Click on NOTE CATEGORIES to browse by topic, read through the entire archives, or type a topic in the search box.Episode 39
Stack Your Life for More Natural Movement
Stack the Things That Matter to You So You Can Move More and Stress Less
We are all given the same 24 hours but it always seems like it takes a trade-off to fit certain things in to that day. If you want to work out, does it mean you’ve got to drop your kids at the gym’s childcare? Or, you can spend time with your kids, playing Candy Land for 2 hours, but will you then have time to fix a whole food meal? Learn how to stack all the things that matter to you so that you can move more and stress less.
DANI: It’s the Katy Says podcast, where movement geek, Dani Hemmat – that’s me! – joins biomechanist, Katy Bowman – that’s you – author of Move Your DNA – for discussions on body mechanics, movement nutrition, natural movement, and how movement can be the solution to modern ailments we all experience.
KATY: I never get tired of hearing you – it makes me laugh every time you read it, because it’s like, I think it’s helpful, though, to say whose voice is whose.
DANI: That’s good. Laughing is good. Before we get started, I’m going to hijack this a little bit. Our last show that we recorded was the year-end recap, the health recap. And that was a super fun show to do. And I can’t wait to listen to it, and if you’re listening to this, that means you already did. And one of the things that Katy asked me was an investment I wanted to make in my health, and I said – do you remember – I wanted to see an Ayurvedic practitioner.
KATY: I remember.
DANI: Okay.
KATY: Oh, were you asking me? I’m not sure – I thought it was a rhetorical question. I’m sorry.
DANI: I was talking to you and the audience all at once. Speak up whenever you want. A few days later, dear listeners, I get in the mail from a friend, some Ayurvedic books. It was really nice. But what’s even cooler – they were totally meant to be, Katy, because I was working with that great voice coach that’s been helping me?
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: And I was just talking to her about high-altitude breathing and she goes, oh, you should read this gentleman’s books. I think John Doulliard is his name – or something.
KATY: Yeah!
DANI: Doulliard?
KATY: Yeah. He’s a big Ayurvedic guy where you are, yeah?
DANI: Yeah, I know, he’s like world famous. He’s 3 minutes from my house, dude.
KATY: Yep, he’s right there in Boulder, yo.
DANI: Yeah, like 3 minutes. I could walk over to his place and it would be awesome. I’m actually going to make an appointment to go see them.
KATY: You know, Ayurveda has been – like, if you just have an idea of meant to be, I really followed this weird instinct toward Ayurveda. You know, I read it in a magazine on an airplane and then I was just, I was like, this sounds like – it sounded right. There was some sort of resonance, and I ended up finding my husband that way, you know what I mean?
DANI: That’s cool.
KATY: It was just this weird thing and it’s been – it’s been so – the books that I sent you, by the way, those are used. Those are from my shelf to yours.
DANI: I could tell because there’s Post-It notes and underlines. It’s fun to see what, you know, was highlighted.
KATY: Well, a lot of that I think was when my husband was going through Ayurvedic training. A lot of those he used as textbooks.
DANI: Cool!
KATY: I am a big believer in just sharing, and I think they had a few of those copies, and he picked some out and I was like, what’s the best one? And so you’ve got kind of a technical, theory one and you have a super practical one, so.
DANI: Thank you so much. It was very sweet of you. Thank you for the dog soap.
KATY: Lavender dog soap. Gourmet dog soap.
DANI: From where you live, for me, named after my daughter, because I have three dogs – you’re brilliant.
KATY: I know!
DANI: But don’t ever send me the jelly bean game again.
KATY: Oh, my gosh! I forgot I did that!
DANI: She sent me this horrible game – you know how in Harry Potter, the every flavor jellybeans, they taste like good things or bad things? There’s a game called Bean Boozled that she sent me, and it has a spinner and a box full of jelly beans that are identical colors, but horrible flavors. So you spin –
KATY: Well, there’s two. So just to clarify, say – say there’s 2 browns. One is dog poop and one is chocolate, and you spin and have to grab a brown one and determine which one it is, right?
DANI: It’s horrible. We sat down to play it, the whole family, and at one point we were all just like, this is no game. This is a horrible thing. We were running to the garbage can and the sink and spitting out – there’s baby wipes, skunk spray, booger. It’s just nasty, man.
KATY: What was the grossest tasting one?
DANI: Oh, it was skunk spray, hands down. And then –
KATY: And it actually tastes like – in the same way that a buttered popcorn jellybean tastes like buttered popcorn, does the skunk spray one actually taste like skunk spray?
DANI: I, having never actually licked skunk spray, but having washed it off a dog and having that olfactory assault – yeah. Yeah, it’s pretty close.
KATY: I thought you were – for some reason, I thought you guys would just get a gross – I figured that you guys probably had a family game night.
DANI: We do.
KATY: I know that, like, odd things intrigue you.
DANI: We’re a very gross family. We love gross things, totally.
KATY: And you’re a gross family! Let’s just call it like it is.
DANI: No, you had us pegged.
KATY: I did. I did, and I will never send it to you again.
DANI: I’m sending it back, actually, to you.
KATY: Pass it on. You know, it could be like those chain letters, and you just go, I dare you to play a round. So anyone out there who wants the game, just tweet us your address, and then pass it on. I think Otto needs it. I think Otto – definitely one of our most engaged listeners would probably dig it. Yes. It’s to go to the Otto family, for sure.
DANI: It’s coming at you, Otto.
KATY: There you go.
DANI: Coming at you. All right, let’s move forward now. Thanks for listening to me, and thanks for the sweetness.
KATY: And also the disgustingness, right next to that. It’s a conditioning –
DANI: The sweetness was in the form of the books.
KATY: It was either that or like a case of Snickers. I couldn’t figure out which one to get you, so I went with the disgusting jellybean game.
DANI: No, that’s okay, like, I have 8 cases of Snickers sitting here because fans have just been sending me case after case.
KATY: It’s like furniture. Your furniture could just be boxes of Snickers. It’s totally functional, and also kind of in line with what we’re talking about today, which is stacking your life. Not your cases of Snickers, but it’s kind of the same thing. Stacking your life is this phrase that I coined – I don’t know, like 6 months ago, maybe. I don’t know. I think it’s been that long. I don’t think it’s been around that long, and it’s this idea that I use in my life to help live a movement-based lifestyle. It’s this phrase that kind of sums up the idea that life + movement are supposed to be more integrated than they currently are; that movement doesn’t happen outside of your life. That you can fit in all of the necessities, all of the nutrients, right? The family time, the private time, the rest time, the community time, work time – it can all be accomplished while you are also moving. In the same way that nutrients come well packaged in food form, it’s like if you have to take 30 separate vitamins and mineral supplements, that there might be a diet of only 5 or 6 foods that if you just created a meal from those foods. But normally you are parsing out or separating out 30 separate things, so that’s stack your life. That’s today’s show.
DANI: I think that’s good, because we’re all given the same 24 hours.
KATY: Mm-hmm.
DANI: But I hear this a lot and you probably hear it about 8 times more than I do is that it’s just like this tradeoff to fit certain things into those 24 hours, like, I could work out, but then the kids would have to sit in front of a movie, or get dropped off at the gym daycare. Or I could write my novel, but then my back and neck are going to hurt from all that computer time. There’s tradeoffs.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: How can we stack our life? You’ve mentioned it before, and you have your little Hashtag, #stackyourlife. Hashtag.
KATY: The Hashtag seemed really summing up. I just – I really don’t – have you seen the SNL skit on hashtags, people who actually talk like that? I feel like I’ve turned into that person, but there’s no easier way for me to just come across with all the power that I feel in one summation: Hashtag!
DANI: Holy cow! But you know what? Hashtags are stacking your life!
KATY: Oh, my.
DANI: Holy –
KATY: You had to go to that other level.
DANI: But it is. It just hit me. You’re brilliant! I’m not even going to make fun of it with hashbrown stackyourlife. It’s #stackyourlife with a Hashtag.
KATY: #hashbrown. That’s something.
DANI: When did it come to you? I didn’t realize that it’s only been this – it seems like it’s been forever.
KATY: I wrote a blog post called, Keeping – I know, you have to take notes now so you can include it in the show notes. I believe the blog post title is, Keeping Your Body and Life Fit.
DANI: Oh, I remember that, yeah.
KATY: And so it’s about – it was just some examples of how I do multiple things at one time. So I don’t even really know if stack your life –if I even use those words in the blog post now that I think about it. I think I’ve gone back to – when did I start saying stack your life? But it comes from an image – one of my crappy images that I drew for the blog post, which was I drew out circles – I drew out consecutive circles. I laid them all out on a piece of paper, and I had a circle for family time. I had a circle for, you know, kid education and couple time and engaging in your community and exercise and work. And here’s how we look at it, right? So there’s this paper with all of these circles, and when we allot time we schedule our day, we go okay, I have to work for 8 hours. So you’re putting 8 hours on your work time, and that’s the only thing you’re doing during that time, so none of the other circles are being filled. And this is always to go back to this idea that there are only – there’s a fixed amount of time in a day.
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: So in this blog post, I go here’s how I do it: and I took 4 of the circles. I grabbed movement, an exercise circle or movement circle. I grabbed a family circle, I grabbed a community circle, and I grabbed - I actually think of food preparation; we all have to eat. It’s such a heavy concern, that getting and preparing food – we allot so much time in our day to that, right? Whether it’s meal planning or going to the store, or the actual cooking, and then the cleaning up after the cooking, right? So there’s all these different circles, right? So I picked four, I think it was family, yeah: family, movement, community, food, and in the illustration I stacked them on top of each other and drew an arrow going through all four, going, I don’t know, I think the picture was that there’s a regular community event here where they essentially have, like, gleaning, or these local farms ask people to donate their time. Can you come out and harvest this fruit? Because it’s an organic farm, it’s producing – they can’t afford, you know, to have a lot of full time employees, and the need for employees goes up right when the fruit is ripe. So at the same time, they invite the community out, and they’re like, we need help harvesting so we can sell this produce in our grocery store for an affordable price: who wants to come? So we all go out and we spend – or whoever wants to – 2 or 3 hours in this field, I mean, with squatting and bending and walking. And I was outside, my feet were bare and in the dirt, my kids were being part of the process. They were playing; they were also moving. They were becoming educated on where food comes from. They were playing with their friends. I was with other friends in our community; I was contributing to my community. I was procuring food, and then the trade off is that they weigh whatever you pick and based on the poundage, you get a certain dollar amount to spend in their store. Or, if you want, you can also just come take that equal quantity in food later in the season of that type. So this was strawberries, right? So if I picked 12 pounds of strawberries, then they’re like, okay, as soon as, you know, this is premium fruit, it needs to go to the store for people who are buying strawberries. And if you want the dollar amount, you can go buy these strawberries, too, or if you want to at the end of the season you can have for free, 12 pounds of strawberries, because those just don’t sell as well. And it’s like, okay, great, I’m going to do jam making or whatever. So this is like – it’s such a brilliant business model, so during that single hour I accomplished – or I guess, let’s just say it was an hour – so in that hour, I did an hour of movement. I did an hour of family time. I did an hour of educating my children. I did an hour in my community, and I did an hour with my spouse, and I did an hour with my friends. And if we laid it all out, that would be what normally would take me 6 hours – and then an hour of food procurement. So it’s like, I just did multiple – I accomplished – if I laid out everything, I got 7 hours of work done in a single hour. That is how I live my life, and that is how everyone’s like, how do you get so much done? It’s like, because I stack my life. I’ve stopped – I’ve arranged my thinking so that I no longer see this compartmentalization of separate things, and I work very intensely to stack up multiple things, so that’s – that’s stack your life.
DANI: That’s just, like, you know, say that one day during harvest time, could you describe what a typical, stacked Katy day looks like?
KATY: Well, that’s not super atypical. I mean, with the amount of foraging and where we live. Another thing is foraging out in the wilderness. Even things like fishing trips – I always think of food. Food is like, food and movement are the top two. So how can we get food? Going to the grocery store is something that I have to do, that probably everyone has to do. I will walk to the grocery store. I will walk with my children and spouse to the grocery store – and again, that is – I mean, that happens almost every single day.
DANI: Okay, but can you, like, start from the beginning of the day? Say you’re given the same 24 hours that we all are. Can you just –
KATY: Okay
DANI: Start from when you open your eyes.
KATY: I don’t open my eyes until maybe 1/3 after the day is gone. Just kidding. I get up early in the morning, and I take a walk with a friend. So it’s an hour of walking, but it’s also an hour of social time for me. It might be the only time I hang out with a friend and just chat my heart out. We also have coffee while we walk, so it has – so although we are walking, it has this feel of friendship and adult time, childfree time. It’s – I’m connecting with someone else, it’s outdoor time, right? So there’s a difference between choosing where to do it: it’s outside, it’s nature time for me, because we’re choosing to do it in a very rural place. I’ve recently added letting myself be extra cold, so now it’s extra movement conditioning, right? I’m trying to continuously add layers to it.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: Sometimes when we walk, I’m getting my walk in with my friend and we’re like, you know what? Like tomorrow’s a holiday for us here, which just means extra food preparation, I have like a list of things I need to do: I’ve gotta go to the grocery store, we always host – tomorrow – we’re recording this right before Christmas – tomorrow’s Christmas Eve, so this is another example of stacking our life. We host a Christmas Eve community brunch and hike. So it’s our gift for all of our friends, because we don’t really buy presents. It’s our way of getting more social community, food time, we’ll do this amazing hike all together, and it’s kind of a tradition where we are, that everyone knows that they can come over here in the morning. So now we’ll need for our walk for my one friend tomorrow is we’ll walk to the grocery store. We will schedule and change where we go for our walk so that our 5 mile loop passes the grocery store, and we will allow extra time – so we will get a chore done, which is get the last minute food we need for the brunch – we’ll get it at 5:30 in the morning, and we just make it part of our workout, right? So we’ll carry our groceries halfway, at the halfway point back. And that’s how we stack our lives. Like, I keep everything so fluid to go, oh, she needs to sometime walk her dog; she’ll bring her dog to get her dog walked. So it’s like, how many of my – if I had to write a list of my life’s tasks, how many of them can I do in a single second? So in the morning, it’s that – when I come home, I usually – I’ll shift into work mode, but I tend to do a lot of my work on the floor while also being with the kids, you know?
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: Yeah, so I’ve posted so many pictures – my Instagram is a really good, I think, place to see a movement-based lifestyle. If we have these –
DANI: Well, and you also have the new website, NutritiousMovement.com, you have your “Day In The Life” section, which –
KATY: Yeah. I don’t usually ever take a walk for the sake of taking a walk. It’s to accomplish some other thing on my list that needs to get done. So I’ll look at my list of things that I need to do today, and it’s like – is there anything I can walk to today? Because walking’s on my list, and dropping this off, or going to take this to a neighbor, or delivering something to my sister, or delivering some groceries. Those, too, are on my list. So I look at that list and instead of going, I walk at this time, every time, I go, how can I be more fluid? More supple with the arrangement of my day? And to see that, I posted something on Instagram. We ordered two cords of wood. For some reason we ran out of wood the day before winter. And I was like – I went to go build a fire – I’m not – I work so much that I usually delegate the fire-building responsibilities to my husband, and I was like, he was gone, and I was texting him, like, “where’s the wood?” and he was like, “we’re out of wood.” And I was like, what? We’re out of wood!? And he was like, yeah, it’ll be coming in a couple days. So we got 2 cords of wood, and you know how they just dump out a huge pile of it, and now I’m like – I’ve got this – it’s like, hours of stacking wood, and I’m like, I’ve got these kids, and I was like, duh! Stacking wood is the movement for today! It is the natural – it is the natural movement. The kids were stoked, they were like, give me, always, play with me, entertain me. And I was like, today we’re stacking wood! And we put on some music, and 3 hours go by and it was just work, work, work. Fun chat, play, and –
DANI: Like you don’t – I don’t know, what’s the opposite of reducing something?
KATY: Yes, exactly. That’s such a good question.
DANI: I mean, it’s cool when you think that way.
KATY: Integrate. Integration.
DANI: Yes, thank you.
KATY: It’s integrating it back into the whole, so we’ve reduced it, and even more than that – and I put this on the Instagram, was like – just, I realized that I have spent the bulk of my life avoiding the tasks that give me the very things that I don’t want to do those tasks, so that I can be able to do. Like, I want all this free time to pursue my interests, which are movement and community building, but they’re naturally packaged in life. It just requires reframing.
DANI: But I think part of it is just integrating your whole mind, as a human – just like looking at that pile of logs and seeing it in a different way.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: We just got 9” of snow last week, and we all bundled up and went out and shoveled, and we were out there for a long time, and we got outside, cold, movement.
KATY: Family.
DANI: And we were laughing and throwing snowballs at each other – but normally, before this concept, I would look at it as one circle, like, oh crap, I have to go shovel.
KATY: Right.
DANI: But then I actually enjoyed myself.
KATY: Yeah. Yeah, you know, the idea of convenience, I think, is where – we’re just so – we’re a culture that is really focused on making things convenient, and we’ve been conditioned to if it’s inconvenient, that’s bad. Meanwhile, we’re also a culture that’s vigorously struggling to get more movement and better quality life and time. And it’s like – if you could just see that the convenience is the problem, if you could just replace the word, “convenient” with “lack of movement,” then literally, that’s what it translates to most of the time. Like, that is – when we use the term convenient, meaning less time or less physical motion of hours in exchange for that thing, then it’s super helpful.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: It’s interesting. The cold thing – the cold thing, you know, we’ve talked about this in the winter show with the Wim Hof stuff.
DANI: And you’re right, it’s Wim.
KATY: Wim? Not Vim?
DANI: I educated myself.
KATY: Wim. My German grandmother would have said, Vim. Anyway.
DANI: Well, yeah, but anyway.
KATY: I think that like – that added temperature, like, the idea and understanding of temperature and movement really changed my understanding about outdoor time in the winter. It was like, we went up to the snow for hours and the kids were – they had no problem with the cold, you know, and then in my mind I’m like, uh, how long are we going to go out there? It’s cold! So that’s how I would have been before, and would have felt the need to limit exposure, but just having someone reframe it to go no, this is a physiological response and a skill and a strength and a motion that you should be able to do: it changed everything. And then somehow just having that information made for having hours of movement and family time and muscle training. The tiny, tiny muscle and the shunting of blood around, and it was like, I’m starting to get it – I’m becoming less of a zoo human every day.
DANI: Yeah. It’s actually made me – it’s been snowing here and I’ve been looking forward to my walk this morning because I took half of my outerwear out.
KATY: Oh, that’s so fun.
DANI: I just went out and – but it was fun!
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: I was looking forward to it. It was a workout while I’m walking and oh, it was great. It’s funny how nothing externally changes; it’s just the transformation happens in the way that you look at it.
KATY: Your mind.
DANI: The transformation happens in your mind.
KATY: Changing your mind – the mind is what’s holding your body back.
DANI: Which costs nothing, people. Nothing.
KATY: Well, it’s a cost – it’s a cost of, you know, habit – habit is one of those things. There’s this efficiency in terms of – in terms of your behavior. And if your behavior works for you, I think there is a metabolic cost of changing our minds. IT’s not like a money thing, but it’s work, and I think it’s underappreciated work of how much physical transformation and effort you have to put into change your mind, because it means that every time you tend to want to think one way, you have to consciously move your thought over a little bit, and while it’s not like arms and legs moving, I think there is some sort of movement or energy expenditure associated with it. So maybe someone needs to look at that some day. Academically.
DANI: Yep. Get on that. Are you still finding stuff – it sounds like you’re still finding stuff.
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: that you can stack? Are you constantly looking at something and going, oh, yeah!
KATY: Yeah.
DANI: Is that good? Or –
KATY: Yeah. I mean, like, the wood was 3 days ago, right? So it’s just – you know, we have these – so much of almost everything that I do is reflexive. It’s just reflexive based on how everyone did it around me when I was little. So it’s constant questioning – it’s like that bumper sticker: Don’t believe everything you think. And it’s like that – it’s just applying that all the time. I’m constantly asking myself, and that’s the habit that I’ve cultivated. The habit that I’ve cultivated is thinking. Every time I think a thought, I’m thinking, where did that come from? Is there validity to that? And what’s my support for that thought? And that is the work that I do the most, is I constantly ask myself that question. That’s my greatest movement is constantly questioning myself. And it does help the fact that I’m a natural questioner anyway, and I’m not a highly intuitive person. Like, intuition I don’t think is a huge steerer for me, or certainly I don’t think – I might be intuitive in that way like a lot of people, but I don’t follow my intuition blindly as much as I follow my – run myself through a checklist of questions, I guess. Often. So I do that a lot, and that helps me find more ways to stack.
DANI: So you look at habit for everything, you think. Have you ever had an attempt at stacking your life go awry?
KATY: No, nothing in my life has ever gone awry. Especially parenting. Parenting is super easy and –
DANI: You’ve got that handled?
KATY: I just make a plan. I just make a plan and it just turns out beautifully, every time. Sure. Do I have an example, though, that’s the –
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: Uh, I don’t –
DANI: I guess if it wasn’t super memorable, that’s a good thing, because that means it wasn’t really horrible or – but it could have been funny.
KATY: Yeah, no, I think that you know, when stacking – I will just, I’m an endless optimist. I will just reframe the stacking as, well, not only did I try to do that but I also learned a lesson! So therefore I’ve stacked it! And I win again!
DANI: That’s great. Way to go, to be tenaciously optimistic. It’s terrible.
KATY: It’s horrible. I really feel like I need to start practicing things half-empty.
DANI: Exactly. Yeah. Or with dirty glasses. My next question – you maybe just answered it – is there anything that shouldn’t be stacked? Like, not that you’ve maybe had a disaster, but you’ve figured out, maybe I just need to give one thing my full attention? And it is just – I’m just curious, it’s purely anecdotal.
KATY: I don’t know. I feel like you have an example. You said anecdotal, so do you have something that you think?
DANI: No, I don’t – well, okay. But like, um, I don’t, I don’t. I was thinking that maybe if you were doing something and maybe your husband said, hey, I feel like you’re not giving me all your attention – or something like that. It’s just – I’m just curious.
KATY: Oh. Well, I feel like that idea that pure attention probably comes from a drought of interaction, right? Like, we live a life where one spouse goes one place all day and the other spouse is living – you’re living a completely separate life from each other. So then the reflex is, when it’s my turn, I want your undivided attention, where – you know what I mean? It’s the same thing with children, right? It’s like, why are you stretching with your kids, you should be fully engaged with that child. And again – I think that those perspectives stem from a life where your child is sent away from you all day, or you are engaging in something that – it’s about the distraction and how you spend all of your life. It’s about the context, I guess.
DANI: Wow.
KATY: So if you were with – if you were co-parenting more, or if your lives weren’t so reduced, or I’m using the term reduced like, not less than but like, segmented, where everyone was apart and everyone had different lives, then it wouldn’t be such an issue. Like, I co-parent, I’m with my children a lot, and it’s not to say that we don’t need individual time – this is not to say that your time should be, like, that you should be with your children all the time and you’re supposed to be with your partner all the time and you’re supposed to be moving 100% of the time. It’s just about the natural balance of things; it’s about trying to restore the natural balance. You know, that your husband or your children, if you live a lifestyle where you are gone or separated most of the time, that pure interaction might be making up for – might be what’s needed to compensate for – but if you’re following the broader transition of transitioning many things where, you know what, instead of leaving my children, like, say you go – say exercise is hugely important to you, but it’s not something you do with your kids. You’re modeling it by taking your child to the gym but then your kid goes to the daycare or somewhere while you go do something separate from them, if that’s the way that you say you’re approaching movement, then you are going to – but you really want your kids to do movement – then you also have to take your kid to their movement class. And that’s a whole separate hour. There’s the hour of you getting your movement, and then there’s the hour of your child getting movement, and it’s requiring driving and classes and paying, and everyone going to their separate movement experience. But if you transition to where the 2 hours that you spent with your kids were moving – and with your spouse – were moving as a family – then – I think that people a lot of times are using their exercise times, I think that people are stacking their life. I think they’re trying to get their exercise time and their alone time at the same time.
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: We all need alone time, and I don’t think that modern parenting allows for the amount of alone time that we need. Retreat into oneself, into whatever. And so we stack in that way, and that’s one way to stack and I think that’s been helpful for a lot of people to go, you know what? I go to the gym and I take the kids to daycare because I’ve been with my children all day long, and that hour away from them is amazing – both for them, and for the parent.
DANI: Right.
KATY: So I’m not trying to say that, that’s not the case.
DANI: It all just depends on the situation.
KATY: Yes, that I think that if you could get your movement with your kids sometimes, and with your spouse sometimes, then you could use that hour of alone time to do something other than movement, and you would have stacked it even more, because you would have been modeling this natural movement with your child, so it’s like teaching, it’s engagement, and then it also, then, provides you with an hour to go do something else which is not any of the things we’ve been talking about. So there’s just different ways of stacking one way, and you might just need t change the way you’re stacking a little bit.
DANI: Mm.
KATY: If you want a different outcome – if it’s working for you, then perfect. But if it’s not, these are, you know, some suggestions.
DANI: Wow. I liked what you said about the – was it drought?
KATY: Movement drought. Attention drought.
DANI: Attention drought, that was – it’s not the answer I expected, but it was really a good answer.
KATY: Well, we’re frag – well, the reductionism isn’t just in the exercise. It’s in everything. Our lives – it’s a non-tribal, non-community, even within our own family –
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: It’s a non-community. You have people whose experience of their lives are extremely different. You can have two people who live in a household and the two of them are experiencing life very differently, and I believe that that causes a sort of disconnect, and maybe the therapy is intense periods of vacation together or time, but if that causes you stress, like, if you’re stressed about it all the time when you’re not getting these periods of engagement, then shifts are possible.
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: That’s another bumper sticker.
DANI: Shifts are possible?
KATY: What if we did a whole show of bumper stickers?
DANI: Shift happens.
KATY: Shift happens, exactly.
DANI: Would you recommend that somebody that is listening to this and going, oh, I never thought about it this way – for them to assess, you know, you said everything could be stacked. Would they just kind of take their circles and list out their circles and just start to connect those in a Venn diagram of – I mean, how?
KATY: It’s not a Venn diagram; it’s just like, literally stacking the circles.
DANI: Okay, well, what would you – what would you?
KATY: Go to that blog post so that you can see the picture. I think that visual will help.
DANI: All right, we’ll put that in the show notes.
KATY: I think that if you made a list of categories – everyone’s got different categories. Maybe you’re caring for someone who needs medical help. Like, everyone’s got their own, unique situation. So create a list of circles – you can use my circles as an example. Like, these are the areas of my life. You know, maybe worship is a circle for you. Maybe medical care is a circle for you – like, you’re going to have to – your circles aren’t my circles.
DANI: Right.
KATY: Figure out your circles, and then create a list of tasks that you do every day that, like, there are the things that are on your daily task list endlessly. Like, every day they’re just automatically there. Eating is one of them – you don’t even put eating on your list because it’s just implied, but start putting it on there. What are the things involved? Is it getting ingredients? Try to break it down into as many steps – every step that you will have to do to accomplish that, and then you start going, okay, how can I layer some of these? And think outside of – think outside of the box, and if you’re using – you know, for me, movement is the key to many things. And so I will naturally default, I think, to finding movement-based solutions to all my problems, right?
DANI: Mm-hmm.
KATY: Like, I see almost all the problems that we have are all the things that need solutions as, well, movement is probably going to be a key component. Because in the natural world, movement is there at every step. (Ding!) That was an excellent pun that I didn’t want to go under the radar.
DANI: That’s my job!
KATY: I know. Movement is there all of the time, and – because if you’re listening to this show, it’s about movement – like, there’s just a gross deficit. And so I tried to – I always think that no matter what my problem is, if I can get more movement in, I’m going to at least be satiating something. And then I look at these – I take a hard look at like, which of these circles are most important to me, and the importance of a circle doesn’t have to be the same every day. You know, like, you can have days or months or seasons where different circles take bigger priority. So someday – someday, you know, I was thinking about another book that I’m not going to write next year because I promised I wouldn’t write any books next year, but maybe the year after – is this idea of just like we wrote – we, all collectively – wrote Transitioning to Minimal Footwear – and actually, that’s not untrue, so thank you, everyone, who ever contributed to a thought. I wanted to write a book on transitioning to a movement-based lifestyle.
DANI: (excitedly) Mmm! Mmm! Who’d you make that promise to?
KATY: I think right now, I think I just might’ve – oh! Oh! Who did I make the promise to of not writing a book?
DANI: About not writing a book.
KATY: To you! In the year review.
DANI: Oh my gosh!
KATY: Remember? See?
DANI: Is it convenient if I forgot? Because you should just go ahead and write that book for us. Never mind.
KATY: Well, you do have the power to edit the show. But I think that’s going to be a book because I think that these steps are more clear – to me – because I’ve been through the process. So maybe sharing some of my process, people could follow it if they wanted to, just like they follow corrective exercise, and thinking of how to walk/where to walk/what shoes to buy that – that- there’s so much more to a movement based lifestyle than exercise, right?
DANI: Right.
KATY: There’s prioritization of time and money, and how you engage your family in it, and so I think – oh, you know what else? On the website, NutritiousMovement.com, there is a free guide – it’s called the Macronutrient Pack Guide. Have you downloaded that yet?
DANI: I have not.
KATY: If you go download that – it’s free – it says it on almost every page, download the macronutrient guide. It is a book – it is a booklet – of all of these things that we’re talking about of how to fit movement into your life while getting things like nature credits and community credits. So that will be probably – I mean, it’ll be more fleshed out in this book that someday I will write, which will probably be in 4 ½ months from now because you’ve edited that show to no longer even carry a record.
DANI: What? A promise? What? No.
KATY: And you’re going to have to edit – you’re going to have to edit this out, too. It’s like Memento, that movie.
DANI: Yeah, it’s all tattooed across my forearm.
KATY: Speaking of movies, have you seen Star Wars yet?
DANI: No. I’m sorry, I’m just not that excited.
KATY: Me, either. But I – I’ve – for some reason, like the creepy jellybeans, I thought that you guys would be like Star Wars. I think I associate –
DANI: No, you know. You and I we’re around the same age, so I’m – I’m the first three movies. I was actually supposed to marry Han Solo. I don’t know what happened there, but I did not.
KATY: Yesterday I parked next to the Death Star. It was someone’s black SUV with tinted windows, covered in Star Wars stickers, and the license plate was Death Star.
DANI: That’s no planet!
KATY: Anyway.
DANI: We’re going to rename – it’s a little late in the game – we’re going to rename this show the Bumper Sticker Show, because we have “don’t believe everything you think,” “Shift happens,” –
KATY: You got one more? I know you do. I think you got one more.
DANI: Yeah, this one. “Your circles aren’t my circles.”
KATY: And that is not going to confuse anyone who reads it. It’s like, what are they talking about? What? I don’t even know what that means.
DANI: Well, this – this was, I mean, thank you. This was good, and I would love to someday – it would just be the natural step or progression to write that book for everything you’ve put out there, this was great. But I won’t pester you.
KATY: Do you hear this, Penelope? Just start taking notes.
DANI: Yeah.
KATY: That’s my editor. She’s like, seriously? Did you just promise to do another book?
DANI: Not this next year!
KATY: I like writing books. What if I just stopped writing blogs and doing podcasts and wrote books, like, would that be better?
DANI: You could do that. Or you could just, like, take your time writing it.
KATY: It’s like you don’t even know me.
DANI: No.
KATY: It’s like you don’t even know me. Take my time writing it. Crazy.
DANI: I guess I’m just going to send you some jellybeans.
KATY: Booger jellybeans.
DANI: Yeah. Well, just to remind everybody: we are now having the mailbag shows once a month, between regularly scheduled podcasts.
KATY: It cracks me up every time you say mailbag.
DANI: Do we have any um – let’s see, this will be coming out so this should be the first week of January that you all are listening to this if you’re getting it when it comes out. We’re about to wrap it up – where are you going to be this month? Where are we going to see you? What are you going to do? Not writing a book, I guess, in January. Whatever.
KATY: It’s January – actually, I’m canceling everything and I’m going to write a book in the first 2 weeks of January.
DANI: Thank you!
KATY: You’re welcome, everybody. January – so, January is a crazy month. So Don’t Just Sit There technically released in mid-December, which means it’s in bookstores in mid-December, so a lot of PR for that, so Dr. Oz magazine took a little snippet from Don’t Just Sit There. I am very excited about it because they took my favorite part of that book, which was a section called, “Office a-s-s is a real thing,” with dollar signs for the s-es. And it’s explaining the mechanical – like, what are the forces applied to your gluteus maximus flesh from weight and how that promotes adipose. How it mechanically transduces adipose tissue. So –
DANI: Sweet.
KATY: So I’m just tickled – I’m tickled that they got that, so I can’t wait to see how that lays out. And when I was in New York, they showed me the picture that goes with that article; it’s a chair in the shape of a butt.
DANI: Oh, awesome!
KATY: Which I might need to get one of those for my house. What else? I’m going to California; I’m going to be in California. I’m doing a book signing at Barnes and Noble in Ventura on the 9th – rumor has it it’s with Jill Miller.
DANI: Oh, fun!
KATY: But we haven’t finalized all those details yet – we’ll announce that – I mean, that’s a couple weeks away which is just crazy. I’m shooting a little TV segment for the ABC news station in LA, KTLA when I’m in Ventura, and then certification week also in Ventura. Are you going to be there?
DANI: I am not.
KATY: Dangit!
DANI: No. I love Ventura, too, and the beach, but –
KATY: But it’s too warm for you now. You’re a snow girl.
DANI: Yeah, me and Wim, we’ve been hanging.
KATY: You and Wim.
DANI: We’re elbow to elbow. Yep.
KATY: I think that’s great.
DANI: In fact, after this I’m going to go sit in an ice bath.
KATY: You’re doing this in an ice bath right now.
DANI: Could you – could you hurry it up?
KATY: I’m trying to hold my teeth apart right now. And I think that’s it – oh, oh! Oh! There is – I don’t think we should – I think we should talk about it not in the next show, for mid-January about what national magazine will be featuring my home.
DANI: So we’re not going to talk about it now.
KATY: Well, we just did, but I think we should talk about it more next time.
DANI: Okay. I will make a little note on that.
KATY: Because I think that now everyone is like, what!? What’s happening? It’s the reason – if you haven’t seen the tour of my house on the new Nutritious Movement site, which you can find on the Day in the Life page –
DANI: Mm-hmm
KATY: The reason my house was so clean in that video was because this magazine was coming to shoot my house. And so it required like an excavation team and many, many hours to get it – so if you’re looking at it going –
DANI: You’re not alone in that everyone does that. Everyone does that.
KATY: Need any help?
DANI: No, but like, that’s, you know, the best cleaning gets done when something important or big is coming over.
KATY: Yeah, well, this is as big as it’s ever been and it’s as clean as it’s ever been. So that will be – it’s for the February issue of this magazine, but it will be released in January, so we can talk about it next time, because I think it’ll be –
DANI: We can talk about it next show. Excellent.
KATY: All right, hon. All right, well, thanks everyone for listening. Reviews – if you have a review for us, we love it. It helps make the show better. For more information, you can find me at NutritiousMovement.com and you can learn more about Dani Hemmat, movement warrior and I believe, Wim Hof groupie –
DANI: Totally.
KATY: Is that what’s happening right now?
DANI: It’s happening.
KATY: It’s happening.
DANI: It’s happening.
KATY: You can find Dani always – that’s where I find her – at MoveYourBodyBetter.com.
DANI: All right.
KATY: All right, hon. Bye, guys!
DANI: Bye bye.
We hope you find the general information on biomechanics, movement, and alignment informative and helpful – but it is not intended to replace medical advice and shouldn’t be used as such.
SHOW NOTES:
https://www.nutritiousmovement.com/keeping-your-body-and-life-fit/
Day in the Life and Free Download of Macronutrient Pack
