 Hey there, it's Dr. Nathan Cashin, and this is another one of my book reviews. I'm just going to check here that I'm coming live on Facebook, coming to you from a different place of the clinic. I just want to give you a view of the office. So the book review for this week is Ballerina and Body by Misty Copeland. I've been a fan of Misty Copeland for a while now. She is the principal dancer of the American Ballet Theater, and the first African American, and she's really made a name for herself. She's seen her on the Under Armour commercials, and so I thought I'd read this book. It's an easy read. It came out, I got it on Monday, and I read it in between patients over two days. So it's a pretty easy read. It's really good. What I wanted to see from a chiropractor, sports physician, and someone who specializes in dance medicine, what does a professional dancer have to say about fitness and nutrition? So I wanted to make sure that the information contained in here was reliable, and I was very pleasantly surprised. So I'm going to talk about the good, the bad, and the beautiful, giving you five lessons that I learned from this book. So the book is laid out in four chapters. It's mind, motion, meals, and mentors, and I really love that for a book that is about outward appearances, she really starts inside with the mind. So lesson number one is your body is perfect for you. So she spends a lot of time talking about how important it is for you to love your own body, whatever that is, whatever color, shape, or size you are, and that it is perfect for you. It is what you need to get through life, and you can accomplish wonderful things. So your body's perfect for you, and she then moves on to section two, which I love because it's motion. You guys hear this from me over and over and over and over again, motion is life. She doesn't focus on exercise. In fact, she says, movement can be playful. You need to find a way to make movement just fun, that you do it just for the joy. And then she goes on to say that working out, this idea of working out, shouldn't be half an hour. It shouldn't be this intermezzo in a day of being stationary, but that you should weave it in through all different parts of your day. That I absolutely love and cannot agree with more. So she goes through basic ballet movements, which I thought was kind of interesting. I thought there would be maybe some new things, and I've taken a few ballet classes. I haven't studied it extensively, but I recognized just about everything in there. But she made the point to make it clear that this is movement therapy. It's not exercise, and so ballet movements are just a way to move, and you can adapt them however you need to. So if you go through some of the movements that she shows, you'll recognize most of them. She's got tendus and degajé and batman, all these other things. But what's really unique is she starts out by saying, do these on the floor. Do these lying down. So she has suffered some injuries, a fractured vertebra, as well as a stress fracture in her tibia and the large bone in the bottom of the leg. And this was her rehab. She found someone who trained her in this type of floor ballet. I don't quite remember the name. And so you do point and flex. You do plies, but you move the legs instead of lowering the body. You do everything on the floor. And I think that's a great way for a lot of people to start. I will say however, based on the little experience I have of seeing patients, most people can't do a lot of the movements. So she has a couple of movements where she says, lift your legs to 90 degree perpendicular to the floor. Well, most of the average people out there can't do that. I can't do it anymore because I'm not practiced. I'm not as flexible as I was. So that can create some problems when somebody's trying to reach an ideal that may be a little out of reach for the average person. So lesson three, and this is when we get on to section three, which is all about food. Again, the first half of the book is about movement. The second half of the book is basically a recipe book. So she talks about meals, and what I absolutely love is she starts out talking about the magic of fat. So we're hearing this more and more in the news and in the research that fat is not the enemy. Fat is actually an essential nutrient, and we need to learn the benefits of fat and what the good and bad fats are, or the beneficial and non-beneficial fats. And she does a great job of that. She explains how fat burns fat. If we eat a low-fat diet, then oftentimes our body is not satient, and we don't feel full, we don't feel satisfied, and biochemically it goes into this process of thinking we're not getting enough calories, and so it holds on to calories and weight. If we eat the right amounts of fat, it triggers the body to say, I've got energy to burn, so let's burn the calories. Most types of fats are easily found in plant-based sources such as nuts and avocados, as well as animal sources such as fish. Misty happens to be a pescatarian, thanks to her husband, who was a pescatarian before they met. So she bases a lot of the meals around fish, shrimp, and other seafood. But it's flexible enough that you can do whatever you need. You can make modifications. So I really appreciate that she emphasizes fats. And then lastly, we get to the end, and the fourth section is on mentorship. Well, let's see if I can get all the way to the end. So part four is mentors, and I really love that she says that we all benefit from having someone in our lives who give us encouragement and a new perspective. So she talks about the mentors that she has had in her life, as well as those for whom she's been a mentor later on. I think this really applies as well to fitness and nutrition. So she mentions a number of times throughout the books that when she was a young dancer and becoming more skilled, she really struggled with eating, and she didn't have somebody to guide her along the way. And I find this is true of many dancers, both from the fitness side of things as well as the nutrition side of things. And this is where I said I'd talk about the good, the bad, and the beautiful. The book in itself is beautiful. There's a lot of good information. I highly recommend it. The one thing that I would say is bad is that she mentions that this guideline is based around what has worked for her. And so in research, that's what we call an N equals one experiment, and that means there's just one subject, one person that this has been tested with, and that's her. So this plan has worked well for her, but one of the problems that a lot of athletes as well as dancers make is they base their nutrition, their fitness, their plan on what the best in the world do, and they think that that would apply, and it just isn't the case. The good thing, though, is that most of the advice that she includes in this book is supported from what I know, is supported by evidence and the research that is out there right now. The meals are well balanced, good fats and proteins, and low carb, which is very important. Not zero carb. This is not a low carb, high fat diet. Research is based on good sources of fat and protein with bread, brand muffins, delicious recipe for brand muffins in here. But I would just caution against following what has worked for one person. You need to find what works for you, and the best way to start with that is what has been shown to work in the science. So that being said, however, I really love the book. It was a really great read, and again the recipes are delicious looking. There are so many in here that are just beautifully laid out, wonderful images, and I really would love to try. So I'm going to go home and maybe give a try to a couple of these recipes, including some zoodles and some citrus salmon. Those are, I think I hit five, I may not have hit five lessons, but those are the lessons from this book review of Misty Copeland's ballerina body dancing and eating your way to a leaner, stronger, and more graceful you. Thanks for watching.