 I am James Swannick and today we are joined by JoDell Fitzwater who is a nutrition educator and a lover of all things health fitness nutrition and she's a pro stand-up paddle athlete which we're going to learn about in a second. She's a big Swanee's glasses enthusiast along with her daughter who are always posing with their Swanee's on which we appreciate very much and we're going to be talking about sleep, we're going to be talking about coffee, the benefits, maybe potential cons of coffee I'd like to get into as well if there are any. Stand-up paddle boarding, I'd love to know a little bit more about that and just you know what time JoDell gets to sleep and how she perfects her sleep and what time she wakes up and how she lives a healthy holistic life. So JoDell welcome to the show, great to have you here. James I'm so honored that you asked me on your podcast so yeah I really value the blog post you guys put out about sleep and so it's it's fun to see people out there putting out the truth about sleep and not just you know like make sure you get seven to eight hours well how are they going to do that and you guys put really good posts out about that so. Thank you, appreciate it. When you said the truth about sleep what are some of the untruths or the things that people get wrong about sleep that you see in the media quite often? Yeah great question because as a nutritionist I that's 70% of one of the issues that people come see me with are sleep related issues so I'm a big number one I'm a big proponent of getting their circadian rhythm right and that starts with you know dimming that blue light that our environments are so toxic with but also I really value the bio individuality of sleep like the mainstream will say seven to eight hours but yet I have clients some of them need nine to ten hours and then I have other clients that need that can get by on seven so it's really individual and I think that's one of the myths the other myths is that you can run on less sleep like three to four hours and just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should because we really want to optimize our health and on our health overall starts with sleep. Yeah what time do you get to sleep each night and what time do you wake up in the morning? Yeah and it wasn't always this way it wasn't until I had a lot of health issues that I decided I wanted to go to bed kind of with the sun and wake with the sun so I go to bed typically around eight thirty and nine is my max if I'm up after nine it's because there's some sort of an emergency or something so I'm not invited to a lot of dinner parties or anything like that but and then I get up. I wonder you haven't been taking my late night calls. Yeah that's the only reason I that's exactly right I see the time and I'm like oh after my bedtime um so yeah then about five five o'clock is usually may wake up time in the morning got it okay so if you're going to bed around eight thirty you're getting up at five so that you know you're sleeping a good eight and a half hours right like the eight and a half hours and how is the quality of your sleep? You know it wasn't always great I've been in the fitness industry for about 20 years and the first probably decade of my career I thought like many people oh I can get by on five or six hours I'll be fine I'll just pound a lot of caffeine and energy drinks the next day at the gym and I'll be fine and I was fine for about five years and then my health started to suffer and I started to develop adrenal issues and thyroid issues and I lost my fertility and all of that so it was a big eye-opener for me about how important not just eating right and exercising is but also getting your your optimization of your circadian rhythm right which is very off for many people so um but yeah I just I feel like it's it's kind of misinterpreted because in our environment if you can get a lot done and you're this person that's go go go and you're burning the candle both ends that's supposed to be the right way to live and actually less is more when it comes to your health so I had to learn that the hard way but now I've dialed it back to where I really see the benefits and the quality of my sleep is much better now I still have nights where I struggle but I've figured out what that is it's still residual adrenal issues that are going on and I'm finding ways to slowly heal that the adrenals take the longest to heal so you really have to be patient when it comes to sleep if you are working on yourself and and know that it is going to happen and those little bitty bits of progress along the way are telltale signs how did you do damage to your adrenals I was an athlete as you said I was a paddle athlete and I was also teaching about 15 classes a week at a local gym and I was a personal trainer so I was doing my own running I would run sometimes eight miles a day plus I would do like three to four classes a day of teaching weight training classes and kickboxing classes and then I'd paddle a lot because I was a sponsored ambassador with BICSUP which is a stand-up paddle company and so they would send me all over the country to give paddle demonstrations and go to expos and stuff like that so I was really overdoing it on my exercise and my fitness and so when you put your body in this state of high adrenaline and high cortisol you do have a lot of energy to run on but it's not really clean energy it's kind of like putting really bad gas in your car it'll go but it's going to sputter along the way and so that's what was happening over time it was it was just like I was doing too much and so my body just started giving out if you can only put out so much adrenaline and cortisol for so long until your body's like all right I fold white flag I can't do this anymore so that's that's really what did it for me it was about five years into that that my my thyroid tanked and my adrenals gave out and I noticed that by my sleep when I tried to sleep longer it wasn't coming like I could sleep for five hours but if I tried to sleep longer than that it was like I couldn't go to sleep I couldn't stay asleep so I couldn't repair even does that suggest that someone can over train like I mean it sounds like you were doing a lot you were you were coaching and you you were exercising you were running and you were paddle boarding you're doing all these kind of things um let's compare that type of scenario to someone like me who goes to the gym for about a 45 minute wait session a few times a week and then does a couple of high intensities and then one gentle run during the week and then you know I take one or two days off um is that is what I just described for myself is that possibly fatiguing or burning out my adrenals or is that does that sound something like would be would be okay James what you're saying sounds very balanced because again you're you're putting your body in a state of movement every day but not excessive and it like you said use the word a gentle run that's what people should be doing the human body when it goes for a run and it's all out effort you're telling yourself well there the only reason the human should be running is to run from something you know so while we're not necessarily running from pray as we would in hunter cat gatherer days we could still be going for a run to like calm this anxiousness that we feel a lot of people go for a run to calm down the anxiety that they feel and so they're running from something they're still running from that anxious feeling because it calms them down in a in a weird way um and so that's not you know not to say that running's wrong or bad but I did it for many years and it only served to to harm me it didn't help me now a gentle run that's something else because if you can you know I kind of teach my clients if you can nasal breathe while you're running you're doing something right because you should be able to keep a calm nervous system and be able to breathe through your nose while you're running if you're doing a mouth breathing it's stressing your body so yeah what you're doing sounds balanced but how people know if they're over training is number one your sleep will suffer and you won't know why you'll have trouble going to sleep trouble falling is staying asleep maybe you're waking up frequently to pee we really shouldn't be doing that and then also um your body will give you signals such as being wired but tired so you have like this this energy that you could run on all day which is called adrenaline but you're also very fatigued where you feel like you could take a nap at any point in the day but if you did try to lay down such as at night when you go to bed you can't go to sleep so that's true for many people that are kind of doing too much and doing too much doesn't have to just be physical training a lot of people are stressed and they're thinking they have too many jobs going on they have too many irons in the fire they don't know when to say no and that can also elevate adrenaline even without running and without overtraining to where it's going to be hard to shut down yeah we're talking to joe del fitswater who is an educator and lover of all things health fitness nutrition uh she's a pro stand-up battle a paddle athlete and a certified functional nutritional therapy practitioner and a food psychology coach a paddle fit pro trainer lifestyle coach and a certified personal trainer with over 20 years experience in the health and fitness industry you can learn more over at get fit with joe del dot com get fit with joe del dot com joe del you mentioned coffee before um i'd love to talk about this i've had a on again off again relationship with coffee i didn't drink coffee for the first 35 years of my life didn't didn't even have a drop was never interested and then i temporarily lived in columbia and where they had a wonderful coffee and i started drinking coffee and then i got into coffee and then i tried bulletproof coffee where i put a stick of grass-fed butter and some mct oil in my in my um coffee i use and i love to the taste of that for a while and then and then after a while i found myself feeling um quite agitated throughout the day whereas initially i enjoyed the taste and the ceremony and the ritual of the morning cup um i found myself late morning kind of early afternoon still feeling a bit irritated and agitated and i reluctantly stopped and then since then i've kind of gone on again off again so i go on for that three months where i drink coffee and then i stop for three months and then i might start again for a month and then i'll go four months off but i the only reason i ever stop is because for me i get i get to a point where i start to depend on it i feel myself depending on it and i start to feel myself getting agitated and irritated about three or four hours after i have the coffee um having said that it sounds like you're about to sing the praises and the nutritional benefits or whatever of coffee so i'm just curious what your thoughts are on coffee in general for people and and what you know guidance you may have for for me and in the scenario that i just presented yeah i mean i don't think you're alone in that i've heard other people say that as well like it starts off well enough the relationship but then it gets out of hand because you know we we tend to be creatures that go after more and more and more like one cup but it turns into five cups or what have you but then also um if you are already a person that has good energy you already run on a lot of adrenaline coffee does elevate adrenaline and it does stimulate your adrenals so it if somebody's already amped up it can irritate them or agitate their system to have more adrenaline so that feeling that you were talking about is actually a feeling of excess adrenaline pumping through your system and that's kind of irritating to the to the nervous system so you were probably listening to your body and dialing it back when that happened and then you felt reprieved for a while but the taste of coffee is what gets me like it's that taste you know it's just a beautiful taste and that's why i'm kind of a coffee junkie too but uh yeah i have to i have to keep mine in check too because i can easily go out of hand i don't use it for energy probably like yourself i use it just for the taste of it just having that warm cup of mud in the morning um but what i would have to do is i use a swiss water process decaf regular decafs are decaffeinated through a formaldehyde process so if you can find a good swiss water process maybe you can mix it with your favorite columbian coffee that you have and just do a little half-caf to where you're just cutting down on the caffeine to avoid that overstimulation um so i kind of i kind of go that route and then once a year i do like a 10 day to 14 day coffee fast where i won't have coffee and it kind of resets my caffeine level if you will so i can i can go through a couple of days of like a headache because we just don't know how dependent we get on the caffeine um but then after that it's like i get to the end of the 10 or the 14 days depending on how long i did it and i go you know i don't really have to have it i don't really need it but eventually because of the taste and because of our environment and everybody's drinking coffee around you go back into it so yes coffee has some amazing benefits it actually has magnesium which can be calming to certain individuals that are low in magnesium but too much caffeine can amp up a nervous system which causes you to throw out magnesium so it's this fine balance of like getting just the right amount to get your fix without overdoing it kind of like the training i read somewhere that if you can you should delay having your first cup of coffee by about an hour in the morning because when we wake up in the morning our cortisol levels are very high and caffeine has been found to keep cortisol levels elevated for longer um were you aware of that or is that your understanding oh yeah for sure yeah i mean it's the cortisol and the adrenaline are kind of go hand in hand as your ultimate like stress inducing response hormones and so yeah caffeine can over stimulate that to where like i said if you're already amped up in the morning chances are you want to do more of that swiss water process decaf just for the taste without all the caffeine um but yeah if i like the idea of delaying it a little bit maybe you wait until you really really feel the need for just a little pick me up or you're just waiting for that taste a little later in the day i always recommend people start with water though first thing no matter what how much coffee i drink i always start with what they call your inner bath you know we always take our outer bath but that water first thing in the morning after you've been dehydrated all night sleeping that's the really key thing don't just jump right into a diuretic something like coffee that pulls water more out of your system you want to get some water in before you drink that coffee yeah i've actually got into a routine now where i drink bicarb which is a kind of like a baking soda um it's pretty nasty to drink quite frankly it tastes like you're drinking salt water first thing in the morning and just before i drink it i have to kind of like psych myself up for it for about five seconds and i kind of breathe in and breathe out because the taste is kind of nasty and listeners might be thinking well why the hell do you drink it well um uh to not to get into too much graphic detail but it really cleans you out like i have that bicarb and within 15 20 minutes i'm needing to use the bathroom um at least a couple at least a couple times over the course of 20 minutes or so and again it doesn't sound that pleasant but i'll i'll tell you this like um it really flushes the body of toxins like like any toxins or nastiness that i have in there it's it's just you know i what i understand from reading the literature is that toxins and nastiness and you know acidity latch on to this baking soda and then when it comes out of you it you know it literally just flushes all that those those toxins and acidity out of you is that your understanding as well of you you familiar with this yeah actually i used to do after a run i used to do um sodium bicarbonate with a little bit of apple cider vinegar and water so it make it kind of fizzy almost like an alka cell sort of thing and that's a really good to replenish like a little bit of electrolytes into your body after a run so um yeah actually the benefits of doing some sort of a sea salt or a sodium bicarb like with your water actually gets water more into the cell i know a lot of people that drink water all day and then they're peeing all day too so it's like they're not really keeping hydrated they'll go and get their blood work and their bun creatinine ratios way off or something is showing that they're chronically dehydrated but they drink all this water so something like what you're talking about or taking in a pinch of sea salt and tossing that back before you drink your water can really ensure that you have minerals to take the water into the cell we we have a lot of Celtic sea salt in our place that we put on food but i i must admit i haven't been taking it with water so if before i drink a glass or glasses of water you'd suggest just like putting it in the water or actually just throwing it in my in my mouth you could do either but from what i my understanding is actually there's a naturopath out of australia that i learned this little trick from her name is barbo kneel i don't know if you've heard of her but she's out of australia too and she's all over youtube she's kind of a cool sensation but anyway she recommends taking a pinch of that Celtic sea salt just putting it under your tongue because we have a lingual neural system in our mouth and i actually learned this in my ntp training too where your mouth will tell the cells of your body what's about to come in so that the cells will open up and receive so it's taking in that that sea salt gives kind of that salty taste on your mouth it actually tells your cells hey we have minerals coming in so open up because we're about to get hydrated and we're about to get some minerals that we need so great thank you for that i appreciate that we're talking to joe del fits water and we are talking about health and nutrition and sleep um just before we get into sleep um also if you want to listen to joe del's podcast as a podcast named get fit with joe del it's on youtube and on itunes and joe del interviews all kinds of leading researchers and doctors and experts on health nutrition lifestyle and movement so tell us a little bit about the uh the pat being a paddle athlete a stand-up paddle athlete tell us a little bit about that oh it's um it's my my escape from reality especially right now in the world with all we're dealing with you know nature doesn't require you to wear a mask and the water doesn't require you to wear a mask um it's it's a freedom like when you're out on the water there's just this peace and nature and water is so therapeutic to the human body and so i think i discovered that because in the midst of all that chaos in my life i was talking about earlier i found stand-up paddle boarding and when i did i was like this is what i need i need water therapy every day so i just started paddling i was like the only person on my lake that was doing it when it first came out and then um since then i've gone on to learn how to teach it to others as as a personal trainer and take their workouts to the water and then i traveled kind of around and trained new instructors and was able to do some fun things with rei and do some like outdoor classes on the water and teach kind of big groups of ladies to come out and take their take their body to the water where your board is the machine and your body doesn't need any equipment it just needs movement on top of the water and doing body weight exercises or stretching um at here where i live i do some special tours called step in a cup where we will paddle to a local cafe that's on our lake and we'll have breakfast and then we'll paddle back so it's kind of like a destination paddle everybody loves that because coffee and stand-up paddle boarding really go well together i love that fantastic and uh has your daughter followed you in your footsteps you have a five-year-old i would imagine she's a bit young so far but is she interested in in uh in the paddle boarding she is she has her own and uh just just last year when she was four she learned how to like paddle without me attached to her so i used to attach my her leash to my ankle so she couldn't like the wind couldn't take her away but last year when she was four she paddled for the first time like all on her own just next to me so it was fun to see that oh wonderful um let's just turn our attention to sleep for a moment um uh obviously you're you're wearing the swanese glasses uh at night time uh and daytime i want to just describe your your swanese habits for us oh wow that's a that's a great question because when i was researching sleep and i was kind of understanding how blue light affects the body i came across the need for something after after the sun went down i was like there's got to be something that will help me block you know the light in my home or the tv or my phone and then i came across um swanese and i was just like oh well they're kind of cute too because i can wear them around and um i think i first found you guys at paleo fx and and that's where we kind of connected and that was several years back but immediately and i have another story i'm going to tell you about a client too but immediately the very first night i wore them it like my sleep was like at least 50 improved like i'd been doing all these things you know and my whole supplement regimen in front of me where i had to take all these pills in order to go to sleep because again i was still healing my adrenals i'm taking all this stuff and then that night like at paleo fx i like wore them that night and then that i was like 50 better and then over the next two weeks i eliminated all my supplements like i went from having this whole countertop full of sleep supplements to just wearing my swanese so and my brother did the same thing he had sleep issues as well but the neatest thing i've heard recently because i have it's mandatory when you come have a consult with me i'm going to work on your circadian rhythm and 99 of my clients i'm like well you have to get these glasses so that you can still do your nighttime routine but yeah we're going to make you a little more sleepy um so i have a client that was very difficult to get her off of sleep medication so she'd been on this sleep this lunesta i'm sure you've heard of that sleep medication for years and years and years probably like six years and nothing she'd tried everything nothing would get her off of the need for like to in order to sleep she had to take the pill and then finally after egging her on egging around about the glasses she's like okay i'll try it and so i gave her a pair of mine and i said just you don't even have to buy any at just try mine and like within the first few nights she was like i am sleeping so much better and then she just tried it one night she just didn't take her lunesta and she found that she didn't need it as long as she put the glasses on when the sun went down as soon as the sun went down she was able to completely go off her lunesta and she no longer relies on it at all and she swears by the glasses and so yeah that was that one of the coolest stories was she was really wanting to get off of that and just by putting glasses on she was able to go off of it incredible amazing yeah it's so wonderful to hear those kind of stories isn't it so someone's life can be completely transformed by something so simple but effective that's really what it is i mean if you can get someone sleeping well imagine the possibilities of their life because we all know the nights that we haven't slept well how we feel the next day we don't give good output at work we're we're yelling at our family members you know we're getting in traffic and being agitated and irritated but when you sleep well it's like the clouds are beautiful and your family's beautiful and every everything you do is working well so i mean you really do change people's lives james with just by creating glasses i mean it sounds simple but it's something that does affect people on a wellness level so that's a beautiful thing thank you and your five year old daughter um are you instilling good sleep practices in her does she wear a pair of swanis is it challenging to get her to wear a pair is it easy is it now part of her routine like how how have you introduced both swanis blue light blocking glasses and you know sound sleep practices into her life uh sure yeah she's very um impressionable because when i explain things to her i'm not want to i always told myself i wouldn't be like what my mom was who's just said because i said so like when they ask me to do something it's because i said but no with her i try to explain everything so i'll say you know mommy's gonna put on these glasses because i want to be able to sleep really good so i'm a nice mommy tomorrow and i'm not yelling at you or you know getting on to you for no reason or whatever and so i'll explain that to her and say you know if you wear these you'll have more energy to play you'll go outside and it'll be a happy day or you'll get your schoolwork done because we homeschool and you'll feel good doing it you won't be sleepy and so i think if you explain it to the kids and and you know let them explore it a little bit just put the glasses on the table and then number one be the example wear them as soon as the sun goes down you put them on and then it's easy for the kids to also follow soup because they're gonna see you and they're gonna well i want to do that so yeah it was not hard for me at all because i took the time to explain to her how they would help her and then i also imitated that for her to see and now after the sun goes down she's like where's my blue blockers and like we can't we can't go anywhere without him in fact one night we were going to a meeting that was late and we forgot them and she got there and she's like but what about my circadian rhythm so like she's just she as most kids are very impressionable if you take the time to explain things yeah i love that um how do you balance other areas of your life like how do you you find the right balance between work between play between being a mother getting great night's sleep being intentional feeling calm like just you know what's the approach that you take to bring all of those elements together oh that's a good question you know because i wasn't always that way like i said there was a time in my life when i would consider myself very unbalanced and i would say that my health issues actually were the best thing that happened to me because it forced me to look at my life and go again way out of balance way too many irons in the fire and way too many like things that i think i should be doing that are really not necessary so i i i think when we especially in this time in the world the way things are going if we just kind of take a step back and be okay with saying no to some things and then also making a list of maybe the four most important things that are a priority in your life you know your family maybe your spirituality your how you affect the world through your career and then also your health because you can't do any of those three without your health in check you know so if it's something like that then you can really go okay if it doesn't fit into any of these four things then i really need to eliminate it and and then be honest and and tell people that you love i'm not doing this i'm not letting go of these things to hurt anyone or to cause problems but i want to be the best i can for all of you whether it's your co-workers or your family or whatever and that way um you can you can find balance because that's what we're all looking for anyway we're all looking for a balanced approach with nutrition a balanced approach with our workouts a balanced approach in our work life and i think when you when you prioritize which one of those in your life are the things you want to do instead of doing all these random workouts dial in the one that makes you the happiest because you shouldn't be doing anything else that stresses you anyway you know and if it's instead of trying all these different diets and dogmas that are out there about nutrition eat the foods that love you back if you're eating a food and it makes you feel bloated then don't eat it your body doesn't need that food so you wouldn't be in a relationship with someone that doesn't love you back so don't eat any foods that don't love you back right so and then ask your family what do you need more of me you know where am i slacking am i giving you enough of my time and they'll tell you what you need to let go of so i think that's that's how you find the balance is really taking time to step back and reevaluate every so often because like you said with the coffee even with coffee it's easy to get out of hand and i think that's a metaphor for our life too and just finally uh you take outdoor cold showers so tell me how you do that and what are the benefits of cold showers yeah so one thing that i've learned in life is that we've become too kind of dependent on our modern living um so we you know if we didn't have water heaters way back in the day you just bathed in the creek or you took a cold shower because there wasn't a water heater in your indoor plumbing in your home and um i like to look back at old books like i love reading old nutrition manuals not the new ones um so one of them i had read was called return to nature and it was from 1903 and the gentleman was talking about the fact that one of the best things you could do for your system your nervous system was to be to take cold baths and to be in sunlight as well um to take sun and light air baths i guess he would call it so he wanted your whole body exposed we don't do that like we go get a suntan but we've got a swimsuit on our shorts and a t-shirt when we're outside we really need to expose our whole body so my husband humors me in a lot of things because he thinks i'm a crazy weirdo but he he went along with the idea that i wanted to build an outdoor um shower if you will or basically i called it like my little sun hut where i could just have my space and i could you know not have any clothing on and i could go out there and take a shower or just stand in the sunlight and not have to worry about we don't really have neighbors but like if the neighbors could drive by or something it's a little sun hut behind my house so anyway um yeah so i just attached the hose back there so it's freezing cold water that comes up from our well and that's how i take shower and so i'm barefoot on the ground outside i don't have like you know stepping stones or anything i just want the ground and it's just the way that i think the human body benefits the most it's that cold thermogenesis that helps the mitochondria of your cells the little energy factories of your cells but you're also getting the sunlight and the good UV rays that affect the mitochondria as well and grounded when your feet are connected to the earth you're also getting that good resonance that the earth creates which is 7.83 hertz and your alpha brain waves are also 7.83 hertz which is why you feel so good when you're barefoot in a on a grassy knoll or by the ocean so coupling all those things together really makes me feel like i can discharge at the end of the day all of this emf electrical energy and the blue light that we're exposed to i can just stand on the earth take a cold shower and then get some sunlight on my skin as well yeah i love that i take uh i start with warm showers but i always finish with cold so i'll start with warm um and then in the last 30 seconds to a minute i'll just go cold we even if it's in the middle of winter and i found that's been beneficial it may not be as beneficial as just getting in right at the beginning when it's cold but um it's it's it's like oh as soon as that cold water hits it's like wow it's like a cup of coffee in the shower right well joe del thank you so much for your time so i appreciate you sharing so much of your guidance and your um and your support and just a glimpse into how you live your life just a reminder to our listeners if you go to get fit with joe del dot com um you can find uh find joe del there she also has a podcast which is called get fit with joe del which is available on youtube and on itunes you can find her on youtube at joe del fit that's j o d e l l e fit um and uh thank you so much for being such a big proponent and supporter of swanis thank you to you to your lovely daughter as well for posing in some of those swanis uh at times as well we appreciate we appreciate that very much and um yeah we just so appreciate you're here at swanik oh thank you so much james i appreciate you guys too your your big asset in what i like to promote i only promote things i believe in and i really believe in swanis