Move Your DNA, Podcast Ep. 8

DANI: Hello! You’re listening to Katy Says, here with Katy Bowman. How’s it going this morning, Katy?

KATY: It’s freakishly amazing, thank you for asking.

DANI: Freakishly amazing! Did you sleep well?

KATY: You know what, I’ve been walking in the morning like 5 miles at 5AM, just because I am in a big kind of work crunch time now, because Move Your DNA is now out, which we’ll talk about later. It’s been my salvation; I still get all my movement kind of throughout the day, but I’m totally charged and ready to go by this big bout in the morning, so I’m feeling really good.

DANI: So you get up at 5

KATY: -ish. 5-ish.

DANI: 5-ish. And how long does that take to knock out those five miles?

KATY: Well, I mean – rather than a distance, I mean I’m not really trying to walk as fast as I can because, you know. Longer is better, but about 90 minutes I’ve been walking.

DANI: Okay

KATY: I’ve recruited a friend. I recruited, actually, lots of friends, but one friend raised her hand and so 90? 90 minutes sometimes a little bit longer, and the sun is just barely coming up. We got stuck between two packs of communicating coyotes this morning, which was rad/freaky, but it was fine – you know, of course.

DANI: Oh, yeah.

KATY: But it was surreal. It’s pitch black. I feel really good; I’ve been doing it for a couple weeks now.

DANI: That’s excellent. I, uh – we’re still getting up early and walking, but it’s going to get colder here pretty soon, so it’s time to bundle up.

KATY: Mm-hmm.

DANI: Mm-hmm. Okay, so we are going to get right into it. Lucky you, you still get the question of the day.

KATY: Awesome, lucky me.

DANI: Lucky you. So, name one thing you could not live without.

KATY: Oxygen.

DANI: Oh. Well, that’s a gimme, but yeah, that’s a pretty good answer.

KATY: See, that’s how my mind works. I don’t have much imagination. So do you mean, not literally, figuratively?

DANI: Yeah. I mean, we all, really.

KATY: I would say my glasses. But see, even then, my glasses or my contact lenses but I’m still meaning literally. Figuratively, Katy, library card.

DANI: Oh, the library card. That’s a good one. I like that. See, you got it – you came around eventually, so that’s good.

KATY: Well, all the things in my mind, I’m like, my husband, my children, my fam – oh! My library card. Yeah, my library card.

DANI: Yeah, the extraneous stuff.

KATY: You?

DANI: Well, could I say, like, walking? Is that something that –

KATY: See, walking, and we’ll talk about it – it would go in the same, literal category as oxygen.

DANI: Okay, so I’m going to quit making fun of you, because I’m answering just like you.

KATY: You, you and I are in the same boat. Hey, Pot. Hey, Kettle.

DANI: Yeah, you’re black. No, I’m black! No, you’re black! All right. And then my glasses, too, because I’m just blind as a bat. But you know. Laughing? Okay, let’s get on with it. You are back in the States, which is awesome. Did you enjoy your trip?

KATY: I did. It was, um, it was great.

DANI: Excellent. I missed talking with you, because I have lots of questions, and a lot of the questions are about your latest book, Move Your DNA, which, that came out in – August or September? I think it was the end of August, correct?

KATY: It technically is not released yet. It doesn’t get released until mid-October, and this is the beginning of October that we’re recording this, but we started shipping pre-orders and Amazon started shipping pre-orders at the end of August. So it’s been out for about 4 weeks, and it’s in bookstores, now, hopefully they’ll have gotten it now. So, yes. It’s new! Four weeks, man, four weeks!

DANI: That’s pretty good, because it’s already a best seller.

KATY: It is. That’s crazy!

DANI: It is crazy! Now this is your, third book?

KATY: Yeah.

DANI: And is this your first bestseller list book?

KATY: It is, yeah.

DANI: Congratulations.

KATY: Thank you.

DANI: Well, I have been lucky enough o read the book, and it is – it’s groundbreaking. I’ll say it, even though it’s probably been said a lot about it. And although it’s thus far the culmination of your life’s work – and you’re not even that old, really –

KATY: Thank you.

DANI: (laughs)

KATY: Thanks for that.

DANI: You’re welcome. It addresses a lot of current health questions and debates, like kegels, standing workstations, stuff that’s very current. Sitting – the new smoking, footwear, stuff like that. It’s huge. And I – if you’re listening, and you have a human body, listeners – I advise you to read this book. Because not only is it written in typical Katy style, which is very funny and warm, but you get a really good education. A really good science education in that book. So I’m going to ask you some questions about it. You just, you did such a good job! I’m very proud of you, even though I had nothing to do with it, I’m very proud of you.

KATY: Well, everyone had something to do with it – because it took me a long time to figure out – you know, this stuff is all very comfortable in my mind, and I make a lot of assumptions of what people know. Like, I just assume that people know some of these basic things, but I realized over the last 7-10 years in just talking with people and teaching people how people were interpreting different things. Like, okay, well, then I know how to explain something a little bit differently, maybe, so I would say that the book is – you said it’s huge, but it’s actually under 300 pages, which is nice. It’s not overwhelming. It’s dense, it’s dense. I know what you mean, but I want for the listeners out there to know that it’s actually not, you know, like War and Peace.

 DANI: No, not at all.

KATY: It is – no, it’s similar to reading my blog style, which is casual. But at the same time, it is – there’s a technicality to it. I know we’ll talk about this, but there’s a technicality that’s there that makes it particularly dense, I would say.

DANI: It’s relatively short read for the amount of information that you do. So it isn’t huge, you’re right

KATY: No

DANI: But what you propose is huge, in there.

KATY: Yes. And you also have to read it 17 times.

DANI: Yep. I’m actually on my 2^nd way through, just because it was – I read it like a bag of Fritos the first time. Like, Cookie Monster. Crumbs were flying everywhere and I was like, Nom Nom Nom Nom. And now, I have to go back and go, oh yeah, I missed that one. And I just did come across last night something else, and was like, oh, yeah, I didn’t see that. So it’s really – you did just a bang up job. Who are you most hoping to reach with this book, because it’s more broad than the other books that you’ve written. As far as – what’s your hope for an audience?

KATY: Oh, you know. That’s a good question, but I don’t know if I wrote it with any particular audience in mind. I would say that I went out of my way not to make it too simple. So obviously I wasn’t writing it – I wasn’t writing it for every single person, because if I was, then I would think that there would be perhaps even more of a back detail that needed to be included. Um…I think that I wrote it for everyone in that I wrote it not directed to professionals who are working with individuals, but just every individual themselves. Everyone who has come to the realization of, something’s not right here, and the information that I’m getting to fix the something that’s not right doesn’t resonate with me in terms of being complete. Or it doesn’t have a deep enough backstory. So I think in that way that I wrote it for everyone – that all being said, the progression of the book as it went from different publishers when it was a proposal, they were like, you really need to dial the writing back to an 8^th grade level, you need to not put so much of the ‘why,’ just put the ‘how to fix it,’ and that didn’t sit well with me. I was like, I think that people have enough of the watered down, general, 5 steps to fix something, and I think that’s kind of led to where the struggle is, because you can’t really get better in five steps. It’s more like 5,000 steps – or, if you could learn a different set of five things about the ‘why,’ that maybe those steps you’d be able to figure out more of those steps along the way, as opposed to being told ‘five steps.’ But I don’t know how to fill in the other half steps in between because nobody really taught me the ‘why.’ So I did the ‘why.’

DANI: Well, as a scientist, the ‘why,’ I imagine, is so super important for you.

KATY: Well, you know what. The ‘why’ is all one really knows. The steps are the least scientific part about it, right? Like, scientifically I can say, here’s the literature that shows that these cells are under gravitational loads, and here’s all the literature that shows that these cancers respond to loads, and here’s the literature that shows that when you’re doing physical therapy what’s growing in your body and what’s changing. So you can have all those pieces, but as far as the ‘what works to repair it’ – there’s no way ever to really research those types of things. You’re turning a physical science into a social science, basically, and there’s a lot of – more of an art form, really, at that point. So all I can do is say, here’s how it works, or here’s how the understanding of what works. And also, here’s some context to understand larger biological systems and how they work. And then, the second part is: and here, essentially from my laboratory of working with tens of thousands of people for many, many years and their feedback and how they have taken the information and what has worked and what has not, and what has made a more robust program out of it – what we now call the Restorative Exercise® program – that in and of itself is just the trickle-down. So I thought, well, how about just people know the stuff first, before I say what to do. Like, what to do really depends on who the person is. So I can just spend a lot more time saying how to work. In that way, I wrote the book for – if I were doing a PhD program right now, this would be my dissertation. So in working with other scientists who are currently, you know, at University, and working in biological fields and having them read it and go, this is really the equivalent to the doctorate thesis that you have here about proposing that movement has the equivalent complexity as nutrition. That there are baseline requirements, even though that’s been well understood in separate – like in bone science, and in cartilage science and in tendon science. Each one of those researchers aren’t really talking to each other and going, yeah, of course, we know that use and the way of use is all required and part of the regeneration system, but the next step, then, is to figure out – figure it down to the level of micronutrients and dosages, which will take a lot more nanotechnology and we’ll have to use non-human animals where you’re eliminating animals from doing anything else. Like, these mice only swung from the bars, and these – I mean, you’d have to use a primate and you’d have to isolate – realistically, those types of things can never be done in the same way that we can isolate food. Food is, from our perspective, a non-living thing that is easy to hack into and measure and put on fire, but we’re not so liberal with mammals, you know, which I’m in full support of. So until you know more, I always go, well, what’s biologically plausible, what makes a lot of sense? There’s a ton of literature supporting in pieces, and then you be your own scientist and do an experiment with yourself, and see how it goes.

DANI: That’s what makes the information or the results really stick, I think, is being able to translate that to one’s own self.

KATY: Mm-hmm

DANI: Which you really give that option in the book. It’s just so user-friendly. One of the most commonly held beliefs that Move Your DNA, well, pretty much your work, I guess, actually, challenges us to look at is the belief that many – if not most – of our health problems are brought on by aging or genetics or poor diet. And that sort of paradigm sort of removes a lot of the responsibility and power from a person. But I feel like this – you’re always asking us, especially in this book, to consider that our bodies are ailing because they aren’t meeting what you referred to as biological imperatives in the book. And for our listeners that haven’t had the pleasure of reading this book yet, could you please explain – just briefly – what, like, biological imperative is, and what’s happening to us the less that we meet that.

 

KATY: Well, I don’t know if I would say that we’re not meeting our biological imperatives. Yes, I guess in general, we’re not –

DANI: I mean, we’re eating, having babies, right?

KATY: yes, yes, so I would say that it would be more like this: The reason that the ailments you’re having are the result of a mismatch between the mechanical environment that you require, and the mechanical environment that you’re currently experiencing. So in that way, the things that brought about the mechanical environment, you could call them biological imperatives, you know. You could say that these are necessary inputs – I think, though, biological imperative might be referring to other things, but yes – like, walking would be biological imperative, meaning that it’s particular input that the system requires. But also, I would say instead of – you know, like, am I offering a counter-paradigm to genetics and aging, and what you eat, or have I just refined that paradigm. For example, a big component of the book – I think we’ve talked about it before with diseases of captivity are like, if you compare orcas swimming and foraging in the wild, that environment – that mechanical environment to an orca swimming around in a tank, and the outcome of the health between those two whales in terms of lifespan, successful offspring, health in general, infections, how many antibiotics they need in order to be able to survive. If you compared that same whale in two situations, the list of health outcomes that you would see that there was a great divergence between their mechanical environment that they require, or that they would have and the one that they have. Which means that there are some requirements there that we may not be aware of. However, that’s not to say that someone who’s been swimming – someone. One of you out there who have been swimming in your captive tank for longer wouldn’t be experiencing ailments more because it’s about being out of the environment longer. So it’s not that it’s not aging, it’s just that aging is not necessarily the thing to hang your hat on when you’re trying to get better, because it allows you to continue to swim in the tank. And the same thing with genetics. It’s not that genetics is not the reason you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing, but again it’s your genetics plus the tank. So when we have not talked about the tank that we – the orcas – are swimming around, and we keep highlighting the variables – like you can’t stop time. There’s nothing to do about your time, and there’s nothing to do about your genetics. If we keep focusing our energy and our money on looking at variables over which we have nothing to do with, you know --

DANI: Right

KATY: Then what’s the point? What’s the point as far as investing health care dollars, because healthcare dollars are not, you know, general science dollars. They are specifically dollars that the government has allocated for improving the health of the people who have put the dollars in to the pot. Sow hat I’m just saying is, there’s this whole other environment that should be interesting to you scientifically, which it is, in the general science community, which is where my data is coming from. And then there are all of the dollars that are going to the healthcare – I think that dollars would be better allocated looking at the environment, and how changing the environment would change the outcome, rather than trying to play with moving the genes around, you know, or selecting offspring who did or didn’t have particular genes, instead of going, let’s just drain the pool and get out of here type thing, to a certain degree. So I guess that is – that’s who I’m writing the book to, is anyone interested in that.

DANI: Well, I think it’s very empowering to know that you can just drain the pool or get out of the pool and make improvements, instead of just throwing up your hands and saying, oh well, I’m old! Oh well! My mom had this, so I have it.

KATY: It is.

DANI: There’s not much to do with that attitude. Like, if you take that, there’s nowhere to go, but if you have the thought that perhaps you could, move your DNA, so to speak, that puts some power back in our hands, and I like that.

KATY: Yeah, I like that, but I’m always trying to counter my own work. So I would say that it’s very empowering, but it’s disempowering, is that a word? It is, you remove your own power, so to speak, if you continue to look at - these are just inevitable things. That all being said, if I were to counter my own argument, for many who are struggling, who have no solution, maybe it is calming to go, you know what? There’s nothing I could have done to fix this, this is just my lot, this is my life, and I fully accept it and I am on board with it and I’ll ride it to the end. So maybe that’s where some of this started was just that, you know, you should always be accepting of wherever you are. I certainly am not an advocate for being frustrated with yourself and the sum total of you in this moment. I think that acceptance is really the first step of peace – being happy in general.

DANI: Well, you always say, start where you are. You know, when you’re doing an exercise or something, and I like that, because that just – implies acceptance.

KATY: Yeah, so, I think that there’s benefit there, however, this is where I always say I have a science brain and a practitioner brain – my science brain is like, what’s happened is, in wanting everyone to feel good about where they are, meaning, in terms of biology, right? So if there’s some sort of biological thing that you should have been able to do, some sort of biologically defining thing, like digesting or procreating or breathing well, if you have some sort of ailment in those tracts, you’re going, you know, I don’t feel really great about that there’s some voids in my biological function. What’s happened is, when you go to who’s in charge of your healthcare, which is usually the basic allopathic system, or even your alternative system as a whole, you know, you’re going to whoever is taking care of you, whoever’s on your body team, and you’re saying, these are problems for me. The movement seems to be going, you’ve done everything that you can, and so just accept it and move on – which is great. However, “everything that you can” – the more we keep telling people that they’ve done “everything that they can,” and stop researching all the things that could be done, were they understood well in a protocol designed for them – in my mind right now I’m thinking of, if people have difficulty producing breast milk, or if people have difficulty vaginally delivering their baby. You know, like, something that brings about stress, you know, a lot of – I’m a relatively new-ish mom, over 3 years, and I’m in that birthing community where people are just going, ‘I feel like such a failure because I couldn’t do these things,’

DANI: Right

KATY: And then you want everyone to feel like, of course it’s okay that these things didn’t happen for you – it’s okay for you the individual, it’s okay. There’s no judgment here, you did everything that you could with the information that you had. My directing of this book and this work is to the people, “in charge” of making sure that the people making the choices of behavior have all of the information so that when they choose a particular behavior, that they understood the pros and con list of that behavior. And so

 

DANI: Right

 

KATY: I’m starting to read, like, medical journals now that are saying, perhaps we’re being too hard on women who can’t make breast milk and we’re stressing them out to lactation consultants and analyzing their diet, and it would be better – less stressful – for them and the baby if we didn’t do that. Totally, I can see that perspective. But then it’s like, well, first of all, maybe someone needs to be teaching people how to give medical advice without – with better bedside manner. So it’s like, we’re just going to work with this in a low-stress way. Maybe there are better systems of support, I know there are, but maybe they’re being exposed to people. And then my thing is, when you tell someone they’ve done all they can, what you really mean is, they’ve done all the steps that you know about – that you know about – based on where the funding has gone towards understanding how these processes work.

 

DANI: That’s a really important thing, I think.

 

KATY: It’s a really important thing, and until I see forty studies on how breast milk is made – exactly what nutrients, and not like, oh you’ve got to make sure you’ve got macronutrients – make sure you have enough protein! Like, stuff that is from 40 years ago – until I see comparisons, volume productions, relatively speaking – you know, everyone makes a certain amount – but until I see research dollars being spread evenly over a biological imperatives as opposed to things like, I’m going to say it, like Viagra –

DANI: I totally was going to say that!

KATY: I know, everyone says Viagra –

DANI: Oh my gosh!

KATY: And it’s like ---

DANI: Yeah, but if I were queen of the world, though, I would totally put you in charge of allocation of funding where it goes in studies, because I just feel like that study – that would be great but it seems so far away, but it would just be – yeah. We need to know!

KATY: yeah, but I’d be totally biased.

DANI: Of course you would!

KATY: You would put me in charge because you’re interested in the same things I’m interested in. Someone else going, well, you can have the same conversation in any different field, and someone would say, our whole future society hinges on this thing and it needs to get more research. And they’re right – this is a very – these are very complex problems: social, I don’t know if science is the best way to solve social problems. But anyway. Oh my gosh, how did this turn into a rant? Let me get down off my soapbox, just to stretch my legs, jeez.

 

DANI: No, but it’s important in looking at all of it. Wes there anything when you were writing this book that you discovered that just totally blew your mind? Did you come across anything in your research that you were just like, whaaa? Or had you kind of been gathering it all and piecing it together?

 

KATY: Yeah, you know, this book – the content in this book is stuff I’ve been working on for a long time, like 10 years.

 

DANI: Right.

 

KATY: The most – the things, you know what? The things that I am most blown away with, I would say specifically because, you know we all have this cultural veil that comes off slowly. I only know what I don’t know through some divine insight of going, oh! I never thought to look outside of that veil! But it’s through reading. It’s through reading a ton of stuff. So the main thing is, when you’re looking at a lot of literature, if you’re using cool search tools like PubMed, it pulls up a lot of relative, related type of stuff. So not so much for this book, but for my next one, so remember this book was written over a year ago.

 

DANI: Really? Wow!

 

KATY: That’s how long it takes! People don’t realize that you finish a book and then the editing process and the layout process and the review process – it’s a year. So I finished this puppy a year ago.

 

DANI: Wow.

 

KATY: Isn’t that insane? Isn’t that like, really? Can you imagine?

 

DANI: No, and for some reason – no, no I can’t. And you wrote that opus, like, on the floor, too. So.

 

KATY: I did. And Starbucks. I mean, really, we need to give a shout-out to Starbucks. And The Man, in general, for the free Wi-Fi wherever I go.

 

DANI: Yeah. Free Wi-Fi.

 

KATY: The Man. Capital T, capital M. I would say –

 

DANI: The Man and his Free Wi-Fi.

 

KATY: Thanks, The Man, for your free Wi-Fi. Um, yeah, so I would say the neatest stuff, the stuff that I’m really interested in now is electromagnetic fields, EMF, and the emerging data on how it affects cells, right? Because it’s a load. It, too, is a load for those who have read Move Your DNA. It’s one of those invisible load makers, right? Because it’s pushing, so they’re looking at – even though it doesn’t look like it, you know, it’s invisible, but it’s still one of those parts.

 

DANI: Sure.

 

KATY: One of those parts that needs to be considered. Looking at sperm motility, you know, after they ‘ve taken these poor chaps and had them had phones that are streaming, you know, that are not on non-airplane mode, right? So if you’re not on airplane mode, your phone is repeatedly connecting to the Internet, which means

 

DANI: Right, always looking.

 

KATY: So it’s like, between the tower and the phone is coming this communication and if your pelvis is in between it, then your junk is being affected by it. So they use men because obviously it’s easy to get samples of a man.

 

DANI: (laughs)

 

KATY: External samples of a man, you know what I’m saying? Do you understand what I’m saying?

 

DANI: Yes, they have a lot of that. All right.

 

KATY: They have – well, hopefully not a lot. But what I’m saying is, the reason they haven’t done it in women yet, but just recently I saw they measured exposure to in utero fetuses that they were able to gain access to later on, and you could see altered development.

 

DANI: Wow.

 

KATY: So it’s – I can’t even talk about that study because it makes me sad, but –

 

DANI: And we won’t, we’re not going to right now

 

KATY: No, no. But in general, just this notion of, we’re being moved by so many things. So many things are in our tank, and so what can I do with that information is like, okay, well, I’ll turn my cell phone onto airplane mode if I’m not needing it. Or if people sleep with it by their head, all night long?

 

DANI: Yeah.

 

KATY: Just put it on airplane mode. Is there proof that I can give you? Anything? No, but there’s proof that it’s changing your cells, and I, for one, don’t really need any more than that to turn it off at night when it’s sitting in our kids’ room, you know?

 

DANI: It’s good enough for me.

 

KATY: Good enough for me!

 

DANI: It’s good enough. I want to let people know that we’re going to talk more about Move Your DNA in future shows, and future episodes. You can get this book, even though you said it’s not technically – well, there should be pre-orders.

 

KATY: It’s out.

 

DANI: you can go, and here’s the deal – you can go down to Barnes and Noble and get that book. You can go to your local bookseller, and if they don’t have it, just request it. Have them order it. But the book is so worth your time. If you could see me now, and this wasn’t a podcast, I am emphatically slapping my hands together to let you know how good this book is. That’s all I have to say, we’re going to talk about it a lot more because I have so many questions about it, and I’m sure I will after my second and third read. Thank you so much for your time today. We will talk again soon, Katy.

 

KATY: Thank you, and I appreciate that you read it. Thank you. And that anyone read it – anyone who read it, thank you. You complete me.

 

DANI: All right, have a good rest of your day! Get out and move.

 

KATY: All right. You, too. Bye, Dani.

 

DANI: Talk to you later, bye.

 

DANI: Hey, folks. I just wanted to remind you, if you want your copy of Move Your DNA right now, you can walk down to your local bookseller and get it. Or go to one of the bigger ones like Barnes and Noble if you need to. If you like to listen to your books, you can go to Audible.com, and get your copy of the audiobook. You can also get an e-book and a hard copy at RestorativeExercise.com or order your copy through MoveYourDNA.com as well. Hope you enjoy it!