381: The Crossroads of Modern Health: Navigating the Integration of Medicine and Lifestyle Practices

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Courtney Townley 0:00
The landscape of wellness is changing. There are so many things available to us that weren’t available to us just a few years ago, a couple of those things being medical interventions, like pharmaceuticals. So there’s a lot of conversation and usage of things like GLP ones, hormone replacement therapy is, thank God, becoming more available and a much more discussed topic for women, a lot of people are using things to help them sleep, so on and so forth.

Courtney Townley 0:28
So in this episode of the Grace and Grit podcast, I wanted to explore the integration of those types of therapies with behavior change, because I think it’s really negligent not to honor that those things, of course, can absolutely help to improve the health of a midlife woman, if they are used properly and if they are integrated with other changes that a woman is making in her life. So if that sounds like something that you would be interested in, stick around, because that’s exactly where we’re going in the show today.

Courtney Townley 1:02
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 1:30
Hello, my friends and welcome to the Grace and Grit podcast. I am your host, Courtney Townley, and as always, I’m really delighted that you decided to join me today. It is a very exciting time to be a part of the health and wellness industry. And I say that because the landscape is changing pretty dramatically. And while, of course, there’s a lot of ways in which I wish it was changing faster, there are a lot of notable changes that are incredibly positive.

Courtney Townley 2:02
For example, the fact that we are having a bigger conversation around the importance of being strong and able as we age as women, versus just being thin, right? Like this whole skinny conversation and this aspiration to be as thin as possible is starting to fade. There’s also a lot more emphasis on nutrient absorption and gut health and digestive health. So while of course, what you eat will always be important, what you absorb is actually most important, and that’s a great conversation that is happening more often. There’s a lot more recognition of the mind body connection and the importance of things like mental and emotional and emotional health, we’re really starting to confront health as a multi dimensional conversation, rather than just a one dimensional conversation.

Courtney Townley 3:14
There’s a lot more, a lot more research and education and conversation around Hormonal Health, which is long overdue, because not only have women been massively underserved, research of women’s biology has been massively underfunded, an entire generation of women lost out on taking hormone replacement therapy. So the fact that we are talking so much more about hormones and the role that they play in health, especially midlife health, is just incredible. We’re focusing more on lifestyle change rather than just quick fixes.

Courtney Townley 4:06
Now I will say that there are still so many quick fixes being sold out there, and maybe that will always be the case, but I do feel that consumers are getting smarter, right, and educators are becoming better educators in that it isn’t just it’s not a quick fix. Health is not a quick fix. It’s a lifelong journey, and one hopefully we will be committed to for as long as we have breath in our lungs. There’s a lot more emphasis on things like sleep quality and stress management as core pillars of health versus just hyper focusing on diet and exercise. And then there’s this whole realm of pharmaceutical support. Supports that are starting to be used in integration as a part of a wellness journey. So pharmaceutical supports being things like hormone replacement therapy, which I mentioned, but also GLP ones, sleep therapies, certainly, antidepressants had been around for a while, right?

Courtney Townley 5:24
These are all pharmaceutical supports that are not meant to replace behavior change, but they can absolutely help to support chemistry in a way that allows someone to show up to take care of themselves more easily, and that’s really what I want to explore in this podcast today, is the pharmaceutical supports as an integral part of a wellness strategy. And I want to start by saying that I’ve kind of avoided this conversation for a long time, for a few reasons. Number one, I am never going to tell a client what to do with these types of things. I’m not a physician. It is not within my professional realm to be having those conversations, right?

Courtney Townley 6:21
What you decide to do in terms of pharmaceutical supports is between you and your provider. But I also feel like I needed more information to understand the value and to sort of start forming some of my own understanding around these things. And so I want to say from the outset that it’s not that I’m for or against pharmaceutical measures in order to support your wellness journey. I will say what I always say, which is, it depends on the person, it depends on the situation, and ultimately, it is a decision that you need to make in the best interest of yourself, obviously with the support of the proper medical team. But to me, that is what self leadership is, and that’s what I’m a fan of, right? I’m it will always and forever be an advocate of self leadership in the health arena. So I will never judge your decision for what you decide to do. However, I will always and forever be promoting that whatever you decide to do, you integrate it with the fundamentals of lifestyle change that helps to promote health. Because I don’t believe that any pharmaceutical on its own can help to optimize health, right?

Courtney Townley 7:55
We also need to play our role in the heavy lifting. So just to be clear, when I say pharmaceutical supports, I’m referring to hormone replacement therapy, which is a really big conversation in the population I work with, because I work largely with midlife women, weight management, medications, sleep supports, like I said, antidepressants, other medications that might be prescribed in order to address specific health concerns. And a lot of my clients use both right. A lot of my clients come to work with me to help with the behavior change side of their wellness strategy while simultaneously also working with a medical professional in order to help navigate whatever medical support they are using.

Courtney Townley 8:54
So I would say probably 3040, maybe up to 50% of my clientele is using some kind of medical support in their journey. And again, in case I didn’t make this very clear, this is a both and conversation, right? I think that medical supports, without the behavior change, will only get you so far, and they probably won’t create any kind of lasting change. And for some people, hyper focusing only on the lifestyle changes without the medical supports makes things impossibly hard for them. So I really want to address the crossroads and of these two things, and I think we enter those waters by talking first about the power of pharmaceutical supports. So ultimately, something like HRT, something like a GLP, one can help someone to manage symptoms that are interfering with their quality of life. Thrive. So just a few examples that you may be familiar with are for the HRT conversation, right? Things like hot flashes and joint pain and night sweats and lack of sleep and moodiness or irritability and 1000 other things.

Courtney Townley 10:20
If you have read one book on the menopausal transition, which I hope if you’re a regular listener of this show, you’ve read at least one, and I can give you a list of lots of books to read, but if you’ve read at least one, you are aware that there are just hundreds of symptoms that can show up during the menopausal transition, and of course, hormone replacement therapy can help us to mitigate those symptoms, brain fog, memory issues, severe fatigue, right? Insomnia, which I already mentioned, the weight changes, certainly HRT can help support with that a little bit. It’s by no means a weight loss drug, but it can help stabilize hormones so we are better in a position to lose unnecessary weight if we’re doing the other work, which is the behavior change stuff. And of course, that’s what GLP ones are designed for, is to literally help people lose weight who are struggling to do so.

Courtney Townley 11:25
And I would also just stress that these medications can ultimately, what they’re all doing is they’re helping to recalibrate hormones right there. If you think about hormone replacement therapy, it’s helping us to recalibrate progesterone, estrogen, testosterone, all of which have different roles in the human body. And when we start to lose those hormones, we get those symptoms I mentioned earlier, and GLP one medications can help us to regulate insulin, blood sugar levels, which often become a lot less efficient for midlife women. GLP ones can also affect our hunger hormones like gray Lyon and leptin, so they help to kind of quiet that food noise and help us to better trust our bodies to send us the cue that we’re full or that we do actually need to eat, and they can certainly help to improve metabolic function by slowing things like gastric emptying and affecting how the body processes nutrients, I would Say too with weight loss, and with more stabilized hormones, we often get better sleep.

Courtney Townley 12:46
I was just talking to my brother recently, who went through a kind of a medical crisis over the holidays. He has Crohn’s disease, and he, I mean, in the span of six weeks, he dropped, I think, almost 40 pounds. And he was a little overweight to begin with, but 40 pounds is a lot for him. And I was talking to him the other day, and he was joking with me, and he said, you know, Courtney, I would never admit this to my doctor, but my doctor was telling me that if I lost a little bit of weight, I would probably sleep better, and now that I have lost weight, I’m sleeping like a baby. And I just thought that that was, you know, it was just so funny to hear that, but also just so relevant to this conversation that we’re having on this podcast today, that when we do lose weight, if we are overweight, a lot of people on the other side of that weight loss will experience better sleep, and also when we’re taking a medication that is helping us to regulate hormones. That too, can help us to better manage cortisol. It helps with our circadian rhythm there.

Courtney Townley 13:50
And then, of course, with that, there is improved energy and cellular repair and all the magic that happens for our health in the sleeping hours. And ultimately, there can be when we’re feeling better because we have supports like this in our life, we have more motivation and drive to maintain and pursue healthy behaviors. Now, you hear me say all that, and it may sound like, oh, it’s all a bright side, right? Like medicinal supports are only positive, and of course, we all know that’s not true, but I think it is important to highlight, especially with such a controversial topic. I don’t know how controversial hormone replacement therapy is, certainly it doesn’t work for everybody, and certainly not everyone has a candidate to take it, but I feel like there is more acceptance of that conversation at large than there might be of the GLP one conversation. And so I did think it was important from the outset of this podcast to just highlight the ways in which these pharmaceutical supports can. Can really help to support the health of a midlife woman.

Courtney Townley 15:04
So let’s now talk about some of the drawbacks of pharmaceutical risk supports, because there is, there can be a downside or a dark side, as I sometimes call it. Certainly these types of supports can create a false sense of security, which leads some people, not all people, to really neglect the behavior change side of things. So like I said earlier in the show, it’s almost like some people expect the drug to do all the heavy lifting, and that’s never the case with any pharmaceutical, right? The pharmaceutical is to help us get our chemistry regulated well enough that we feel better so we can actually do better with our behaviors. So it’s not an either or, it’s a both, and some people have side effects right from pharmaceuticals that may require adjusting their lifestyle in ways that they aren’t really excited about.

Courtney Townley 16:06
So some people have digestive issues, some people have sleep changes. Some people have more irritability or bloat. There’s all kinds of side effects that can come from using a pharmaceutical support. It’s often, sometimes, if we aren’t administering the behavior change side of things, our results can be short lived or temporary with the pharmaceutical supports, or we keep always needing more to get the same effect from the pharmaceutical that we were getting at the beginning, and we may lose effectiveness right over time if the fundamental health practices aren’t maintained and medical interventions alone, I think everyone listening again can accept the fact that alone, they fall short to optimize health so weight management medications without proper nutrition and exercise doesn’t really help to support muscle tissue and can definitely even lead to nutritional deficiencies, right?

Courtney Townley 17:11
If we’re not eating a nutrient dense diet when we’re taking those drugs, we can definitely experience nutritional deficiencies just like anybody else, hormone replacement therapy without stress management isn’t going to address fully hormone related symptoms, right? Because we can still bring in a tremendous amount of stress into our lives, whether we’re on HRT or not, HRT is going to help to a point, but we also have to be practicing Stress management techniques. We have to be reducing that unnecessary stress and then also simultaneously doing things that help to make us more resilient to stress. And even another example would be like a sleep medication, without proper sleep hygiene can create dependency. So if you’re constantly popping sleeping pills, but you’re also always going to bed late, and you’re always drinking alcohol before you go to bed, or you’re always in front of screens up until the point you put yourself to bed, or you’re eating really late, you’re always going to be dependent on those medications because you aren’t taking care of yourself in the ways that you need to to eventually get a good night’s sleep without the medication.

Courtney Townley 18:33
So all this to say, the fundamentals of basic Healthy Living will always be relevant. I remember a while ago, I had a client reach out to me talking about just how excited she was about the idea of GLP ones. And again, I wasn’t necessarily for or against it. I was just listening to what she had to say, and I kind of felt like she was looking for permission or an opinion from me on it. And the only thing that I really said, and I feel so strongly about this to this day, is that I will die on the Hill of fundamental behavior change, like the things that keep us healthy through lifestyle is the hill I will die on. It doesn’t mean that I don’t think other things can help support helping us to climb that hill, but the fundamentals will never not be relevant, and there’s a lot of research to support this right the crossroads between pharmaceutical supports and lifestyle change. And these are just a few things that I pulled for this podcast today, but there are studies in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism showing that HRT combined with regular. Exercise leads to better bone density outcomes than HRT alone, right?

Courtney Townley 20:06
Which is why, everywhere we turn right now, we’re hearing about the importance of strength training for midlife women. Can HRT help with you know, supporting maintaining some muscle mass and maybe helping to minimize the loss of bone, yes, to some degree, but not but it’s not never going to be to the degree it would be if you combined that therapy with a regular strength training practice. A meta analysis in diabetes care showed that combining GLP one medications with structured physical activity programs resulted in 15 to 20% greater improvements in insulin sensitivity compared to medication alone. Right? And that’s only one of many reasons why we should be exercising if we’re on something like a GLP one. Research from the North American menopause society demonstrates that women who combine HRT with stress management techniques report 30% better symptom relief than those who use HRT without stress management.

Courtney Townley 21:27
I want that extra 30% because I need all the stress management I can get. Studies in sleep medicine indicate that patients combining sleep medications with cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, had 40% higher rates of long term sleep improvement compared to medication only approaches. And I’ll share just one more the Journal of Clinical Medicine reports that integrating mindfulness practices with traditional medical treatments results in significantly better outcomes for anxiety and depression management in midlife women. So there is this growing body of research that is consistently showing that an integrated approach combining medical interventions with lifestyle practices produces superior outcomes compared to either approach in isolation.

Courtney Townley 22:30
Now please do not hear me saying even a little bit that I think everyone is a candidate for HRT or something like GLP ones or sleep medications or antidepressants. That’s not what I’m saying. What I hope you’re hearing is that if you are someone who is using any of these medical interventions and they are helping you, first of all, awesome. That’s great if you are feeling better, so you can actually do better in your life. I’m cheering you on, and this is just the reminder that the fundamentals of behavior change will never go out of style and will only help to bolster the goodness that you are getting from those medications. So there is a timeless nature to wellness practices and the basics are always going to help to support and help you to get the most out of these medical interventions.

Courtney Townley 23:32
So let’s talk a little bit about what those basics are, right? And again, if you have been a longtime listener of the show, these are you could probably do this podcast for me, right? This part of it, because you have heard what the basics are so many times, but I think it never hurts to review. And I think if you for newer listeners, this is a really helpful list to go through. Now I do want to point out, before we get into this, that the awesome thing about the basics is that they’re free. Most of them. I mean, you do food is not free, but the other ones are all free. You don’t need any fancy equipment or anything special to engage with these things. They are free. They are accessible, and you don’t have to do them in extreme doses, like doing these things just consistently over time can massively improve your health and well, being mentally, physically, emotionally in every dimension of your health.

Courtney Townley 24:34
Okay, so first one hydration. Hydration is a cornerstone of cellular health, because there is quite literally not a process in the human body that doesn’t use water to some degree. So we’ve got to stay hydrated, right? We have to drink water. We have to get sleep. Because, like I said, before the magic of health happens in sleep, the brain cashes out, the immune system is bolstered. Our hormones, you know, get get flushed out of the system and and sort of reset. There’s just so much greatness that happens in our wellness when we are resting and when we are asleep. It is nature’s reset button. Eating real food, right? Eating real food, beyond, beyond diet protocols, right? And beyond quick fixes and beyond the conversation of how much protein should I be eating at midlife? I’m not saying that’s not important, right? Protein and fiber are definitely important at midlife. But all that aside because you’ve been hearing that for a long time, eating real food, food, your body just recognizes as food. Whole grains, yes, protein, yes, vegetables, yes, fruit. These are things our body recognizes as food.

Courtney Townley 25:53
Now I’m not saying that all those foods work for all bodies. They don’t, so we have to tune in and listen to what works well for us, but living at a time where there is so much opportunity to saturate our diet in processed food, I think the reminder and the practice of coming back to Whole Foods is always important. Movement, yes, strength training again, something that we hear everywhere. So important for midlife, not just strength training, but the cardiovascular aspect of you know, helping to strengthen our heart and our lungs. And for longevity, cardio is so important that, being said, movement matters most. Moving your body often and much throughout the day is what matters most.

Courtney Townley 26:42
So how much are you moving during the day? I’m not saying I’m not talking about exercise. Remove exercise from that answer. How much movement are you doing outside of your exercise sessions, managing your mind. This is a very overlooked pillar of health and a lot of spaces, I think it’s becoming much more mainstream now. But what practices do you engage with daily, not just on occasion, not just when you do a face plant into burnout, but what practices for parenting and managing your brain do you engage with daily? How much time do you spend outdoors in nature, getting sun on your skin, fresh air in your lungs, just being in a forest or with your feet in the grass, and how much are you connecting with other humans, like really connecting, not just going to work and working on projects, but how much time do you actually connect with people outside of work? Those are the fundamentals. So again, just quickly, hydration, sleep, real food, mindset, movement, time in nature and connection.

Courtney Townley 27:59
Now, if you’re not doing any of those things on the regular. Do not try to overhaul your life overnight and start living radically different tomorrow, because you won’t be able to sustain it. But you could do a little bit more of any one of those things, and you would actually be improving your health and improving your body’s resilience to stress. That’s a beautiful thing. So all this to say later. Let’s see next month. So June 2 through, I want to say it’s like the 23rd it’s for three weeks. 21 days, I am hosting base camp back to basics inside of my rumble and rise community and the public is invited to join us, so registration will be opening next week. If you’re already on my subscription list, awesome. You will get a notification of that. If you follow me on social media, you will see me advertising that, and I am giving away a lot of opportunity to participate for free, so it is a paid event.

Courtney Townley 29:03
It’s $49 for the three weeks, but if you want to participate for free, all I ask is that you leave a review, ideally, a five star review, right? I am totally open to criticism about the podcast. I really truly am. I am human. I do not do anything perfectly. I am always aspiring to do better, but if you want to to leave me constructive criticism, email me Courtney at Grace and grit.com because people do read reviews, and they decide if they’re going to listen to a podcast based on those reviews. So it helps the podcast, the longevity, the health, the reach of the podcast when you leave a positive review.

Courtney Townley 29:45
If you leave a review, take a little snapshot of it and just email it to me, courtney@graceandgrit.com and I will send you a coupon to participate in our 21 day challenge in June. Totally free and again, the challenge is to help you get back to basics. Is a super fun challenge. We’ve done it multiple times. I let you choose your commitments, because that’s what I do in my coaching practice. I never tell people what to do. I just help to educate them around certain topics, and then I give them agency over their own process. What do you want to focus on for these next three weeks? With the basics, and I give you parameters for that, of course, and we gamify it. There’s lots of awesome prizes at the end. There’s a lot of other people who are participating, so it’s just a super, super fun event.

Courtney Townley 30:36
So again, registration will be open next week. Just keep your eyes open for that. If you don’t see registration on the you know the website, or you can’t figure out how to get to my newsletter or onto my social media accounts, just email me Courtney at Grace and grit.com and we will send you the direct link to register. But like I said, if you leave a review, just take a snapshot, send it to my email, and we will send you a coupon to participate for free. All right, my friends, I hope this was helpful. I hope you have a magnificent rest of your day, and I will be seeing you again very soon. I hope. All right, take care.

Courtney Townley 31:17
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.