 Hey everybody, I'm Lance Squiggy, and this is Tea Time with Lance and Allison. Allison, what's tea time? I just got some routine blood work done with my doctor and found out I have elevated cholesterol, triglycerides, and my glucose is borderline. And for the past couple years, I've had kind of elevated blood pressure as well every time I go to the doctor and we kind of just assumed it was like white coat syndrome. I don't really have any issues with it. I'm still pretty young, but now I'm beginning to think maybe it's not white coat syndrome. Maybe my blood pressure is kind of elevated. So we thought it would be cool if as previous and current health professionals, current physician assistant students to kind of take you on my journey because my goal is to not go on to medication. My goal is now that I know that this is a problem and I have evidence that shows what I've kind of known all along, which is that I haven't been treating my body very well in PA school. This is a little bit of a wake-up call for me, so I'm gonna get my blood work done in about three months. So end of March, probably. I'll be right in the middle of my last quarter of my didactic year of PA school. And my goal is to have all this stuff be normal. So what do you plan to change? Where was your life two months ago and where is your life going to be in one month? Honestly, pretty similar. I don't have any changes. I'm still gonna be in school. Monday through Friday, I'm still gonna have exams every week. But I think my mindset has changed. Like it's that thing where you're young, so I'm 26 and I have a family history of high cholesterol, high blood pressure, types of diabetes, you know, obesity runs both sides of the family. Like it's not shocking to hear that I would get this at some point, but I've always been like the healthy one in my family. I tried to exercise pretty consistently. I eat pretty well. We don't drink alcohol. We do all this stuff that should help mitigate those genetic factors that make me a high-risk person. So that's not gonna change. School is not gonna change. But how I think about what I'm doing in my free time and even in my not-free time is going to change. And that's kind of what we're gonna document is in this lifestyle of mine that I have right now where I really do spend. So ideally, I'm getting eight hours of sleep that leaves 16 hours of my day. At least 14 of those 16 hours. I'm studying or learning. I don't think that's that much of an exaggeration. Or sleeping as well. Yeah, no, I mean that that seems like an accurate number. My kind of follow-up to your life is so previously and upcoming things aren't gonna change very much, but if your triglycerides are gonna go down some sort of habits are going to change. Do you have a plan of attack already or are we gonna talk about that? We're gonna talk about that because part of the reason we're documenting this is one to show you this is possible. So when you go into your doctor and they say, hey, you need to make these or when you come to see me in a year and a half and your blood work comes back and I say, hey, your cholesterol is kind of high and your triglycerides are elevated and your glucose is borderline like we got to make some changes. I'm not bad enough yet where I need medication to help regulate it. Like it's not off the charts. Like, well, you know, we can't even properly test your blood because it's it's the centrifuge. It's too thick with all the cholesterol and triglycerides, which happens. But it's elevated. But this is just a general lab course scale where the reference range for triglycerides is 0 to 149. I'm at 162 and this is fasted. So I got this done in the morning. My LDL cholesterol, so that stands, it's like the bad cholesterol, if you think about it, that range is 0 to 99 for fasted. Mine's 127, which is high. And then you have your HDL, which is the good cholesterol, the happy cholesterol. Mine's 41 and they want it above 39. So it's like in that range where oh, it's above 39, you're okay. But that's kind of low. There's not a lot of buffer there. Especially if my LDL's are high. Sometimes if your LDL's are like kind of high, but your HDL's also really high, it can kind of like help mitigate that a little bit. So it's less concerning if your LDL's high, but your HDL's, you know, on the higher end of the scale, too. My concern is more the triglycerides, which the more optimal ranges that I've heard are ideally, you want it under 50. Like less is generally better. For triglycerides, whoo! Yeah, and when we're at 162, so I don't have a clinical medical background, but I did do a master's degree in cell biology and anatomy and the metabolism stuff that we've talked about is what I think of when I see something like triglycerides. So I think triglycerides, what we're measuring here is a blood panel. So we're measuring triglycerides in the blood. This is not really an indication of fat as stored throughout the body, right? That would be, you know, you could do a dexascan or whatever. We should probably establish that first. So I'm not overweight. My BMI is normal. My body fat percentage is normal. But that doesn't mean that I can't have health problems. Yeah, or metabolism problems. That's how I see it, yeah. Yeah, because like Lance, and I'm sorry to interrupt you, you can please continue. But that's what he's saying is like triglycerides are the way that your body stores fat. My blood triglycerides are still elevated even if I don't have a lot of fat storage. Clarification that I think we should look up just for our own whatever, but I don't see when I hear triglycerides. I think less about stored fat, especially this blood panel. I think triglycerides is a somewhat mobilized form. It is, it's a partly stored form, but it's not, it's not stuck in adipose tissue, which would be more stored, more on the spectrum of stored to me. Whereas more on the spectrum of not stored is something like a free fatty acid or you know, eventually a ketone body. That kinds of stuff, that'll float around. You can use that a little more readily for energy. Whereas these triglycerides, they're a little bigger and they, like you were saying in the centrifuge example, they thicken the blood. Like the blood is literally thicker. So you'll often see with something like this, blood pressure increase and that's just resistance in the the tubes. Yeah. I think establishing that sort of baseline is actually really important even for, you know, a normal listener who is not a medical professional or a fitness professional, like it helps you advocate for yourself. You want to, you want to kind of know what's going on so you know how to attack it. This is, this is most, the most intimate portion of you and if you're going to change it, like there's no way you can totally farm this out. You can't just say, give me better blood. I mean, that helps actually, but it's not really a great solution. And that's why I come back to metabolism because when I think of metabolism, I think of two things. I think of diet and I think of exercise. And when I think of how the body responds to those things, I also think of stress and sleep. And so generally, if I have a client who's in your situation, I'm giving them some form of a new cocktail of diet, exercise and stress management. Where are you there and where are you trying or where were you there and where are you trying to head now? So if you're watching this, you probably know who we are and what we do slash what we did. Lance and I both have backgrounds in exercise science and working with people in my position. I've worked with countless people in my previous jobs with blood panels, just like mine or worse, and help them get it down. So for me, it's a little embarrassing, I guess, to be in this position because I know what I have to do and I know it's not that difficult. But what I was doing previously, you know, my first couple quarters, I always get started and in the first couple weeks of the court. And I mean, so for me, it goes back a little bit further, I guess. Let's go back before even school, because I think my problems start long ago. Cue montage and will be abbreviated because it's not that interesting to other people. I played Division One field hockey all four years. I did it all four years. But my freshman year, I got really sick. There is an article on Quotipiac's athletic website about my journey, if you want to read up on it. But basically, I was diagnosed with Lyme disease and got really, really sick, took an entire semester off of school for medical leave to receive antibiotic infusions and thought I was doing a lot better. But I think just the stress, I had Lyme disease. I was also diagnosed with a couple other tick-borne infections. And at the time, I was also exposed to Epstein-Barr virus, which is the mono virus. So I was just really, really sick. And I think the toll that it took on my immune system and most importantly, my nervous system was just crazy. I think the stress that my body experienced was something that I'm still struggling to recover from. And this, I was diagnosed back in 2014. So, I mean, we're coming on eight years of this. And I still have not residual Lyme disease, but, you know, recovery from such a serious infection. After I had the Lyme disease, it was really hard for me to exercise. I still, I've seen a lot of doctors and I've worked with a lot of really awesome professionals and I've gotten to a much better place. I really worked on my sleep hygiene. I changed my diet. I changed and worked on my mental health to work on anxiety and all this other stuff that can contribute to your recovery from a serious infection like Lyme disease. And I got myself to a really good place where I can actually exercise again. For a while, I couldn't do anything without having what I called major flare-ups, which were just like major bouts of fatigue, muscle numbness, muscle pain, tremors. I mean, Lance saw a couple of them. It's kind of like, it's almost like paralysis in the morning too, sometimes. Just when it's really bad. It's crazy. I've never seen anything like it. Can't sit up on my own. Need assistance around the house. It's important to describe these types of things because I think this is one of the many, like you have the schedule challenges of being a student in a very demanding program, but you also have, like you don't respond to exercise the way other people respond to exercise. You can't just do a little bit more or try a little bit harder and kind of get by, like doing that could set you back for weeks. Yeah, so that's part of what I have to work with is what Lance is saying. I don't respond to exercise the way that most people will. So if I try to go and do like a hit workout, for example, like a high intensity interval training exercise, 15 minutes go really hard, push yourself. Those actually tend to make me pretty sick. I don't feel well. I get this muscle pain. I get really fatigued and I just don't respond well. And so something for me is I need like 40 or 60 minutes of my day carved out where I can go for a really long walk or do a strength workout in the gym or something. But trying to make time for that is the biggest issue at school. And I can start out, this goes back to, you know, I started out the quarter. My schedule is pretty light the first couple of weeks because we haven't had any exams yet. And I'm in the gym and I'm on top of my notes and I'm doing everything right. And then I hit that first bout of exams. And this quarter is a really good example because we came right back after Thanksgiving. I was great. I worked out every day and I took all my notes and then it came to exam week and I had three exams like Monday, Tuesday, Thursday. I didn't sleep for about 48 hours for one of those, I mean two of those days and it is horrible. And I never ever wanted to do this. This was like, if you would ask me, I would have told you like, nope, I will never do that. I will never get to that point. I had to. Prove it. And it was not awesome and I don't recommend it. And if you're in school, I really hope you're never in that position. But I just was not ahead of the game as much as I thought I was. And I ended up doing okay on my exams, but I slept for 14 hours after that. Yeah, yeah, that's crazy. And so I mean like those weeks, I don't have 60 minutes to go and work out and even if I do, that might be bad for my body. Like that might be too much. Yeah. That might not be a good plan. And so it's refreshing to get this side of the experience where I could sit in the chair as a coach and be like, you really need to do the different. You can't be doing that. But as the student now, I'm like, no, I really had to do that. There's no way around it. So coming back into this quarter, we're halfway through the quarter. I'm kind of at midterms. And I wanna say that's not gonna happen anymore. It probably will, especially finals week. It will definitely happen. But there's a lot of stuff that I can be doing that I'm gonna be doing over the next couple of months to work on the other stuff that's more within my control. So I think this is the most important part of this process is for me to experience for Lance to visualize and live with and to kind of have him and my coach, Jay Chung, to help guide me through. And that's gonna be, you can't control your schedule. You can't control your exams, but there's a lot of stuff you can control. And that's what we gotta work with. And so for that, it's gonna be all the stuff that you hire Lance for help on. It's gonna be how much movement are you getting? What's your diet look like? And what are you doing to mitigate the day-to-day stress that you feel? Because like Lance is saying, stress can elevate all the stuff that we're seeing on my blood panel. So when I get really stressed out about an exam, I'm potentially making those blood markers worse. I'm potentially putting my body into a fight or flight state, getting really stressed out, elevating my cortisol, doing all this stuff that's going to increase my triglycerides, increase my cholesterol, and increase my chances of developing heart disease and dying from a heart attack early on. And that's what we're trying to not be at. Like I don't wanna be on medicine. I wanna be healthy. I wanna have a long, healthy life. So we gotta work on stuff and we're gonna take you through exactly what your coaches would have you do in a crazy schedule environment. Yeah, yeah. And normally I wouldn't throw a bunch of stuff at this person if I'm training them, but I've seen Allison live for a few years now and I know her cortisol is always high and if she skips meals, it's just gonna get higher and persistently high cortisol is gonna raise her triglycerides. So like eating healthy for her might mean less about having fresh, nutritious stuff, though I think that's still important, but maybe more about just having regularly scheduled meals so that her body doesn't have to freak out so much, her hormones don't fluctuate so much. But you, go ahead, go ahead. Yeah, maybe we should hear Lance's perspective, but I don't. The biggest thing that I think I took away from that comment from Lance is I am one of those people where I have a lot going on and I just forget to eat. So I think there's like two or three maybe types of stress response with food. One is like me, you just forget to eat, you don't eat, you're stressed out, you're worried you're getting fat, whatever, you skip a meal. I can afford to miss a meal. How many times have we heard that? I can afford to miss a meal. There's a cricket outside and it's very loud. It might be inside, it's pretty loud. Go ahead. Arizona man. The second type that you'll see are the stress eaters. So the people who snack constantly when they're stressed, so they're studying for their exams and they're eating chips and they're eating, I thought of waffles, I don't know why I thought of waffles, you're probably not eating waffles, but you're eating food, you're ordering food, whatever. And that third type of eater are maybe like the second eater, I wasn't sure, emotional eaters. And I do this sometimes too where to reward myself after I've done really well on an exam, I'm like, I did really well, I'm gonna get a pizza. And it's like, you were so stressed out you didn't sleep for 48 hours and now you're gonna help your body by giving yourself some unhealthy foods to make you feel better because emotionally that's what you do to reward yourself after a stressful week when I'm really just hurting my body further. So that is actually one of my goals for 2022. Even if I can't maintain, that's my goal is to maintain but understand life happens and it's not always gonna be perfect but I want my mindset to change from that. Like if I had a really stressful week and I made it through, I want to help my body by doing what's good for it, not by what my irrational trained brain has learned is gonna make me feel better inside by eating that pizza, you know, going to sleep early and getting a nice big plate of vegetables is what's gonna make me feel better physically after a stressful week and probably emotionally, yeah. I've seen the, one scenario of stress eating that you did not mention that I've seen most common from you and from other people, but from you is I'm so stressed, I have so much to do right now I just wanna order a pizza and it's not like, it's not like you don't have, like if I offered to cook, you'd be like but I really just want pizza because I need the comfort. So I think that's like number two, I think it's the stress eater where like you want that comfort food. It's just an uncontrollable craving. Yeah, yeah, because I mean, that's a thing, when you're stressed, you want sugary foods, you want fatty foods, that's, I don't know the science behind it but I know that's what people want. Yeah, yeah, brain craves it, especially as you're used to it. Yeah. Like you were saying, it's a learned behavior, you've become familiar with that. So we talked about that, it sounds like you sleep pretty well as long as you sleep. She is a pretty deep sleeper, doesn't always feel rested, not really sure what to do with that but hopefully metabolism stuff can maybe help with some of that. Yeah, I think the, so the thing that I would always tell my clients and I tell my family members this a lot too and I mean, I've never been sedentary. I played sports all through my entire life into college so I had cardio every day and then I worked in strength and conditioning where I was up and walking around and I had a very active life profession. So I moved every day, all the time and now I'm in school and what I always used to tell my clients is, because they're like, oh, well, you know, I did 30 minutes of cardio today, so I'm fine. I don't need to do anything else. And my question is always, okay, you did 30 minutes of cardio and you'll hear this from coaches a lot but what did you do the other 23 and a half hours of that day? You probably just sat on the couch or sat at your desk, especially with the work from home stuff because you're getting up to go to the bathroom or the kitchen and that's about it. 30 minutes of cardio is probably not even meeting your daily prerequisite of how much you should be moving. It's still sedentary. Yeah. Yeah. It's something, and I think, I said this on another podcast today, not Tea Time with Lance and Allison, but another one, that cardio and going for a walk are not the same thing. You need the cardio, but you also need to move around. It's just good for managing your stress. It moves, fluid around in your cells and your tissues and you get to start recycling the waste out of there so it can be excreted or what's the hippie word for that? When I detox, yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, so I think of the medical stuff that we learned with this, which the American Heart Association recommends that you have 10,000 daily steps every day and that's not really done with a lot of good research, but that's saying this is what you should be doing in addition to your exercise. So your 10,000 steps should not equal your cardio workout. You know, that's in addition to whatever else you're doing. The two should almost be separate. So that American Heart Association recommendation for if you're trying to lower your triglycerides, if you're trying to lower your cholesterol, you need to do four to six days, I think it is of, you know. It depends on how vigorous the activity is. Yeah, I forget. Six days of relatively low intensity stuff for like at least 30 minutes a day. Yeah, that is not the 10,000 steps that you should be getting. And that's kind of a lot of cardio. When most people think about how am I gonna fit that into my day? That's one of the reasons that the high intensity stuff has taken off so well is because I can get a 90 minute cardio workout in 20 minutes of high intensity work. The issue with that stuff is you just can't recover from it. And if you're Allison, because this is Tea Time with Lance and Allison, and we're talking about Allison, she won't be able to recover from it probably at all. Probably not for a week or more. Yeah, don't put me out. I won't be able to study the rest of the night. I won't be able to work out the next couple of days because I'll have too many muscle pains. It just doesn't make sense for me to try to do. So we talked about diet strategies. We talked about bad ways to do it. We didn't talk about how we're gonna- Well, what are you gonna do? Yeah. And so I'm hopefully gonna document some of this for y'all as we go through it. My personal goal is because of how I compensate with stress, which is skip meals and order out a bunch. My goals are to one, not skip meals. And for me, that meal is primarily breakfast and lunch. Sometimes I skip both breakfast because I slept in because I'm tired because I'm stressed. And so I wake up and I have to leave so I didn't have time to cook breakfast. So I just don't eat that day. And then if I didn't pack my lunch the night before or I don't have food that I want for lunch, I don't bring lunch with me and then I'm at school. And what I was doing last year was going to Del Taco across the street because, well, I don't have lunch and I need to eat something. So I'm gonna go to Del Taco, which is not a great option. And then I'd come home and be so stressed out I would have us order out food and get a pizza because I'm stressed out and I wanted a pizza. So this, what we're gonna do this year, 2022, new year. I've been pretty good about breakfast so far. We're about a weekend. I have granola bars that I can eat, that's an option. I wanna eat more vegetables with all my meals because they're good for me and they will help lower my cholesterol. And so a good way to do that is smoothies and they can be done pretty quick and Lovely Lance does the dishes while I'm gone. So if I use the blender, I come home and it's all clean after. I try to rinse it out. But I have to get up early enough to do that. And so I get up, make my smoothie, put some vegetables in it. That's been good so far. If I don't have time to do that, I can probably make a peanut butter and jelly on a piece of gluten-free or like whole grain bread really quickly. And to preface that, we use just like fresh ground peanuts, it's not processed peanut butter. So you know, we go to Whole Foods and we get the, you just put the peanuts into the grinder and it gives you some mushed up peanuts and that's what we use. I would consider that processing, but it's not that bad, you know. It's not layers of processing and preserving. Okay, that's fair. It's just raw peanuts though. I do use like Smucker's Jelly, which is not awesome. But again, my goal is not to have a perfect meal. It's, I need to make sure I'm eating. So I'll do that and then I'll pack some fruit and carrots in a little container the night before and bring that with me. And that's like my snack or the other part of my breakfast. And then for lunch, we are buying like rotisserie chicken or something at school that I can shred up, put on salads for lunch. That's super easy. Yeah, to just have, you know, Sunday, you go to the grocery store, you grab your rotisserie chicken, just shred it all and then you can just grab a handful when you're prepping your lunch. You don't even have to worry about, you know, cutting it up or like, you know, bringing the right silverware to school or whatever, just grab a handful, throw it in with your salad, done. I'm kind of a freak and I don't really eat salad dressings on my salads anyways. So for me, it's just like a couple handfuls of spring mix, maybe some arugula, spinach, whatever we have in the house, handful of shredded chicken and then toppings that I might want. So if I want some carrots or walnuts or pecans or I feel like I can never say that word. I thought that was so weird. I needed to say it because I felt weird saying it. Blueberries, like whatever else I want on my salad. Blueberries. Blueberries. You can get fancy and like pre-make some quinoa to put on your salad, have some extra protein, carbohydrates, blah, blah, blah, but it's really not hard to do and you just do it the night before. I've also been trying to plan out our weeks better. So Lance is great. He helps me a lot around the house while I'm in school. He doesn't plan ahead when he goes to the grocery store as much as I need to for, well, listen. Because we have to cook a lot at night to have stuff to bring for lunch. And if we don't have enough of that protein that we had the night before or something, I just have like a plate of cauliflower to bring with me to school and then whatever Lance is gonna eat because there may not be enough for both of us to split or I come home and I need to go to the store more frequently to get stuff basically is what I'm saying. Like today I had to stop at the grocery store on my way home to make sure that we had something to have for dinner so that we would not order out. Whereas last quarter, I would not have thought about, okay, we don't have anything to make for tonight. I would have just gotten home and been like, oh, we don't have anything. We better order. Yeah, we have to order. That's what the pain of a high measurement on your blood test will do to you. You're finally feeling it. So I'm just basically, long story short is I'm trying to plan ahead. I'm trying to think a couple days in advance is like, okay, we're having this for dinner tonight. I'll bring this in for lunch tomorrow. What are we gonna have for dinner tomorrow? This, okay, two days planned, the whole week planned, however you wanna do it. I like planning the whole week because I'm kind of a freak like that, but you do figure it out. I would say that is the best diet tip. I wrote a whole book on diet tips. Actually, you should check it out. It's currently called Dieting Without a Diet and it's available on mastering.fitness sponsored by Mastering Fitness. I might change the- Click the link here. Oh yeah, I should put it. I think it's, wait, I think it's, I don't remember, it's one of those. I was wanting to do that. That though, planning ahead is the most helpful tip because it eliminates the need for willpower. If you have a plan, you just execute the plan. You need a little bit of energy, but you don't need to control yourself and say, oh, I'm not supposed to have this. I need to look at those fries but not eat them. Like it's not that kind of thing. It's just, this is what I do today so I'm going to execute it and it becomes less emotional and more logical. Yeah, and the emotion is still there. Lance and I have very different relationships with food. He will just eat something because it's good for him. I don't do that. I'll like throw up, so. She's like, I love you. You're like a child when it comes like being picky about stuff but I don't wanna. She doesn't actually say that but she thinks it. I do. I just don't want to eat that. It doesn't sound good to me, so I don't want to. So finding food that tastes really good is really important to me. So my goal for this kind of like whole series with y'all is to show you like, cause we also have a bunch of crazy diet restrictions, right? So like I'm not really supposed to eat eggs that much. They kind of upset my stomach. We try to be gluten-free. We try to be dairy-free. We're pretty paleo, honestly, but also Lance has a bunch of sensitivities to like nightshades and. Fod baps. Yeah, so we have like a crazy long list of foods that like onion, garlic, peppers, tomatoes, stuff that we're not really supposed to be eating. We do sometimes, but we try to avoid it for the most part. So I think it's nice for us to show how we kind of navigate these crazy diet restrictions because a lot of people are like us that we know and it's hard to navigate that. And the reason, we should probably just make another video on it on why we decided to make all these dietary changes and how we went about it and figuring out what didn't work well with our bodies. But I wanna keep y'all updated with some of that. And then the other part of this stuff is gonna be taking you through my workouts. And so we talked kind of about workout, but we never really talked about what the plan is. Yeah, I've been waiting to get there, let's do it. Okay, so workouts, I would say anecdotally, it seems like she used to not work out at all. I didn't ever. When we lived in California, every time I got into a good groove and you were with me for at least one of these, maybe two of these, I could work out pretty consistently for like six weeks. And for me that was like some type of cardio and what I was doing for a while was like walking on the treadmill on an incline. I'd wake up early, I'd go to the gym, I'd walk on the treadmill for a Netflix episode. That was my TV time for the day. Then I would head to work and then I would have a break in the day and I would do not an intense lift, but I would do some type of lifting exercise. And then I get to like six weeks of that and I'm just progressing because I'm getting stronger, I can lift heavier weights and I'd have a flare up. And that would put me out for months. Meaning she would be very, very tired. It would be very hard to get up in the morning. She'd get a lot of those muscle pains, pins and needles, feelings in her extremities and just like responses where you would say this doesn't feel like, before she got sick, she worked out and she knows what it feels like to work out and this doesn't feel like that. Like it's not just I'm being a wimp, you know? It's interesting because as a strong conditioning coach I know how strong I am. And so like I know I can deadlift 135 pounds. That I know I can do. But when I'd have these flare ups, nope. The, I don't know if it was nervous system, endocrine, whatever could not do it. Too tired. I just couldn't pick that weight up off the ground. And some people might be, we had a friend who would be like, it sounds like a mindset. It's a fixed mindset. And that would honestly really make me mad because I would be so frustrated partially because I was afraid, like what if he's right? What if it really is all in my head, you know? Like if you have a chronic illness, there's always some voice in the back of your head. Like you're making this worse than it is. Like you're just being a baby. You're being dramatic. But I knew that wasn't the case. I knew it wasn't just being dramatic or I wasn't just in my head where I was telling myself I can't do this. Like it's something I wanted to do and I tried really hard and I would just get sick. So Lance is correct there. We've been together for over four years and two and a half of those, I did not work out consistently if at all. Like there'd be months where I did not work out at all. Going to work was my workout and that would kick my butt. So I started working 2020 with a coach. One of our I-Fast crew, J-Chung, J helped me a lot and I think COVID kind of gave me the space and time to go for more walks and do more stuff and kind of focus on my body and health a little bit more just because I didn't have a commute and it gave me some extra free time in the day to really focus on myself. So I started working out pretty consistently then and then I felt really good and I was making the body comp goals that I had wanted and I was running again and I ran a 5K and then I started school and just all that got pushed to the back burner. So I know what needs to be done. I know I need to have more daily movement. I know I need some type of cardio routine and I know I need some type of strength training routine because another thing that's important that I talk about with my doctor is for women, your, I don't know if I've told you this directly, for women, your bone density peaks at the age of 30 and every year after that, your bone density starts to go down and then it dips really low when you hit menopause and that's why you see osteoporosis in women so much and so lifting weights is really good and I'm not 30 yet. I probably haven't reached my maximum bone density yet but I want that bone density to be as maximum as it can at age 30 and lifting weights is gonna help me do that because again, I'm looking at long-term, I'm looking at longevity, I'm looking at how can I live to be 100 with Lance because I never wanna leave you. So how do I do all that? And for me, that's gonna include some type of strength training. So we got a bike, a stationary bike so that I can do my work. If I'm studying at home, I don't have to worry about trying to go to the gym and get my computer set up and my iPad set up and getting all my notes out and listening to my lectures and blah, blah, blah. So we got a stationary bike or I can use it as the 30 minute break that I get myself when I get home from school. So we got a bike. My goal is to do some type of cardio work at least, I think I said like a, I should have wrote this down. 100 and something or two, 300 and something days. So 365 minus 52, whatever that is. I gave myself one day a week that I'm allowed to take off and not do cardio. So six days a week for this year is my goal of cardio. This is in addition to some movement. So going for walks, doing stuff during my lunch hour instead of sitting on my phone, scrolling through social media or watching YouTube videos or whatever. And doing strength workouts on days where I have the time. And for me, those strength workouts, what I found worked really well when I was working with Jay is I respond really well to like, like a half of a workout basically. So instead of like a 60 minute lift, I'll do a 30 minute lift. And it just, it works better for my schedule. I feel better when I do it. So I'll pick three or four exercises. I'll do three to four sets of like eight to 12 reps and strength is kind of a goal for me because I like to feel strong, but for now my goal is just to have a routine and stay consistent because this is what you'll learn if you have a routine and you stay consistent, you'll make progress. Whether or not that's the progress you see, like if your goal is weight loss and you're starting out slowly because that's the best way to build a routine, you may not lose a bunch of weight right off the bat. You may not make a lot of strength gains right off the back. But the blood marker stuff, if you start a routine and you're consistent with it, you'll see those changes pretty quick, which is why I'm excited to get all this stuff redone in about three months. I may not see body comp changes. I may not see a weight loss. I may not even feel like I could like, oh, now I can like run five miles and I can do all this stuff. Like I'm not gonna feel bad in three months. It'd be awesome if I could, but it's not gonna happen. But I should see changes in my blood work. So that's what we're gonna find out. Yeah, that's exciting. We've kinda got a plan, kinda got a plan. We've got systems that are gonna go into a concrete plan. She's a planner, I'm sure we won't be short of plans. Is there anything else we didn't talk about? I don't think so. I think, yeah. Pretty much hammered it. What's the recap is, as a coach, you've gotta address how is somebody eating, how is somebody exercising, and how is somebody managing their stress, which includes sleep, right? So we generally wanna sleep about eight hours a night, hopefully uninterrupted. You generally wanna eat fresh foods that go bad, perishable kind of foods that you do have to prepare, you do have to cut up, you do have to cook occasionally. And hopefully that doesn't take too much time for you, but if you need to spend more time to make it delicious, then you tailor the program to the person. And then for exercise, my recommendation is generally try to do something pretty much every day. So six days a week I think is a super good challenge there, super good process goal. And that's six days a week of my cardio workout. It's not talking about that daily prerequisite of movement. Because again, that's just something you should be doing every day as a human. Your body is designed to move, you need to move, or you're gonna have heart disease and you're gonna die early. And that cardio stuff, that doesn't count your strength work either, eh? Correct. That's a lot? Yeah, it kind of is, but I still see it as manageable because my strength stuff, if I need to, I just do that Saturday, Sunday, and I pick one day in the week where I don't have an exam. That's three days a week of lifting. And it's 30 minutes, I can carve out 30 minutes. Yeah, your sessions being 30 minutes helps a lot because I don't know about you or your psychopath, but when I was in my master's program, I could not just study all day. Like I needed a little bit of a break, I would start fall asleep, I would just give up. So having that 30 minute break might be enough for you to kind of process what you were just studying, but also get away from it, not look at the paper so much, rest your eyes, whatever it may be, and then you can come back in. And if you take another 30 minute break to work out later on in that day, as long as you have the time, like I think that makes a lot of sense. Yeah, so keep in tune with all this stuff. We're gonna take you through diet stuff, we're gonna take you through workout stuff. Maybe we'll do a video on stress management too because I have lots of it. And it's been a process, I have a lot of resources, I've worked with therapists, I've worked with doctors, I've worked on myself and run up on how to do it and had done work with friends and stuff just to kind of help manage all that stuff and really explore the root of my stress and how to manage that. I have some ways that I'm gonna be tackling that this year to see if I can help with some of the really high stress moments that I'm sure everyone experiences. So we'll do some more videos on that, but keep watching. We have based Tea Time with Lance and Allison off of our favorite YouTube channel like Becky and Chris and Tuxedo Time. So if you like travel or things that look beautiful, you should watch Becky and Chris, definitely. You just like good people. You should watch Becky and Chris. Oh man, good people. We're gonna be, I'm trying to get her to move to Buffalo so we can be friends. Yeah, check out their link here. Yeah, one of these. I think it's this way, because I remember doing this, I don't know. Yeah, I think it's this way. Check out the link. It's a card, it's called a card. Yeah, thanks for watching. If you learned something or you found yourself inspired, hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when we release the next one. I'm gonna put all this in a playlist, the Allison story stuff. So she's gonna kind of like, she's kind of leading the ship. She's got Jay, she's got me if she wants. I try not to dip into her life too much with stuff like this, but obviously I can offer any. Partner, not coach. Yeah, right? It's not my role. But he has a unique lens because he is a coach and he can see. I see all the data. When I'm doing stuff and sometimes it's not so great when he points it out because I'm also a coach so I also recognize the bad stuff. Sometimes I don't want to talk about it. Sometimes I just want to do it. That will be our next series. Managing your relationship. When to say nothing. Yeah. That's what it's called. Thank you for watching. I'm gonna do it again. If you learned something or you found this inspiring, is that what I said? Hit the like button and subscribe to be notified when we release the next one. If you need something else to watch, I'm gonna leave some videos here in the end screen. So click one and I said subscribe, right? Stay tuned to see if I can actually change my blood panel in three months. It's what we're teaching you to do, three months. Yep, and if you're joining- Totally new person. If you're joining, let us know. Thanks for watching. Bye-bye. An hour. Taken by Allison Lance and the Cricket.