Balanced Bites Podcast Episode #162: Special Guest Katy Bowman author of Move Your DNA

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1. What’s new for you from Diane & Liz
2. Shout Out: Kristen from Living, Loving, Paleo
3. This week in the Paleosphere: Zucchini Cheese
4. Special Guest: Katy Bowman author of Move Your DNA
Discussing Katy’s new book
The difference between movement & exercise
Historical context of movement
Movement instincts of animals
Loads as the effect of applied forces
Tips to make movement more biomechanically beneficial
5. Homesteading Hijinks: A goodbye to pigs & gratitude
6. Diane’s Kitchen tip: Blending coffee
7. This week’s hashtag details: #coffeemyway

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LIZ WOLFE: Hey everyone, welcome to Balanced Bites podcast number 162. Sponsors-Wait, should I say hi to Diane first? Hey Diane.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Wassup?
LIZ WOLFE: Wassup. All right, sponsors. Pete’s Paleo: Bringing fine dining to your cave. Make eating Paleo easier and more delicious with Pete’s meal plans. Great for those nights when you need real food fast. Pete’s Paleo is now offering 21 Day Sugar Detox-friendly meals to make your life that much easier on the 21 DSD.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Cute.
LIZ WOLFE: Check out PetesPaleo.com for all the details and be sure to check out Cheef Pete’s….Cheef Pete’s Keek Beak. Chef Pete’s cookbook, Paleo By Season. Did you have something to say in there? Am I muted? Did you mute me? No? Oh my God. I think we need to start over.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Am I muted? No, I’m not muted.
LIZ WOLFE: You were. [Laughs] Should we start over?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don’t know. Do we have to? I think it’s fine.
LIZ WOLFE: Okay.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: You guys were cool. We’re going to keep going, okay? We’re going to keep going.
LIZ WOLFE: Everybody good?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: AIght?
LIZ WOLFE: Cool.
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DIANE SANFILIPPO: But I have to tell people that we have…we have some coupons from Pete’s Paleo. So let me give you a little bit of info on that before I tell you about the coupons because…
LIZ WOLFE: Coupons or Coupons?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Ummm….
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DIANE SANFILIPPO: We don’t have time for that. Let’s see…so obviously we know 21 DSD is great for your body in a lot of ways, and we’ve just mentioned that they have 21 DSD friendly meals and they’re seasonal, ready to eat, all that good stuff, totally follow the program, shipped to your door, ready to go. Yadda yadda, and I just love the idea. I mean, I’m, you know, buds with Pete and Sarah because I think their company is awesome. I was like, hey, let’s do this whole 21DSD thing. So just want to remind you guys that the bacon is 21 Day Sugar Detox approved as well. Totally sugar free, so if you’re getting a meal plan, you should also throw in some bacon. But I want to let you guys know that they have some coupon codes, so the first code gets you 5 dollars off 21 Day Sugar Detox meals and it’s 5OFF21DSD, and the other code is 5 dollars off of any of their regular meal plans, and it’s 5OFFPETESPALEO. So check those out when you are ordering your Pete’s Paleo.
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So what’s new with you, D?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mostly I want to update folks about the Mediterranean Paleo Cooking Tour. So let’s see. This episode will air on October 23rd, and that means we will begin touring shortly thereafter. So just a reminder: we’ll be in Nashville on October 28th, in Atlanta on October 29th, and Chicago on October 30th. And then San Francisco on November 1st. And then…and then, we’re going to have a second round of touring, kicking off in Framingham, which is the Boston area, for those of you who are in maybe a little bit in that area and aren’t familiar with exactly where Framingham is, so that’s on the 16th of November. Then we’re kind of TBD for a couple of days there, but stay tuned if you’re in the New York/New Jersey/Philly area because I’m trying to get something going there. And then in the Sacramento area in Roseville, in California on November 20th. Los Angeles, which is TBD, still trying to get something solidified there, but that will be November 21st, then San Diego, November 22nd. And then, a third leg of this tour a couple weeks later, early December, so this leg of the tour, we’ll have the fabulous Brittany Angell, who we mentioned, I think, last week or the week before. Her book is releasing around this time, so this would be a #PaleoTour update where Brittany will be joining for these events, so Seattle, Washington on December 7th, Portland area, hopefully the 8th or 9th of December. I don’t have that confirmed yet. Then Denver, Colorado on December 10th, and we’ll also have a special appearance by Juli Bauer there of PaleOMG, for those of you who don’t know Juli. She’s amazing. And December 13th in Rochester, New York. Love Rochester, we’ve always had amazing events up there. I know you and I taught a seminar up there, just always fun crowds. So that’s where we’ll be wrapping up on December 13th, and all of these are just in time for folks to grab books and get gifts for the holidays. I think that will be really fun.
LIZ WOLFE: All right, so we’re going to skip my announcements today and go straight to our shoutout this week. I’ve got stuff to say, but we’re going to save it for Homesteading Hijinks. So our shoutout this week is Kristen of Living Loving Paleo. I just recently interviewed her for Real Food Liz Radio, just a half an hour, to get to know her and what she’s about. She’s got an amazing blog and an amazing story, and she recently came out to talk about her ostomy, which is basically a way…she had basically her colon and part of her, I believe small intestine, but I may have that wrong, listen to Real Food Liz Radio for those details. But she had all of those removed. She was literally on the brink of death for a moment there because of her digestive issues. And she has openly begun talking about her ostomy, so really, really brave of her to talk about that, and we just wanted to shout her out.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: All right, so this week in the Real Food/Paleosphere, I want to know if you’ve seen this, Liz, and also what you think about it, but zucchini cheese has been kind of all over basically Instagram and a little bit all over Facebook, I guess. And it’s essentially a dairy free cheese, which is made from-oh, great, somebody’s calling me. [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: It’s not me.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: And it’s somebody I actually…I’m like, oh, I know who this is and I want to talk to them. Arghh!
LIZ WOLFE: I’m sorry, I’m sorry; we’re keeping you from your social life.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: It’s not social at all.
LIZ WOLFE: Where balls fly at my nose.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: It’s a spice company. [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: This is the worst. #worst
DIANE SANFILIPPO: #worstepisodeever
LIZ WOLFE: So zucchini cheese.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: We’re not editing that.
LIZ WOLFE: No.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: We’re not. So it is zucchini, summer squash, or turnip, peeled or unpeeled, depending on the color that somebody wants, and then let’s see, they could do carrot, if they want like a cheddar style, some kind of oils, coconut, red palm, whatever kind of fat you want, and then gelatin, and then they’re using nutritional yeast for the cheesy flavor, some salt, and there’s a probiotic capsule you use, I guess, to just probably give it that tang. And herbs and all kinds of stuff, so just basically make like a dairy free…it’s not vegan, if you’re using gelatin, so dairy-free cheese. Your thoughts?
LIZ WOLFE: Sigh. I have never worked that hard on anything. [Laughs] So like…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: [Laughs] It sounds harder than writing a book.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes, it sounds like a lot of work. I think it’s awesome that people with certain dietary restrictions who are willing to spend time in the kitchen have this option. To me, my personal relationship with zucchini is just not that good. I love zucchini noodles. I have accepted zucchini noodles as my personal savior. But my…I just think most things made of zucchini are disgusting. I hate zucchini bread. But I don’t know. I’m not going to make it, but if somebody wants to bring some to my house, I’ll try it.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I’m not really sure the relevance of zucchini in this anyway. I mean, it sounds like it’s just a really non-flavored bland sort of, I don’t know, mild carbohydrate base to give the gelatin…it’s just like a flavorless fiber substance to really just get all this stuff sticking together. Like the gelatin and the cheesy flavor and all that other stuff is really like the important part of this cheese.
LIZ WOLFE: Have you tried this alleged zucchini cheese?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: It doesn’t sound like something I would be able to spend time and energy making. Really?
LIZ WOLFE: But people love it. I’ve heard…I’m in a couple of networking groups where people were talking about it, and they said it was Uh-mazing. So it might just be because those people haven’t had the good fortune of having…been able to have good cheese for a long time.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: I don’t know, but I mean, try it. Like tell us what you think about it. #zucchinicheese. Make sure you spell zucchini right.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: People are shredding it. People are shredding it and I don’t know that it melts okay. I’ve seen some other-some other posts about it, but yeah, I mean, I think probably because my, I wanted to see if I can find some more posts about what people are doing with it, but probably because I can’t really eat cheese, but I still kind of do. [Laughs] So it will just either make me break out or it will give me gas or something really fun like that…
LIZ WOLFE: But that’s fun now that you and Scott live together. [Laughs]
DIANE SANFILIPPO:  It’s like what did we eat? What did I eat? Ughhhh. [Laughs] But people are doing all kinds of crazy stuff with it, and I mean, I guess if I really was missing cheese or just kind of wanted to do something fun and interesting, you know…I don’t know. It’s a cool way to get some gelatin into your diet, maybe.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don’t know. I guess…
LIZ WOLFE: My way of getting gelatin in my diet is…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Gelatin?
LIZ WOLFE: …to dump it in a cup and drink it. But like I said, I don’t like to work that hard.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I know. So yeah, basically, I’m…I generally don’t work that hard when I cook, but I don’t know. I mean, try it. I guess I would leave it to other people to try it. And I think one of the girls, who at least in our little community who has really started spreading information on it, her Instagram account is Ieatrealfood.recipes. Her name is Hayley, so just wanted to give her a little baby shoutout there.
LIZ WOLFE: Cool. Good job. I admire your tenacity and stick-to-itiveness.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: [Laughs] Indeed.
LIZ WOLFE: Indeed.
All right, so this week’s podcast is an interview I did just a few days ago with Katy Bowman, the author of Move Your DNA, which is an amazing new book that talks about movement as the missing piece for health. She is a bio-I always say it wrong. A bio-MECHanist, not a bio-meCHANist. A bio-mechanist. So listen to this interview and what I love most about it is the totally organic movie quote that popped up in the interview. It was just so Diane and Liz style. It was amazing. So you absolutely must listen for that.
Interview with Katy Bowman
LIZ WOLFE: Today, I’m talking one on one with Katy Bowman, a personal hero of mine and health educator to countless others who want to improve their health through nutritious movement. Katy is a bio-mechanist, which is just as smarty pants as it sounds, and of course, bio-mechanics is a field dedicated to the study and science of movement, thank you, Doctor Google, which we’re now understanding as a requirement for overall health and it’s a huge topic of conversation in the Paleo/Primal community in particular. Katy is the creator of the Aligned and Well DVD series, the director of the Restorative Exercise Institute, which, by the way, she also put together a fantastic presentation on Paleo Parenting that is available through her site along with her famous Alignment Snacks, and she writes the hilarious and mind-blowing fact filled Katy Says blog. Most importantly, she’s the author of Every Woman’s Guide to Foot Pain Relief, which by the way is not just about feet. Another book entitled Alignment Matters, and the book we’re going to talk about today called Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement. Katy, thank you so much for coming back on the show to talk Move Your DNA.
KATY BOWMAN: Oh, thank you for having me. I love chatting with you.
LIZ WOLFE: I love…no, no, no, no. I love chatting with you.
KATY BOWMAN: I think your…our last one was my favorite podcast ever, and I’ve done, not as many as you, but I have done a lot of podcasts, so I’m excited to be back.
LIZ WOLFE: Don’t tell Diane because that was my favorite podcast ever, too.
KATY BOWMAN: We won’t tell her. She’ll never find out.
LIZ WOLFE: Air hugs. Air hugs. [Laughs] So obviously I’ve had the privilege of speaking to you before. We’ve talked about topics ranging from like how our cells accept nutrition and that concept of how nutrition isn’t just about food, it’s also about how you feed your cells with movement. We’ve talked about what you think about treadmill desks, which is always a fun one. I’m sure you get asked about that a lot. But before we launch into the whole chat about Move Your DNA, can you kind of give…folks can refer to our first podcast together for a little bit more of like the groundwork to where you’re coming from, but I was hoping you could give people who might be new to the concepts you teach like a quick primer on how and why your work led you to write Move Your DNA.
KATY BOWMAN: Well, I think I wrote, well, I don’t think…I know I wrote Move Your DNA…
LIZ WOLFE: It all gets really like wibbly…
KATY BOWMAN: You don’t…right, well, you know, after doing so many, like you get questions among the same questions and every time it’s like, why did I write this book, now that I think about it.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: But I wrote this book for two reasons. One, it’s an actual full scientific thesis in itself, which is movement, like nutrition, is just as nuanced and there are a wide range of nutrients in the same way that we need, lots that we require, like that are necessary for biological function, that there’s all of this input that we need through food, but that the same goes for movement, that we need, our cells need, our genes need, our structures need this wide variance of input, which is equal to loads. We’ll talk about loads probably.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes, we will.
KATY BOWMAN: So I mean, it’s not nutrients in the fact that there’s nothing you’re putting into your cells. It’s more the way that the cells in your body are deformed and how they respond chemically to that deformation. That there’s a baseline of input that’s required. So that’s the first one. It’s just to put that out there, that the way we’ve been looking at movement is kind of the equivalent to how we looked at food 40 years ago, and that it is much more complex, but then there’s this other component to the book, which is when I talk about-that I had to write-because when I talk about movement, most of you right now are thinking exercise.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes.
KATY BOWMAN: And they’re not the same thing, but because we’ve been using the word exercise and movement interchangeably, I had to do this whole background explanation of how the two are different and how you don’t even necessarily get what I’m saying because it’s like, oh, I need to crosstrain, check. I already do that. It’s like, no, I’m not even talking about the things that you do in the gym. I’m talking about all the ways the cells in your bodies are squashed by everything that you do 100% of the time, and that because we are essentially a disea-a population that are kind of in captivity, so to speak, you know, in the same way that other animals are…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: after that, as we’ve lost our movement, which we’ll talk about later, that we’ve replaced it with this exercise, and it’s really similar. God, I even hate to say this because I feel like the jut, like the biggest jerk in the whole world, that the way we consume exercise, it’s really the equivalent to junk food.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh man.
KATY BOWMAN: Not popular. Not popular, I know.
LIZ WOLFE: No.
KATY BOWMAN: But don’t turn off your radio. Don’t turn off your radio. Keep listening.
LIZ WOLFE: It’s going to come back around.
KATY BOWMAN: It will, but that’s…that’s essentially why I wrote is just to put those two big ideas out there with some, some rationale and some scientific depth behind it so that we could all get on the same page to have this conversation that we’re going to have now.
LIZ WOLFE: Well, that makes me feel really good because actually my next…my first two questions for you were actually about what you just identified as the two major concepts, and I’m like, I totally got the book. I totally got it.
KATY BOWMAN: Yes!
LIZ WOLFE: Awesome. Took the right notes. Okay, so I want to build on the idea of exercise not being movement, and there was a part at the very beginning where you talk about…you say exercise is a repetitive intake of an isolated muscle contraction, and you liken that, if I got this right, to taking an isolated nutrient like a vitamin or something like that in isolation, and one of the things I often talk about when it comes to nutrition is nutrient synergy and how one very important nutrient, like let’s say retinol, when you’ve got that just in isolation, when you’re just hammering yourself with one nutrient in isolation, that that can be really bad, and it’s not so much that the nutrient itself is bad, it’s more the context.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, right, and that’s the same thing for movement.
LIZ WOLFE: And that’s kind of what you’re getting at maybe as far as exercise being different from movement or do you…an you build on that a little more?
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah. So let me think. So…so exercise, so I just called it junk food.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: I just called, you know, I was the person who just did that a second ago.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs] Oh, by the way, if anyone’s still listening.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, so there’s all kinds of exercises, so that I would say that exercise itself is a full range from the junk, real junk food to what’s really more the equivalent of like a minimally processed whole food bar.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: You know, it still comes in a wrapper. It’s still…it’s still much different than it was in its organic form, but it certainly has a different quality than to the junk food. Keeping in mind that when I use the term junk food, I’m meaning it literally as in something that has the benefit of giving you calories and energies, but just has some sort of negative consequence that comes packaged with it. So I don’t even put junk food in the bad category because to someone right now in the world, junk food would be a welcome intake…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: For someone who’s starving, for example. So movement, exercise, yes, it’s kind of like…the easiest way I could break down the difference between exercise and movement, the most comprehensive would be exercise is when you’re doing movement for the purpose of reaping the health benefit of it.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: Where…that was exercise, right? Did I say exercise?
LIZ WOLFE: Yes. [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: Movement is when you’re doing…when you’re moving your body second to getting something else necessary for your life accomplished. So movement would be a by-product of accomplishing something else.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: So in like nature, it would be, you know, you’re going about getting food or to safety or to the next place that you’re going to live, or you’re carrying your kids or you’re…whatever you’re doing, you’re digging things out of the ground. You’re not doing the movement for the sake of movement.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: You are getting it as a by-product in a very organic kind of way. So exercise is our attempt…We kind of understand that there are these vitamins. I think that when I say exercise is like vitamins or a supplement, it’s not like you’re like, okay, yeah, I know that if I, you know, have a problem with a weak, you know, leg muscles that I will take vitamin squats or lunges to kind of rectify it. You know enough about exercise that an exercise won’t make all of you healthy, that it’s kind of a spot way to treat something. So it is like that. They’re processed in that nothing else is happening organically while you’re doing it. You’re just pulling it out and you’re trying to target with your exercise in the same way that you’ll pull out a vitamin or a supplement to target some hole in your diet. You’re trying to fill in a gap…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: So to speak, is how I mean it.
LIZ WOLFE: Well, it makes sense as well from, and you talk, you’re all about like the historical context. You talk a lot about, you know, the research you’ve done on hunter-gatherer-I can’t remember the book that the woman’s last name is really long….What’s that book about hunter-gatherers that’s in here? Uh, Katherine something…did I get that right?
KATY BOWMAN: Oh, no the, yeah, that’s a…oh my gosh, Dettwyler.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes.
KATY BOWMAN: See, that’s not hunter gatherers. That’s a modern day…
LIZ WOLFE: oh, okay.
KATY BOWMAN: Mali, children in Mali. So yeah, we talked about [22:09]
LIZ WOLFE: Okay, I’ve got all my nutrient areas, all that stuff crossed.
KATY BOWMAN: Yes.
LIZ WOLFE: But I’m thinking in a historical context in how, when you really think about it, the way we go to, like we drive to the gym to do like certain repetitive movements in an indoor space with machines and such. Why would that be more intuitive exercise just for exercise’s sake vs. what human beings have done for thousands upon thousands of years, which is movement to achieve some other task, exactly like you’re talking about it. It really does make intuitive sense.
KATY BOWMAN: Well, I hope so. [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: I mean, it does to me.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, yeah, I think…and people, you know, in other part of the book, too, is recognizing that we’ve isolated ourselves from nature…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: And I don’t necessarily mean that we’re not in it; it’s that we don’t even think ourselves as part of it, right? There’s animals. I hear the way we talk about animals. There’s animals and then there’s people, forgetting that people go into the animal category. There’s not animals in us, so I have a kid…I have two kids. So I’m having to watch my language a lot because you’re going, oh those are animals, and it’s like, but we’re animals. That’s what I was corrected by my three year old. It was like, oh right, we are. Right? And to realize that now the way that they learn animals are zoo animals because everything is…these are zoo animals.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, it’s so true.
KATY BOWMAN: It’s just, it’s just…I just…it’s a language thing. It’s a language thing, and it’s a mindset, and it’s just a forgetting to reintegrate back into the big understanding that the United States is not an indicator for humans, in what humans are doing and what animals are doing all over the planet, that it’s just a  real narrow perspective, and it’s hard to let that perspective not seep into the way you do everything, including research and…
LIZ WOLFE: It’s the…this is kind of an aside, but living out on the farm, and I know you’ve bought some property; you’re going to do a little homesteading of your own.
KATY BOWMAN: I am. I need to get your advice on some things probably.
LIZ WOLFE: I have no advice. But, oh here’s my advice! This kind of goes along with what you just said. The way we interact with nature…this has been so clear to me since we started raising animals, we humans kind of try to adapt nature to us, so, you know, I’m cold, so I’m going to turn up the heat or I’m, you know, hungry, so I’m going to walk to the refrigerator to get this food that I bought last week and I’m going to eat that. Whereas our animals, and for a long time, I treated our animals like they were people, like I had modified their environment to keep them comfortable, where really our animals kind of adapt themselves to the environment they’re in and in all ways, from what they’re eating to how they’re moving, and we can actually impose our own issues on animals, if we’re not too careful, so that’s my advice. Just let the animals be animals. They’ll take care of themselves.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, you know, we’ve done…this will be…we’ve had like chickens and little things on smaller properties compared to where we’ll have more now, but so I was all for free range chickens…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: Like literally, like no cage, no nothing. It’s like, well, let’s just see how they do. And it was really interesting to watch them become tree climbers. And so I was telling people that my…I had these tree climbing chickens. They’re like, what are you talking about?
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: We have had chickens for 20 years, and I was like, well, do your chickens have a cage? Because that breeds a particular behavior. You know, your way of dealing with safety is going inside the house and locking the door…
LIZ WOLFE: Right.
KATY BOWMAN: And that becomes like the chickens, the chicken’s skill, so therefore, it loses its tree climbing skills or tree climbing impetus or whatever, but I had a chicken that would take all twelve of her babies up into the tree, and she would nest, like 6 feet up in the tree, and she would take her babies up there one at a time. That’s something that you wouldn’t…that’s not chicken…that’s not a “normal chicken behavior,” but normal meaning that’s not the normal on a farm, putting our, you know, safety home, got to be warm construct on it.
LIZ WOLFE: Right.
KATY BOWMAN: These are the chickens…they’ll do whatever it takes to protect it, and it’s also the by-product was some natural movement for us, which was the eggs can be anywhere, all like, our kids would just go out and comb for eggs for like 40 minutes, which is much more similar than you would in the wild. They wouldn’t be in a box where you would…
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: where you’ve trained them to go, and we would just find nests of like twenty eggs. It was like a perpetual Easter Egg hunt at our house. It was just as exciting to find eggs everywhere, whenever. It was awesome.
LIZ WOLFE: See, my brain just exploded again.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: I’ve been doing that for like a year and half now. I never even thought of that.
KATY BOWMAN: On a side note, all of our chickens are dead now.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: I mean, not all of them, but you know, you’re going to lose a lot of chickens.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes.
KATY BOWMAN: But that’s also kind of the natural order. Like I don’t…I feel that part of the me, if I’m going to be taking eggs, if I’m going to be using chickens kind of as an egg factory, then everyone’s going to have to, like it all kind of gives back. Like I don’t feel badly about the chickens getting knocked off when the chickens had all of the ability to grow their adaptation skills, and if they didn’t, then there was some other coyote or fox around here that had to feed their babies, and it just goes with the territory.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: You just realize that loss and, you know, and gain and [sings] it’s the circle of life. You know, all that kind of stuff.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh my gosh. That was really good by the way.
KATY BOWMAN: It’s my super good mike.
LIZ WOLFE: That was really impressive.
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: It attunes you and everything. I would have had to get like a mike with Autotune, if I was…
KATY BOWMAN: I don’t even sound like this. No. I don’t even sound like this at all. I have a
LIZ WOLFE: Incredible.
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: That was actually something that I’ve talked about in the Balanced Bites podcast recently, how we’ve been losing chickens because I’m very much pro-like the chickens are going to range, they’re going to have the entire property, and, because that’s the chicken-ness of the chicken, and of course, we kind of lose them in spurts, and so we’re down quite a few chickens, and for me, it felt like a dilemma because, you know, I do forget sometimes that nature can be what we would perceive as cruel because we’ve kind of taken ourselves out of nature, like you said, and it’s all just very interesting, so that’s…you’ve got me thinking about a few things.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, you know, I think, again, sorry to talk about my kids all the time, but they are the center of my life.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: But you know, they’ll be at school, and I’ve been reading little kids books, which I kind of abhor.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: There are some really good ones, and there are some terrible ones. It was like sharks are mean. And I was like, sharks are not mean, sharks are hungry.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: Sharks eat things because they’re hungry. You just ate 17 cows this month. Are you mean? No, you’re just hungry. And so just that…it’s just that we’ve just gotten into a really kind of unconscious way of seeing everything, you know, human-skewed…
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: and yeah. Like you just…like it’s people think things get eaten and things get killed, and yeah, I liked our…I like the free range chickens, and we’re going to do heritage turkeys. That’s going to be…
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, awesome.
KATY BOWMAN: Heritage turkeys. But I have the plan on actually letting them run, like all over the town. Like I will repopulate the town with heritage turkeys, and I feel good about that…
LIZ WOLFE: Have you talked to your townspeople about this?
KATY BOWMAN: No, I’m not going to let them know that I’m just going to let like the strange like, what is this heritage turkey? What is this weird bird that no one in this state has seen, you know…
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: For seventy-seven years. They will secretly be coming from my backyard, and I live…
LIZ WOLFE: There will be a news story about it.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, I think it’s kind of cool. I think, let them go, and if it’s meant to be, they will return to my yard.
LIZ WOLFE: [xxx]
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: So this is a really good segue because one of my favorite sections of Move Your DNA is about the diseases of captivity, and how we humans maybe can be compared to like the orca with the floppy fin, the flaccid fin syndrome, which makes me want to watch Free Willy for about a split second.
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: So what does that all mean, and what brought that metaphor to mind for you?
KATY BOWMAN: You know what? I watched Blackfish as I was finishing up the book. I was watching Blackfish, which is a documentary on one orca in particular, Tilikum, who is a SeaWorld orca, and his experience, and the deaths that he was involved in, but then also his background. And it’s like, how he was…how he was captured. It’s awful, but I do think it’s necessary to watch. But anyway, it brought up this, as I was watching it, this memory of when I watched Free Willy, which came out, I don’t know, when I was 8 or 9, you know. I was a kid, and I remember watching it, going, what’s wrong with that fin?
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: Because it’s flopped over, it’s hard, but it’s folded over, and I think that the kid that was like some sort of little mention of the kid, he’s like, what’s wrong with his fin? It’s like, oh this is…oh, he’s fine. Like this is just what happens to whales in captivity, and there was no Wikipedia back when I was 8, and I asked, and no one knew, of course. When I saw that, it reminded me, and it’s like, well, here’s the Internet now, and so I spent that night. I kid you not. I was up for 7 hours, and I read until 3 in the morning, every bit of literature ever written about the folded fin. There’s nothing in existence, no data, on the fin, on the Internet that I haven’t read. I read every paper, everything.
LIZ WOLFE: That’s something to put on your resume right there.
KATY BOWMAN: It’s just, it also is just like a freako, is what goes on my…Like I’m such a weirdo.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: I could put that on my resume, just like this obsessed with these crazy, just, I need to know how this works and it tied in so well to what I had already written in the book, that I actually went back and added to the book, to the beginning, right? It’s in the beginning.
LIZ WOLFE: Yes.
KATY BOWMAN: Because I thought this is a real easy way for everyone to understand what I’m talking about. Because we talk about disease of mechanotransduction and this crazy cellular process and genetic expression. Everyone has like an 8% idea of what you mean. They…it might go a little bit more, but you need to have some sort of easy, everyday way of tying in understanding physical forces, I’ve found, for the general population.
LIZ WOLFE: There’s a nerd threshold there.
KATY BOWMAN: There is, and everyone is nerdy about different things.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm. Right.
KATY BOWMAN: And so I just thought this is a really great way to illustrate that a whole structure can fail when the mechanical environment that is nothing, it’s invisible, the mechanical environment is just a collection of forces. So it’s hard. When I say environment, you’re thinking, the tank that the orca is swimming in, but the environment that I’m really talking about is the invisible mechanical one, which is what are the forces that are created by swimming in the tank? And then what is the invisible mechanical environment of swimming in the ocean? And then you compare that set of forces, and then you go here is the structure. Here is the biology of the fin, and it turns out that that fin is dependent on the invisible environment created by swimming in the ocean. So it wouldn’t even…you couldn’t even put a tank sized circle within the ocean and get the same results because the environment isn’t just the ocean, it’s the way that you move through it. So we could go out in nature and hike, but hiking in nature is not necessarily the same mechanical environment were you living it and surviving in it. So it just…that’s how that came to be, and I’m forever thrilled for that, watching that documentary because it really has become how I’ve talked about the book.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah, it definitely reached out and grabbed me from the very beginning, that concept.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: Because it was so…I mean, it was just we have so many kind of representations of it that we’ve all seen since we were little. So it’s just very, very easy to apply to myself. And with that, I wanted to kind of bring that around to loads because I don’t want to miss talking about loads. How do…where do loads come into our, like invisible environment as human beings?
KATY BOWMAN: So a load, a load is, this is the…well, the way I explain loads in the book is in a couple ways. As you probably noticed, I use a lot of non-human examples.
LIZ WOLFE: Well, you’re the whole reason I wanted to grow a pumpkin patch, by the way.
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: So I could carry different pumpkins.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah. Right, you’re like, okay, right. Yes. So loads are the effects of applied forces. So that’s like the textbook answer without any context. So let me, the way that I talk about loads with a sponge. Like if you dip a sponge in water and you pull it out, and you want to get water to move out of the sponge, you have to create some kind of applied force to the sponge, but there’s a lot of different ways you could do that. You can like squeeze it in your hand. You can push the ends of it together. You can pull the ends away from it-from each other. You can twist it. So each one of those things is a different applied force, and you’re deforming the sponge in a different way, but all of those ways create some sort of sponge movement. So you are under physical forces all the time. Right now, everyone is under the effect of gravity, even if you’re still, you’re under the effect of gravity. So your body, body parts are being pushed toward each other. That’s one load. But then, you know, no matter how you’re sitting or standing, that position is changing the way that your body is being compressed. You are using muscles or not using muscles in those actions. Also, change this load to the cell, which is the experience, which is how the water is moving inside the sponge. Right? It’s all coming out in the case of the sponge. But in the case of the cell, it’s just being pushed from one cell to the other, and the way that fluid or the way that that structure of a cell, which is the cytoskeleton, real similar to you. You have a skeleton inside you that can assume different positions. You have a skeleton inside your cells that assumes different positions based upon how it’s deformed and that way of being deformed is the load of that particular cell, which is what I equivalent to the nutrient.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: So every load is its own nutrient.
LIZ WOLFE: So an example of that would be in everyday life, maybe let’s distinguish between like load and exercise. Like you know, doing a, I don’t know, like a push press or something like that vs. like load and movement. Like how would those look different.
KATY BOWMAN: So let’s say that there’s a spectrum of loads that your body requires.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: It’s not that movement, that-it’s not that exercise is not nutritious, per se, because it’s bringing about a load. No matter what you do with your body, whether it’s picking up pumpkins or whether it’s doing, you know, the rowing machine, or it’s sitting on a bike. Each one of those things is creating a load. The question is are the loads that that thing is creating what you require cellularly.
LIZ WOLFE: Ahhh.
KATY BOWMAN: Or, what is the ratio of certain load types? Or what is the frequency of a load? Because it’s like nutrients again. So if you think of everything that you do, every exercise that you do. If you’re like, well I do yoga, well, great. Then within yoga there are 50 exercises within that, and then if you want to get real specific, you would look at joint articulations and each one of those is a particular load, you’re going, okay, this is loading my body in a particular way. So I could say that it’s the same with the diet. You could come up with a handful of foods that you eat on a regular basis and look at the nutrients in those, but then I could say, but if those are the 7 foods that you always eat in different combinations, is that adequate? Would there still be some things that you are missing? And you know, you can always figure out the things that you are missing or the things that you’re having too much of, or as you were talking about earlier, the things that are packaged in a way that don’t, that change the outcome. So you could package nutrients that change the net effect of that nutrient based on what goes in with it, and the same as we talked about, as I talk about in Move Your DNA, that load nutrient ratio is also really important, that because we don’t move and because we only exercise, it’s not necessarily that the exercises that we’re doing aren’t nutritious by definition. It’s just that they’re usually done in the context of nothing else which makes the result of that load a problem. When you only strengthen narrow, narrow portions of your body, mathematically speaking, you made everything else weaker, which is a natural occurring place for disease and injury.
LIZ WOLFE: And I’m pretty sure that somewhere in there, you just justified my refusal to eat kale more than like once every two weeks.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, I mean, it’s kind of like, yeah, you want…everyone wants like a superfood or whatever. And that also brings up, that also brings up this notion. So people will say, okay, so if movement’s nutritious, if different movements are nutritious, then I should be doing a ton of different stuff. And the answer still is yes. However, there are motions that are actually really, really necessary. So I think of it like, you know, someone will say, like you will say, I’m sure that you’re probably on the animal sources of nutrients are different than plant sources of nutrients because the nutrient itself is categorized just by some person who said this is how I’m going to categorize it. It doesn’t really have anything to do with the actual thing; it just makes it easier to write scientific papers about things can be in the same category and also not be in the same category.
LIZ WOLFE: Very true.
KATY BOWMAN: So that’s why I love Venn diagrams. Venn diagrams are the raddest thing ever. They’re great. But with movement, if you looked at what the load input would be for a human, it would be like walking, as boring as walking is, walking would make up and the loads that would come with walking, head to toe, which would also-are the muscle actions, head to toe, that come about moving forward over, you know, rough terrain for extended periods of time every single day, that it’s not just that you walked, that the duration and the distance matters because those adaptations are part of what keeps our fin upright, so to speak.
So within nutrients, you can say on a base level, it’s like, you need A, D, E, K, vitamin C, you need, you know, these micronutrients, but there’s a ratio.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: Then you can further say, well, you don’t just need those, here’s the, you know, micrograms of everything you need. And you don’t need all of them equally. There are different, different ratios to each other, and then there’s also different times in your life, there are differences between genders, there’s different requirements. Like you can say something is natural, but an organism, like a natural, like an animal, which we are, doesn’t eat or move the same way throughout the period of their full life. Kids need things that are different. They need different types of input. Your body is constantly in a different stage, so natural, what coats around it, is a lot of times broader than the general way that we use it, which is just found in nature.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: You know, like the most general way, so…
LIZ WOLFE: Okay, this always goes way too fast, and I wish I could have you for like hours and hours and hours. So I want to ask one more thing. This might be a stretch, but I’m going to try and liken it to our conversation that we’ve had so far, and then I want to bring it in to some practical stuff. Because a lot of this, you know, I mean, a lot of this is over my head. It takes me a long time to really internalize this stuff and say, okay, I get that and this is how it applies for me because this is very…there are some really complex stuff things at work that I want to kind of take it to ground level. And we’ll do that. I will attempt to do that with this question. [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: Mm-hmm.
LIZ WOLFE: Okay, so we were talking about kind of ratios of different movement, incarnations of movement. And that kind of got me thinking about how this whole discussion of ratios and even nutrients in isolation might translate to what we like to call “ab work.” Doing ab work. And my original question was I wanted to talk to you about something that I have always done, so this is very selfish, but sucking in the belly, and you say that’s actually sucking up, not so much sucking in, and talking about that in the context of even digestive health, which is something that Diane and I talk about all the time. But I wanted to talk about the abs, sucking up, maybe isolating that body part in a way that may not so much be natural, and then from there, maybe we could talk about some practical points that people can recognize in their own lives to make their movement more biomechanically beneficial.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, well, I guess we want to make sure that everyone is thoroughly disgusted with me, so by the time I finish talking about, you know, exercise as junk food, then we talk about the section of the book, “Core Activation, Shmore Activation,” right?
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: That’s the place. So again we’re talking about natural loads, and that the way that we use exercise as kind of a Band-Aid. It’s a way of spot treating the symptom. So a ton of people have core weakness. But the reason that they have core weakness is not because they didn’t do their core exercises.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: Okay, so that’s…that’s a way of looking it. It’s like, well, if you’re weak through the core, you need to do these core exercises, and these core exercises are these, usually, for many people and the way they do them, are movements that would never occur in nature at a frequency that would never occur in nature, in a ratio of other nutrients that would never occur in nature. So they’re a way to get strength of a particular muscle in a particular way, which then results in a particular tension, which then results in a particular resistance. Where I’m most concerned, you know, being a biomechanist, I’m working in a biological field, so the difference between health in the medicine, and health in biology is like medicine, it’s like okay, you don’t have any diagnoses or anything. But in biology, it’s like when can you not do something that is like your biological imperative should be like the most baseline thing for you as a member of this species to do, so eating is one of them. Gestation, getting pregnant, you know, being able to support your baby, delivering it, like all of these things are things that I’m missing it like the things that go through the gut…
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: So we have a huge problem right now where most people can’t do it. Most people can’t digest their food. You’ve got 80 million people with constipation and the inability for their food to move down through their colon. We’ve got umbilical hernias; you’ve got diastatis recti, the splitting open, people who have to transfer in the middle of their vaginal delivery because they can’t yield. I mean, it’s like, it’s just…and then you…
LIZ WOLFE: I think you talked about that on Katy Says, by the way. I just…go over there…
KATY BOWMAN: I talk, yeah, I mean…
LIZ WOLFE: And look up that, look at Kegels, look it all up over there.
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, and so when we have this, we have this overcompensation for core weakness, which was brought about by living in a movement drought. The fact that you are sedentary almost 100% of the time is why your trunk is not functioning. And why your trunk together with your hips don’t function, and why your trunk together with your upper body doesn’t function, and why your upper body and your lower body working together through the trunk isn’t happening, which are part of what the trunk needs to do. It also needs to be able to support all the intestinal activities. It needs to support all of the biological activities. So we’ve trumped…we haven’t trumped…we’ve prioritized usually a look of the core, and we’ve set the parameters of a strong core to be, Can I accomplish these exercises? Instead of Can I accomplish the baseline human activities? And we’re not really recognizing the fact that your corrective exercises or your fitness exercises or your lack of exercise, for that matter, are all negatively impacting your biological function. That there is a baseline of movement input, load input that is not created through these exercises, even though these exercises would give you a look or the assumption that I’m really strong…
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: But, you know, when it becomes, when it starts interfering, when it starts interfering with your biological function, then you know you’ve overconsumed vitamin, you know, sit-up.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs] Vitamin sit-up.
KATY BOWMAN: or plank, or plank exercise, or whatever corrective exercise you’re doing. That’s the difference between exercise and movement. Core exercises are again, they’re just junk food, and the junkier they are would be the less, like they look like something that your body would actually be doing, ever, in nature.
LIZ WOLFE: So I shouldn’t suck in. I should just let it hang out.
KATY BOWMAN: Well, so then…so that’s just core exercise. Sucking it in is kind of different. So sucking it in is, you’ve got mass that sits on top of your abdominal wall.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: Again, the reason you have it there, depending on the phase of your life, has more to do with what you’re eating and how you’re moving throughout your lifetime as well as even a little bit more subtle things like what’s the electrical flow through these areas constantly all of the time that are more related to resting tensions and have you adapted to sitting in a chair. Like things that are more movement-related and not exercise-related. So when you suck in your stomach, whatever was out on the front of it is now just on the front, which means that anything that was behind it, is now inside. Is everyone with me there? Class?
LIZ WOLFE: Well, it’s just me, and I’m with you, so it doesn’t matter.
KATY BOWMAN: So it doesn’t matter. So it’s just you and I, no one else is here in the room.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: So whatever is on front is now replaced what was underneath and what was underneath is now inside the abdominal cavity, which was fully packed beforehand. It’s not like you have a lot of vacant space in your guts. It’s just all there. So the cool thing is you were kind of like, you’re like the Titanic…I don’t want to use it like it the Titanic. That’s not inspiring. But you’re like a ship.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: You know, that like when it starts sinking, it has like air lock chambers, you know, you’re shutting things, like you’re made of all these smaller airlocks, but the airlocks can slightly be deformed and it’s really great, it makes the body highly adaptable, so that you can continue to survive in many, many different environments. But when you suck your stomach in, you’ve now had to displace your guts somewhere, and you can push them, and the way that you displace is unique to you, depending on everything else that you’ve ever done and where the strengths and weaknesses reside within your own body.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: So you could be displacing your organs upward, which, so if anyone’s ever heard of a hiatal hernia, which is when your intestines end up in your thoracic cavity up by your lungs. If you’ve ever heard about that, the first question is how could that possibly happen? How could my guts end up in my lungs? You know, and it’s like, so it’s just a basic pressure argument, so for some reason, no one ever really talks about the why part. That’s why I’m like such a nerd for it.
LIZ WOLFE: Well, that’s a nerd thing.
KATY BOWMAN: Well, right, then that’s a whole epidemic unto itself. Or you can push your guts down, in case your guts’ pushed down, and then they displace what was underneath them, which was your pelvic organs, which then displace down again, if you’re a man, that just pushes everything down onto your prostate. If you’re a woman, it pushes out, which is called organ prolapse, or you could have a hernia. So you could kind of go down, but to the side, in which case your pressure is depressurized by something pushing “outside of its original structure.” It’s not outside of your skin, but it’s outside of the structure in which it’s supposed to be contained. You could have a diastasis recti or an umbilical hernia. All of these are the way that one would alleviate the regular displacement of your abdominal contents. A lot of people work on their digestion. I’m assuming a lot of people on the show work on digestion.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: But considering it as it’s something that’s in a vacuum, like your tube is just floating in a jar, and I like to talk about like what’s moving through your gut, a lot of times you could have high quality stuff moving through your gut, but it can’t move because your mechanical environment is actually pushing it back up because of the external forces. Like if you have a balloon and you grab the bottom of the balloon, you’ll see that the balloon bulges back up. You could be doing that with what’s in your gut tube. You could be slowing down your own digestion because the mechanical environment in which you keep.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh my goodness.
KATY BOWMAN: I know. Everyone hates me now. I’m sorry.
LIZ WOLFE: No, we love you. And here’s the thing. We talk about all, you know, we can spend all day talking about all of this stuff, and kind of the mismatches within our environment and how we move and all that stuff, but actually you offer a ton of solutions, like concrete action points in Move Your DNA for kind of attacking these things. So I guess the question would be, if you were cornered in the store by somebody who found out that you are who you are, and they said, hey, got, you know, real close talker, right up in your face, like in the corner, what can I do to be healthier? Like what should I do? And you only had 5 minutes. You had to leave. What-where would you tell him to start? I mean, it could be a page in your book if you wanted it to be, or maybe some concrete stuff for people to pay attention to, who are new to this.
KATY BOWMAN: Well, the easiest, like the easiest things to start with are the things that don’t add any extra time. So it’s looking at your footwear to see if you’re not offsetting every joint in your body by having something heeled under your foot. It would be looking at how often you sit, but not just how often you sit, how often you sit in exactly the same way. And then I just say, change that. Don’t even worry about how much you sit right now. Just when you go to sit, sit differently because that would be a different nutrient, you know. Sit on the floor in front of your couch. Put a couple of pillows under your butt so that you’re more comfortable. It would be-look at how much you’re walking or not walking and start working on that, and then one more thing would be, oh no, two more things. You said 5 minutes, but I’m just going to go with 5 things.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: I do a lot of women’s health, like pelvic floor stuff, and bathroom-ing again is a huge problem for a lot of people. It’s like get something under your feet when you go to the bathroom, whether it’s like a Squatty Potty platform or get a couple stacks of Move Your DNA for underneath each one of your feet. [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: You know, flip over a wastepaper basket and put your feet up. You don’t even have to do an active squat where you’re using your muscles right now. Just get your knees and hips flexed because that means all of the valves in your bathroom-ing parts can now work without you having to do something else. There is a way that they work just naturally and it is in the squat position because that’s the position in which you’ve always gone to the bath-the humans have gone to the bathroom for a long time and one more, one more. Oh my gosh. It’s something for your arms. So it would be start hanging from your arms, just a little bit, even if your feet are on the ground. But all that being said, all those things could take many, many microsteps that with a bulletpoint list of quick things, I always have to say, your structure as it is right now isn’t really your natural structure, so the mobilizing type exercises that I put forth help you do all of those things a little bit, with a little bit more ease of transition on your body. So like, those are the bulletpoints, easy ways to fix every day, no time added to your schedule, but if you added just a few corrective mobilizing exercises to that, then you’d get even a better outcome for making those transitions, so that would be the easiest thing.
LIZ WOLFE: And my assumption-you learn one thing, and then you have to keep learning because for me, it was like okay, I’m going to walk more. I’m going to really make walking a priority, and then I got into the shoes I was walking in. And then I got into how I was walking and how my stride looked like, and things like that, so there’s always ways to build upon the baseline, but I think, am I right in saying that you should not do nothing for fear of doing something incorrectly?
KATY BOWMAN: Right, exactly. Yeah, you know, and I think it’s the same thing with nutrition, probably. A lot of people like, they’ll say, if I can only wear minimal shoes sometimes, am I undoing it when I like wear my regular office shoes sometimes? Or if I eat good sometimes, am I undoing it when I eat bad? And I think it speaks volumes about how people understand. Like physiology is not banking. You’re not…it’s like it’s not…
LIZ WOLFE: Thank God.
KATY BOWMAN: Yes, yes. You adapt to everything that you do. You don’t adapt to the good more than the bad. You just adapt to what you do most frequently. So if you think about even these tiny little things that I’m starting to do just a little bit, it’s like, it is contributing to the net wellness that is you. And if it was something better, you know, that you were doing before, then you just got collectively better. So don’t feel paralyzed by doing it wrong, and just maybe make a list, right? At the beginning of Move Your DNA, I say, make a list. Make a list of everything that is bothering you or worrying you or ailing you, and then maybe let your list dictate where you want to start first. If you have foot pain, then you’d be more concerned with things that change the loads to the foot. If you have pelvic pain, then you kind of are thinking, right, I’ll be thinking about where my pelvis is when I’m walking. Or maybe you’re not even ready to walk yet because you’re in pain when you’re walking, in which case you would want to focus on learning some alignment points that make the loads while you’re walking less damaging to your body. So be your own guide.
LIZ WOLFE: And the cool thing about all this is, is that it’s really not intimidating or overwhelming. it’s just really cool that we have this information available to us to learn to move better, thanks to you. So I just…I love, I’m so grateful you’re putting this all out there.
KATY BOWMAN: Thanks. I try to stay compassionate and it’s hard when you write a book of like here’s what’s wrong with everything.
LIZ WOLFE: Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: And everybody…
LIZ WOLFE: Is that the alternate title?
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, it was. It was going to be the subtitle for awhile, but in the end, it’s more, I don’t like to put it out there that way. It’s hard, because it IS in itself, like that kind of message. Like here’s the problem. I’ve always been really solution-friendly, meaning it’s really just one problem, and here are a thousand solutions that you can select based on your life.
LIZ WOLFE: Mm-hmm.
KATY BOWMAN: And if you look at it that way, then the limits for getting better don’t even exist. Like you can get better right this second.
LIZ WOLFE: The limit does not exist.
KATY BOWMAN: That’s right, see? I’m all about…is that the Matrix?
LIZ WOLFE: No, it’s Mean Girls.
KATY BOWMAN: Yes! I love it.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs] I can’t believe I got to slip a Mean Girls in this interview.
KATY BOWMAN: I know. I love-we love Mean Girls in this house.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, it’s amazing.
KATY BOWMAN: I knew I knew it. The limit does not exist. Okay, I just want to tell you this quick story. I was at the DMV and  the woman said, “Catty?” And I said, “No, it’s Katy, actually it’s Katy.” And she’s like, “yeah, I’m going to put it down as Catty.”
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: And I, and so I just looked at her, and I was like…
LIZ WOLFE: That did not happen.
KATY BOWMAN: Is that from Mean Girls? Is that from Mean Girls? It totally did happen! She’s like, yeah, I always wanted to say it.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
KATY BOWMAN: And she’s like, I just could tell that you would be cool with me saying it because I live in Washington now, so when I moved more from Southern California, I was the only person at the DMV. My husband and I were the only people at the DMV, and they’re like, do you like this picture? Would you like us to take another picture? Could we fill out your form? They filled out the form. “Oh, don’t worry about it. We’ll fill it out for you.” It was three women working, and then just my husband and I and no one else in the DMV, and that’s when I knew that we had made the right move. [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: All of that plus the Mean Girls quote. You picked the right place.
KATY BOWMAN: We’re in the right place. We are in the North American Macchu Picchu here. We have landed.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, that’s amazing. Okay, so last question for you. How were you…how did you comport yourself during this interview physically? Were you sitting? Standing?
KATY BOWMAN: I’m sitting on a Bosu.
LIZ WOLFE: Really?
KATY BOWMAN: I’m in a squat position…so I’m in a supported squat position.
LIZ WOLFE: Okay.
KATY BOWMAN: So I’ve been working on kind of untucking…the Bosu allows me to get close to the ground, but I didn’t have to grunt through this whole exercise.
LIZ WOLFE: I appreciate that.
KATY BOWMAN: I don’t have a grunt filter on this mike that makes it sound as pretty as my singing, so I would just support here. And I’m kind of bouncing on the Bosu, so fidget, you know, it allows me to move around quite a bit, but I’ve been doing a lot of interviews this morning, so I’ve been taking them all different.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
KATY BOWMAN: I did one standing and rolling my foot out, and then I did one sitting, and I’ll do one seated all the way on the floor next.
LIZ WOLFE: All right, well, that’s it for us today. I’m really grateful to you for taking the time for us to come on. Thank you so much.
KATY BOWMAN: You’re very welcome.
LIZ WOLFE: Now the book is Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement and the author, of course, is Katy Bowman. I’m absolutely obsessed with all of her work, and this book is just one more to add to the creepy, obsessive podcaster pile.
KATY BOWMAN: [Laughs]
LIZ WOLFE: Please pick it up because all of these, it’s a very solutions oriented book, and it’s really enlightening. Not only that, but you know, if you’re not so sure quite yet, hop over to KatySays.com or AlignedandWell.com. You will get your learn on and you will laugh at the same time. That’s why it’s so much fun to learn from Katy, and change your life thanks to her, because she makes it really funny and really fun, as well as incredibly information dense. So pick up the book, Move Your DNA: Restore Your Health Through Natural Movement, and Katy, it’s available on Amazon?
KATY BOWMAN: You can get it at Barnes & Noble, any of your local bookstores, Amazon, and then I also like to throw a shoutout. I made an Audible, an audio book for it, on Audible.com.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, yes, yes, yes.
KATY BOWMAN: Because, you know, you’re going to read this book that’s talking about like you need to stop sitting, and I didn’t want to say, but you need to sit down for like 8 more hours of finishing reading this book. So you can listen to it and it actually has all the mileage chapters. I put the mileage at the beginning of each chapter, so the whole book is worth 20 miles.
LIZ WOLFE: I love it!
KATY BOWMAN: Yeah, so like, that was my…that was my solution because I felt kind of out of alignment, so to speak, for not making an audio book, which is such a great learning tool for us, you know, who are trying to get more movement. It’s like, you could be listening to this and shoveling chicken poop at the same time, if that’s your life.
LIZ WOLFE: You’ve been talking to my husband because I was supposed to clean the chicken coop like two weeks ago.
KATY BOWMAN: I mean, your husband can be listening to this and cleaning the chicken coop at the same time is what I meant to say.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs] Okay, thank you. All right everybody, pick up the book and thanks for listening. We’ll talk to you next week.
[1:03:13]
LIZ WOLFE: All right, Liz and Diane back to wrap up this episode. I always love talking to Katy. Her work has been huge for me personally, so it’s an honor to have her on this show at the debut of her new book, so definitely check that out.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Has her work inspired you to not like lay on your stomach on the floor and your computer anymore?
LIZ WOLFE: No, it’s inspired me to be on the floor with my computer.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don’t mean the floor, I mean, like hunched over on the floor.
LIZ WOLFE: On the floor? There’s…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I’ve seen you blogging, my friend. I’m just kidding.
LIZ WOLFE: I know. It’s not good.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I’m waving my finger.
LIZ WOLFE: It’s better than sitting in the same position all day long, which is what I used to do.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yes. I rotate.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah. Rotating is very important.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mostly because I’m so short that the tabletop is too high for my arms, so it messes up my shoulders. I know, I’m like…I’m only 5’4. People meet me and they’re like, I expected you to be a lot taller. It’s just because I’m loud and from New Jersey, and my hair might be that high, but [Laughs] I’m not that tall. Yeah, I’ll move to the couch, you know, recline a little, get my shoulders dropped, the laptop in action. Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: Yeah.
Homesteading Hijinks
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Liz, let’s talk about your Homesteading Hijinks for the week, shall we?
LIZ WOLFE: Absolutely. And if people want a lot more about the homesteading stuff, I know there’s a few people that are just like, they eat it up. There are some other Paleo homestead people out there that I’ve connected with. Listen to the Modern Farm Girls podcast with me and Diana Rodgers. So that’s a whole half hour of talking about all this stuff and her homestead stuff as well.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Love Diana. She’s hilarious.
LIZ WOLFE: I love her. She is really funny.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: She is funny.
LIZ WOLFE: She’s kind of like…she’s kind of like sly, like sly about it. I don’t know. But she’s been my moral, ethical homesteading touchstone for awhile now, and I just actually called her yesterday because we were having to take our pigs in to be butchered. So I called her and I asked her to talk me through it, and so that’s basically my Homesteading…it’s not really Hijinks, it was kind of the not fun stuff for…we haven’t had the pigs for that long, but for a couple of reasons, number one, we’re going into the winter, and keeping these pigs that are almost full sized, just about butcher sized through the winter would mean feeding them quite a bit of grain, which is fine. I mean, that’s what you do when you raise pigs. You raise them through the winter, but feeding them quite a bit of grain, of course, organic, non GMO, soy free, etc. But it was kind of a matter of resources or the pigs vs. resources for the humans. So given that they were about slaughter weight and given that we would like to fill up our freezers before it gets too cold, and also given that the responsibility for many of the animals falls to me during the winter, since my husband leaves for work before it’s light out, we just kind of thought it would be best if we went ahead and sent them to slaughter now, and I was tasked with loading them into the trailer and taking them to the butcher. My girl Amy did it with me, and it was tough, I mean. We-there was a lot of guilt there. It was the first time, you know, I’d ever done anything like that. And we basically, you know, got them all excited, kind of called them out from the back acreage. They thought they were going to get fed, and instead they got loaded into a trailer and shipped off to their death. And that’s the reality of it, as meat eaters, we are eating things that were made dead, that were killed, so we could eat them. And it was tough. I mean, we dropped them off, and Amy and I had been talking about doing some kind of blessing or some kind of thank you on the way there, and of course, we get out of the truck and we asked them to back the trailer up for us because I cannot do that, and basically I just put my hand on each of them and was kind of just trying to transmit like a message of gratitude to them. And of course, the butcher comes out and says, “Don’t-don’t pet them!” And I was like…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Awwww!
LIZ WOLFE: I’m just having a moment.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Awwww.
LIZ WOLFE: And really, like I was overwhelmed. I definitely…there were tears and some being choked up because really taking responsibility for the fact that I’m dropping you off to die…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: was probably the worst feeling I’ve ever had. So you know, I’m still kind of wrestling with it. It definitely makes me not want to ever waste a bite of meat.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mm-hmm.
LIZ WOLFE: So it’s just different. You can buy it from local farmers all day long, and that’s the best, you know, that’s the best way to go about this if you can, but the actual…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: The process was tough. And then I came across a post from the Elliot Homestead, which is a blog that I follow. It was basically a step by step rundown on how you butcher a pig at your homestead. They had somebody come out that’s well known for preserving the ancient methods of butchering and basically did everything from pictures to video on exactly how to do it. So, and that’s even more, I mean, that’s a degree even closer to our food that I’m just not ready for, so…people were pretty supportive on Instagram about the fact that I was doing that. There were a couple of people that were like, I’m sorry, I could not do that.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: And I was all, I don’t think you’re sorry, but that’s fine that you don’t want to do it. Just don’t, you knew, just don’t give me a sideways look about it because I’m trying here, so…
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s…it’s one of those things where you just have to, you have to just have the respect and I think that’s really what, you know, your attempted little blessing or gratitude, which I think is really important, and one of the reasons…or one of the things that we do when we kind of say grace before we eat food or something is just have that little moment of thanks, and it’s partially, you know, thanks to this animal who gave its life for me, and I do think, you know, there are so many folks who don’t eat meat who wrestle with this issue, but I think there’s also the whole side of these pigs were born to be raised by someone like you to have them on a homestead or on a farm, and to then be eaten. I mean, that was their…they’re bred and grown for that purpose, and so it is…it’s a little different, I think, than some of the mindset that folks have around, that we’re just killing animals. It’s like, we wouldn’t have raised those animals. We wouldn’t have had those animals, not as many of them would have been born because we, you know? You know what I’m saying?
LIZ WOLFE: And that is important for the heritage breeds in particular, actually keeping the population going.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Yeah.
LIZ WOLFE: Which is what we had. Heritage breeds. I’ll write about it eventually, but you know, like I understand. In that moment I understood wanting to opt out of this whole cycle.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Mm-hmm.
LIZ WOLFE: And I talk about that a lot in Eat the Yolks. It’s the fact that there really is no life without death, and thinking about, you know, people go to the Gap at a shopping mall that probably destroyed many animal habitats and killed many animals to dig out the mall, so they could have their Gap jeans or whatever. Like there are many things that are not necessary in life that cause death, you know, and just to kind of have one pig, one family, is really, I would say, the ideal. But even if you’re eating vegetables, beans, wheat, whatever it is, something is being upturned, killed, harmed, for your dinner. It’s just tougher when it has a face and a demeanor a little bit more like yours, you know.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Probably and even tougher when you’re the one who raised it, so…
LIZ WOLFE: Right.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Well, my hat is off to you, my friend.
LIZ WOLFE: Why thank you. It better taste damn good.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: [Laughs] Report back on that bacon.
Diane’s Kitchen Tip
LIZ WOLFE: Will do. On a lighter note, it’s time for Diane’s Kitchen Tip. Diane, what do you use to make your, to blend your coffee?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: All right, well, this will be a quick one. I recently received one of those little handheld like whirring little whisky thing. I don’t even know. Not whisky.
LIZ WOLFE: Hanh?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Nobody sent me whisky.
LIZ WOLFE: Whisky.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don’t know what I would do with…
LIZ WOLFE: The safe word will be whisky.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I don’t even know what this thing’s called. It’s like a handheld little blender stick thing, but it’s not an immersion blender. It’s a really tiny one that honestly I think is just a waste of plastic and space. Like it’s just not very useful.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh good.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I think a spoon or a fork is just as effective if you just like flick your wrist a little bit into your cup, and you’re fine. Anyway, somebody sent me one of those little things. I don’t know what they’re called. Somebody tell me what they’re called. I don’t think those are good or effective. I generally use my Magic Bullet, the little, you know, countertop mini-blender thing to blend my coffee and people have been asking me because I’ve been making my pumpkin spice coffee, which has some coconut milk, a little bit of ghee, a little bit of maple syrup because I love maple syrup.
LIZ WOLFE: [Laughs]
DIANE SANFILIPPO: We elves try to stick to the 4 main food groups. Candy, candy cane, candy corns, and syrup.
LIZ WOLFE: Oh, it’s so close to Christmas movie time.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: I’m going to start watching it on repeat now.
LIZ WOLFE: You should.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: So and then I put it in the blender. A little bit of pumpkin spice, pumpkin pie spice, put it in the blender, and so I use the Magic Bullet and I heat up the coffee extra hot before I do that because then otherwise it would just be kind of lukewarm, but I don’t generally use a full size blender because a full size blender is a bit too much for me to clean. So there you go.
All right, I’m going to do our interactive listener hashtag dealio this week, and I think for last week it was Weird Food I Love and if zucchini cheese doesn’t count [Laughs] Now I’m not sure that this woman was tagging it for us or not, but I thought it would be really funny to call her out as the, you know, selected “winner,” even if she wasn’t intending to do it for the podcast.
LIZ WOLFE: Sweet. Like it or not, you win!
DIANE SANFILIPPO: Carly! Her Instagram is CarlyS629, and she’s eating broccoli with mayonnaise, and if she’s a Paleo/Real Food eater, then it’s some healthy Paleo mayonnaise, but she’s got broccoli with mayonnaise and it’s something she grew up eating and so…oh she said she makes her own homemade mayo full of healthy fats, free of weird additives. So that’s…it sounds like she’s with us, but usually people do the hashtag and then they tag us too, or then they also write, you know, #bbpodcast, something like that. So I wasn’t quite sure. But I think it might be even funnier if she didn’t mean to tell us that, and we’ll just go tag her on Instagram and let her know that we called her out, and said awesome weird food that you love. So there’s that. You want to give us a new hashtag?
LIZ WOLFE: I do. The new hashtag is #CoffeeMyWay. [Sings] I did it my way. Was that good?
DIANE SANFILIPPO: That was good. That was pretty good.
LIZ WOLFE: Cool.
DIANE SANFILIPPO: So if you’ve been enjoying the pumpkin spice coffee that I put a recipe for on Instagram or I also posted one for gingerbread coffee or whatever you do to your coffee, hashtag it #CoffeeMyWay. You could also put #CoffeeWithBen if you want, but if you want us to shout you out on the podcast, #CoffeeMyWay. And probably tag one or both of us, too, just so that you meant to submit your coffee for us to take a look at. Tell us how you drink it.
LIZ WOLFE: Cool, well, that’s it for this week. Find Diane at DianeSanfilippo.com and join me at RealFoodLiz.com, and join our email lists. Do it, do it. If you’re not on the list, you’re missing, you’re missing a whole world. And if you’re loving our new segment format, please let us know in your iTunes review and if you don’t like it, just don’t say anything. Thanks for listening; we’ll see you next week.