qualitative metrics, and then they go to a doctor’s appointment and they’re like, oh my gosh, my doctor was so psyched because I had all this information that I’d been tracking, and it was really easy to kind of pinpoint what our next steps should be, yes, so definitely hear you on that. Okay, quantitative metrics is, again, I’ll read you just kind of this very rote description, because, again, I think it’s just very straightforward. Quantitative health metrics are numerical metrics that provide objective data about someone’s health and well being so these metrics are based on standardized methods of collection, making them easy to track, analyze and compare over time. So Laney, I’m gonna let you give us a bunch of examples of this, because it’s, I feel like it’s really in your field, right? Of like being Functional Diagnostic practitioner, you track a lot of quantitative metrics.

Laini Gray 27:17
Yeah, I really do. Because when I work with people, I’m like, we need to take a look under the hood, yeah, and kind of see what’s going on. And we can’t do that unless we test it. So when we think about the very basic one, blood chemistry, blood chemistry, right is getting our annual blood work done. Because we get to see what’s going on in our glucose, in our metabolism, our the health of our organs, how we’re detoxing, how our immune system is functioning, we get to see glimpses of what’s going on on the inside by looking at our blood work every year. And we know this, it’s part of medicine. It’s covered by insurance annually, to get in there and look at the blood and track what’s going on so we can see if something bad’s happening or if something’s coming up. We can actually monitor those things. It’s really powerful. And then when we’re talking about hormones and gut health, we have more specific testing that we can really look at what’s happening in my microbiome, what’s going on with my hormones, how am I metabolizing things? And we can get really specific about where things might be a little dysfunctional and might need a little support. So that’s super powerful with doing testing. I love testing because it answers so many questions as to, why do I feel this way?

Courtney Townley 28:26
Yeah, absolutely. And even things as simple as, like, your heart rate variability, your glucose right, which I know you’re tracking right now wearing a heart glucose monitor, tracking our workouts, like, how well are you recovering? Right? Like, we can track our heart rate variability? Yes, there’s so many metrics that we can track. And some of you listening to this might be like, Okay, now you’re overwhelming, right? Because there are so many quantitative metrics that we can track, and it does become overwhelming. So this is, I think, where the question comes in, like, how do you decide? Like, if I’m going, I understand the importance of tracking more than one thing, but when is it too much like, and how do I know I’m tracking things that are really important to where I’m at in my health journey,

Laini Gray 29:12
you know? And that’s that’s a loaded question, but it really comes down to, are you working with a practitioner or a provider or a coach that can help you navigate that choice? And then what is really important to you? What is your goal? From my perspective, I’m like, you should be doing blood work and lab work every year so we can check in. Then when we get that, for example, if all of the you know, insulin resistance markers are high and the glucose is off, then maybe wearing a glucose monitor is the answer. Maybe that’s what we focus on for a while. What I see most often, though, is that hormones are kind of out of whack. Digestion is out of whack. And we talk about stress, and nobody wants to believe that they’re stressed, and they want to believe that they can survive on five hours of sleep.

Courtney Townley 29:51
Well, they’ve all normalized stress, so it doesn’t feel like they’re stressed. Well, they’ve been there for so long, yeah.

Laini Gray 29:55
And they think they’re okay. They’re like, No, I feel really good. I’m like, believe me, I’ve been there, but, oh, I feel. Better than I did at this one time, but that doesn’t mean I don’t still have stress. So I have found heart rate variability and sleep quality to be something I really enjoy tracking. Yeah, yeah. Because if when I wake up and I’m tired, I’m like, Oh yeah, I didn’t really sleep well, and I can actually see some feedback as to why I’m feeling that way, yeah.

Courtney Townley 30:21
And I think there’s things like you mentioned, right, going in and having annual blood work done and getting kind of your standardized Western medicine tests done each year, I think that’s, that’s a given, and that’s kind of a it’s a good thing for everyone to be doing, yeah, but in terms of the rest of metrics, I think if someone’s listening to this and really feeling lost, like I would say two things. Number one, either pick, and you said this like you I’m echoing this pick where you’re rumbling like, pick something to track in an area you’re rumbling in. If you have low energy, track your energy levels. Yeah, right. If you know, every year you go get your blood work done, your glucose is through the roof. Maybe you should start tracking blood sugar, right?

Courtney Townley 31:03
Like use your rumbles as your kind of navigation tools completely track those things specifically. But if you don’t really, maybe you feel like you have so many rumbles, like everything is a rumble, or you can’t really specifically think of exactly what you’re rumbling with, I would just approach it kind of like I do health in general. I always tell people, it doesn’t matter where we start, let’s just pick something to start with, to start unpacking stress, and we’ll improve your health. And I kind of believe that about metrics, let’s track anything, yeah, and let’s just see where it leads us. You might find that certain metrics aren’t really taking you anywhere, amazing, because it’s just not really not telling you, or it’s always staying the same. So great.

Courtney Townley 31:48
We should move on to another metric, right? But pick something, or some, a few things to start tracking so you can get more information. And I always say, when you have more information, it helps you get out of drama and more into the data. Right? Data over drama is a really lovely place to be. Yeah. So we’re going to get into our class. We’re going to talk a little bit more on the details of how often to test certain things. So we’re not going to talk about that too much here today, but I would like to, before we close this out, talk a little bit about the importance of avoiding obsessive tracking, because I think, like the scale, any measurement can become an obsession 100% and so what are some things that you would want a listener to know about avoiding obsessive tracking,

Laini Gray 32:39
if it adds more stress to your life and you find yourself being frustrated, don’t do it. Don’t do it. So one of the things I will ask, I will say, well, we need to talk about nutrition, because usually everybody has to do some nutrition, you know, resetting and cleaning up. And I say, How does tracking your food or logging? I don’t like that. Okay, then let’s not, let’s aim for a certain amount of protein on the plate, right? We can do things that don’t have to stress you out. If you work on a computer and do data all day long, you probably don’t want to track any more data, right? Let’s look at something else. Let’s journal how we’re feeling it really and getting into that point where, now, oh, now I can’t now I’m not going to go to bed because my my watch says it’s not bedtime yet, or I have to go to bed in my 10,000 steps or whatever, right? That kind of obsessive, because it’s, it’s not a pure science. Everything is a little it’s not exactly all the time. Even body composition is not a perfect science, right? So can you get so tuned into it that you’re wound up tight and you’re just like, so upset about everything that’s not a good way to track.

Courtney Townley 33:41
So kind of taking that a little further, I would say any type of tracking that starts to diminish your mental well being, yes, you probably should reconsider. It doesn’t mean you’ll never go back to it. Like, I know people go on and off with the scale all the time, you know, but when you really feel like it’s just causing more harm than good, and you’re it’s causing you, like you said, more stress than it’s helping you. It’s probably time to step away. Yeah, I’m not saying King anything else you would add to that in terms of, like, tips for avoiding obsessive tracking,

Laini Gray 34:15
just getting really clear with what it is that your goal is. What makes you happy, what are the values you have in your life, and what do you want out of life? And then assessing how that tracking is getting you there, right? If you are tracking so much, and you’re like, oh my gosh, I can’t miss my nine, nine o’clock bedtime, and your husband’s like, just got home from a trip. Like, that’s not good. You now, now you’re losing the value of your relationship because you’re so synced into your tracking, and you don’t want to upset that. So you have to think about all those aspects of life and of health, and there is going to be a balance. It’s not just this straight line, and there’s never any challenges. So you have to have a little flexibility in that as well.

Courtney Townley 34:53
Yeah, I often think of, like, I often use the word dosage, like, it all comes down to dosage. Like. How often are you like you gave the example of, you know, negotiating your bedtime to spend time with your husband. And that can be a beautiful thing, if you’re doing it every night, right? Maybe you need to reconsider, like, what’s going on that’s making that happen. But the same with data, like, it’s great, you know, the scale can be a great tool. It is a tool. The tool is not the problem, it’s the way it’s being used. And if you are using it to the point of obsession and to the point of self destruction, then you need to recalibrate the dose, and maybe that means actually pulling completely away from the tool for a while. I would add just kind of other things to consider with the obsessive tracking is maybe focusing on trends over time rather than like the daily fluctuations.

Courtney Townley 35:46
So even with weight, I’ll often encourage my clients to take their average for the week, rather than obsessing so much about how much it went up and down each day, because that can make us crazy. Yes, but when we see the average this week is slightly lower than last week. That’s amazing, also maybe minimizing how much you’re tracking. In terms of how many metrics are you tracking? We talked about a lot of possibilities today, but we’re not by any stretch of the imagination encouraging you to go track all those things. So pick maybe three to five. Would you say? Like? Is that like? Is that a number you would kind of roll with?

Laini Gray 36:21
Yeah.

Courtney Townley 36:22
Okay. And then the other thing, and this is a big part of the work that I do with my clients, is metrics are only as potent as what you make them mean. Okay, so you can make a number on the scale mean amazing things about yourself or horrible things about yourself, and the effect that that is going to have on your mental well being is completely within your control. So data is just factual information. Your blood pressure is this? Your heart rate is this, right? Your glucose number right now is this, now that you know the number, what are you going to make it mean that I suck, that I’m never going to I’m never going to figure this out. I’m the unhealthiest person on the planet. Like, be very careful what you make those metrics mean. I’m not saying it doesn’t mean there’s room for improvement, because a lot of times it does. That’s exactly what it’s pointing to. But it could just mean that, like, Oh, this is an area where I could, you know, up my game a little bit, yeah, rather than going into this whole dialog of sort of mean girl vitriol, right?

Laini Gray 37:37
Well, you know what I’m just thinking as you’re saying this, think about the report card of an elementary student. Yeah, it’s data, right? You’re getting the facts. That’s all it is. And then. But the thing that’s different about an elementary school teacher, they’ll say needs improvement on listening in class like they actually give you some feedback as to what’s going to help that score or that report, right? And so we have to parent herself, teacher ourself, to say, Okay, here’s the information. This is what I could do to improve, or I can let it be or let’s maintain. It doesn’t have to be this big, horrible experience or whatever, right? We just have to look at that information and then come up with a plan with how we’re going to deal with it 100%

Courtney Townley 38:16
and 100% and I’ll share this because I think it’s really relevant to the to this conversation that, you know, that, like, what was it? 2020, I went into my primary care giver, and she was like, you know, Courtney, your platelets are consistently high. I think we need to check it out. So I was sent to an oncologist, hematologist, which that label alone, like freaks your brain out. And, you know, she told me, she’s like, look, this could be like, one of three things, like, you either have low iron, you have a blood disorder, or you have cancer. And I was like, well, let’s go with number one. Yeah, I vote for that. Long story short, she came back and said, You know, it’s after I did a bone marrow biopsy. I did have to get a bone marrow biopsy, and I have a blood disorder that is classified as it’s a blood cancer, which I think is crazy, because if you’re going to have anything labeled as a cancer, this is the best thing to have, because I will die with it, not from it, but it’s because I have a genetic mutation. How that mutated? Why that happened? I have no idea.

Courtney Townley 38:18
But here’s what’s really interesting, just kind of summarizing everything we’ve talked about in this episode, especially this qualitative and quantitative category of metrics. When I had that test done, I’m fit. I feel like I’m doing everything right, like I had absolutely and still to this day, have never had a symptom of this blood disorder, but my if I had not gotten my blood work done, I never would have known, right and now it’s like, I kind of know the symptoms to be looking for, because my blood is basically sticky. So I’m just a little bit I’m definitely in a higher category of having a stroke or a heart attack. Back because I have thick blood, but now that I know better, I can check in with those quantitative metrics, like, do I have a headache? Like, do I feel like I’m hydrated? These things matter to that condition.

Courtney Townley 40:15
And then, of course, getting my blood work tested more frequently to make sure I’m controlling my platelets is a part of that. So that just kind of like, I don’t know if that helps anyone listening, but it just kind of helps to show, I think, the the comprehensive need for both sides of these metrics, because we don’t always feel symptoms, and something can be askew, and sometimes we know we don’t feel right, but our blood is our blood work is showing that everything’s great. So both matter.

Laini Gray 40:48
Yeah, they really do, for sure. And I mean, and on that, that’s an interesting so I’ll share mine, which is kind of the opposite. I had an emergency surgery where my colon twisted. I remember this, yes, right? And it came out of nowhere. And literally, was like, You’re the gut health girl. How could that happen to you? Well, it has nothing to do with your gut. I had immobile colon, and if we’ll get into that some other time about how grief affects your organs and your systems, because it was after my mom had passed. But yeah, so I had to have emergency surgery. They took 12 inches of my colon, and then my metric for recovery was if I was pooping, that was the metric. If you can’t poop, come back and let us know. Do you know what I mean? So I actually did have to use the qualitative, yeah, I’m having regular bowel movements. My tongue is no longer white from all the antibiotics and everything they put in my system so that I could assess, yes, my system is recovering. So it is, it’s a whole picture. We have to look at all of the pieces. And, yeah, once you have something or get some information, it actually gives you a purpose, so that you could track things a little more diligently, because you need, you, you need to, or you want to, for your own health and well being.

Courtney Townley 41:57
Yeah, and I know you and I are both huge advocates like you, you call it like being a health detective, right? Like becoming our own health detective. And I always call it self leadership, that tracking these metrics just allows us to advocate for ourselves in a much more power filled way, and that that’s, that’s the real genius of it and the beauty of it. So in closing, what would you like listeners to know just in relationship to this conversation?

Laini Gray 42:24
If anything that the scale is only one metric, it doesn’t really tell you anything about your overall health, your overall happiness. Once you get clear on what it is you really want, what you value and where you want to go, you can pick the metric that actually does the most good for your individual life?

Courtney Townley 42:42
Yeah, absolutely. And I would just piggyback that and say that, you know you’re there’s that quote, I first heard it from Elizabeth Gilbert, but it’s not an Elizabeth Gilbert quote, but it’s, you get to be a masterpiece and a work in progress simultaneously. And I think that’s what metrics, they allow us to kind of see the work in progress part, right? But also know that your metrics don’t define who you are. It’s just giving you some factual information about the way your chemistry is functioning and what might need to be recalibrated, and it allows you to lead yourself more powerfully.

Courtney Townley 43:16
But in order to do that, you have to be able to do both, you have to be able to acknowledge how amazing and deserving you are, and you have to be radically honest with yourself, which doesn’t always feel awesome, right? Like we all have stuff that we’re doing that we could do better, that, you know, if we’re in total denial about it, doesn’t bode well for our health. So really being truthful with yourself about where the dosage of things might be a little too much. Like, how many nights are you going, only getting four hours of sleep, right? Like, how many chips are you really eating? How much alcohol are you really drinking? How much negative self chatter Do you really have? Like, the more honest we are with ourselves. I feel like the better work we can do in this, in this whole arena. So that would be my, my, those would be my parting words. Love it.

Courtney Townley 44:10
Thanks for being here. Always fun conversations with you. Hopefully listeners feel the same way, because we’re going to be having more of these. And just a reminder, if you do want to go another layer down into kind of specific questions you can be asking yourself, specific testing that you can be getting. And again, we can’t possibly cover the whole gamut of this conversation in just one more class, but we’re definitely go just a little bit deeper in our base camp class, which we are giving listeners for free. It will be accessible once this podcast episode drops, and all you have to do is head on over to graceandgrit.com/metrics, you’ll drop your email and we will send you a replay of that class.

Courtney Townley 44:53
Thanks for being here. Laini,

Laini Gray 44:55
thank you,

Courtney Townley 44:55
yeah, and thank you to the listeners for being here, and we look forward to seeing you. Again very soon, take care. Bye.

Courtney Townley 45:09
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.