Love, Breathwork, Fertility, Metabolic Health, Routines, Epigenetics and Longevity - Recap Podcast

Welcome to another episode of the Longevity and Lifestyle Podcast. I'm your host, Claudia von Boeselager, here to uncover the groundbreaking strategies, tools, and practices from the world's pioneering experts to help you live at your best and reach your highest potential. Today's episode is a special recap episode featuring a short clip from the previous week's episodes. It serves as a teaser into the wealth of insights, entertaining anecdotes, and valuable tips from the various conversations to give you a flavor of the episode and guest. If you'd like to check out the full episode, simply go to longevity-and-lifestyle.com/podcast. Please enjoy.

It turns out that social connection is a bigger driver of health and happiness than any other factor that we know. According to this longevity study on men specifically, basically at the end of men's lives, they did an 80, 80-year study. They basically showed that close personal relationships are what brought health, happiness, and satisfaction of life. Social disconnection, on the other hand, is actually potentially a bigger driver of disease than smoking, drinking, sedentary behavior, and obesity. So when I started looking at this data and these numbers, I was like, what is social connection? And how do we improve it? How do we build it? How do we make it stronger? Basically, one of the problems that we have right now is there's quite a lot of deaths of despair because we're not dying from as many infectious diseases, although COVID has certainly killed a lot of people. Prior to COVID, we were mostly dying from chronic diseases. And then as we started to prolong life, we actually started to see more and more deaths of despair develop. So that's due to isolation, that's due to social conflict, social rejection and exclusion. And I was wondering, so why is this happening? If you actually look at the history of oxytocin and you look at the history of humanity, we evolved alongside a bunch of other hominids, but we won out of all the other hominids. So like we succeeded, like we were the ones, Homo sapiens won. And it's thought that part of the reason why we succeeded is our ability to create social bonds, because essentially this is the kicker, love and social relationships. If you think about love itself, like what is love, right? Like we always, we know it, we feel love, we have love, but what is love? So I was obsessed with love last year and I was studying the science of love. And I discovered that love is a motivational force similar to hunger or thirst. It actually drives people towards one another. And we get this dopamine from connection, but oxytocin is what creates these bonds. And love is driven by a bunch of different neurotransmitters, but dopamine and oxytocin play a pretty big role. And love is this motivational force that drives us together because proximity, closeness, actually increases the chances of information sharing and energy sharing. So we share resources and information. And resources and information are what help us survive, right? Now, love also increases the chances of reproduction, right? So if we have close social ties, we're more likely to connect with people of the opposite sex and/or the same sex, but have children. And so when you look at love as this absolute fundamental facet of biology that is so important to survival, just as important as hunger or thirst, just as important as food, you understand why lack of love and lack of social connection is So unbelievably detrimental to human. That's one of the things that I started trying to figure out. So communal support is actually really important for people to flourish, right? Because we need to share information and resources and we need to maintain proximity to reproduce. And life basically evolved oxytocin signaling for a reason. And this is the coolest thing about being a woman because women are basically oxytocin dominant. So we are literally the keepers of life. We create it and we propagate it. We nurture it. Men are all about protectors of life. They make sure that they're more vasopressin dominant. So they are more likely to be aggressive. They're more likely to defend. They're more likely to protect. This is life's basic design for a reason. Before I go into oxytocin, I want to back up to like evolutionary biology. The endosymbiotic hypothesis suggests that we engulfed bacteria, single-cell organisms, the original form of life found on earth. Engulf bacteria in order to harness energy from the environment, which enabled evolution. So this pattern of energy gathering and information sharing, sensing and integrating and reproducing, this goes back to the very earliest forms of life. And so this is why I'm so obsessed with biological imperative as a foundational way to teach health, because if you understand that life is about survival and reproduction, your biology does not care about your job. Your biology only really cares about you staying alive and you making another person. And that doesn't mean that our minds believe the same thing, because obviously I care about all sorts of stuff that's not related to survival and reproduction, but our biology, this programming is running the show under the surface all the time. And when this programming gets disrupted, all hell breaks loose. And I'll give you a few examples of this later.

Can you share with my audience your insights into the importance of sleep and the impact of sleep deprivation?

Sleep is one of the main chapters I oftentimes talk about and the way I arrived here or the decision or the reason behind the decision to become a certified sleep coach was a very simple one. I figured out by working with so many women, the fact that weight loss, and this is just one topic when it comes to sleep. If we want to lose weight in an efficient way and also sustain the weight loss process, sleep is instrumental. It's very important. Can make or break, I like to say, our ability to lose weight, our ability to age slowly, our ability even to prevent diseases such as cancer. There are important studies about this and also our ability to perform at a high level. And the reason for that is the fact that sleep regulates most hormone production. Sleep is also part of our circadian rhythm, meaning that it occurs under a repeatable 24-hour process. And it's determined by the light-dark cycle of our environment. At least 15% of our DNA is controlled by circadian rhythm, including certain repair mechanisms of our body. Because I mentioned the studies and I love using them as for those people who want to check, who need to check. Data from my perspective should be used more and we should know about those studies more. Every single time I have the opportunity to share anything interesting, I do that with my audience. It looks, and this is for everyone, but specifically for us women is a very important piece of information. So taking sleeping medication, even as little as one pill. 20 times a year, and in most cases we do this more often, has been shown in 3 large studies to be associated with increased mortality. Another important and interesting thing there is the fact that our, let me call it, favorite prescription medication or prescription pill will only add 30 to 40 minutes of sleep on our schedule. Now, why sleep is so important? So what happens when we get sleep and what happens when we don't get the sleep we need? And when we talk about sleep, there are 2 important things. Number one is the quantity. In other words, for how many hours we sleep. And the other one is the quality of our sleep. And oftentimes we only judge whether or not we sleep well or the quality of our sleep is good enough by judging the number of hours. Timing our sleep is more important than the number of hours we spend sleeping. It's one thing to go to sleep at 10:00 PM, for example, and catch the, what I like to call the primetime hours. And these are between 10:00 PM and 2:00 AM. And completely different thing to go to bed at 2:00 AM and to actually miss the prime time hours and sleep until 9:00 or 10:00 the next day. The main reason for that is the fact that our body is designed in such a way in which it releases certain hormones in certain time intervals. Human growth hormone, for example, this is one of the juiciest hormones, especially for us women, when it comes to aging and aging slowly, to be more specific. And then melatonin is another very important hormone. It's also called sleep hormone and it's called like that for a reason. And we get the first melatonin, I like to call it injection, around 10:00 PM. We like to use a very funny metaphor and say the fact that it's almost like a train and we miss the 10:00 PM train with that injection. And then the second one is at around 4:00 AM. And for those women who experience issues around 4:00 AM with their sleep, chances are the melatonin, the quantity, the level of melatonin they get from their body is not high enough. And we lose, we start— the level of melatonin is decreasing as we age. So this is changing. And melatonin is also associated with youth, same with human growth hormone. So for those women or people in general who miss these prime time hours and also don't have a predictable routine around their sleep, chances are some of these juicy good hormones are not in place or they are not produced as they should. Another important thing, and this has to do with us women as well, is the fact that human growth hormone is a great way, probably the best way for us to protect or to do prevention for breast cancer. It's the number one hormone helping us stay away from this specific type of cancer. So I hope it gave away a very important incentive for those women who like to, I don't know, binge on Netflix maybe. Or spend some time in front of TV or screens, going to bed around 10 is definitely important. So sleep is when growth hormone and melatonin is released. When this is happening, our body can maintain and also repair muscle mass in general, and also decrease belly fat. Sleep also helps us consolidate our memory and has the ability to literally change the structure of our brain by providing a wash of cerebral— this is how you spell it, cerebrospinal fluid that removes the damaging molecules associated with neurodegeneration. It's huge for someone who is predisposed. And as I'm using the genetic report when I work with my clients, and this is a 200-page report, and one of the chapters, the pillars is all about mental health with a specific focus on Alzheimer's, dementia, and Parkinson's. So we can see whether or not someone is predisposed for those specific diseases, the prevention plan is definitely one that incorporates healthy sleeping hygiene for those specific clients who discover the fact that they are predisposed to get those diseases. If we move a little bit to the way our skin looks, because this is usually very interesting for women, right? Dark circles. I'm sure everyone knows about that. So dark circles are there. And if we move to the emotional and not just dark circles, of course, the level of hydration in our skin is changing and also the glow we all want, right, is not there the next day. And there is another very interesting thing happening, and this has to do with our emotional health and the way we interact with other people, the way we interact with our kids as parents or key relationships in general in our life, right? We snap at people. We are not nice when we don't sleep enough. Work productivity and our level of productivity declines definitely. Our level of cortisol, a stress hormone, is a key hormone when it comes to stress, is higher when we don't get the right amount of sleep. And that makes us eat more and also store more belly fat. The next thing happening in our body is the fact that our thyroid slows down when we don't get enough sleep, and then insulin doesn't work the same or as well as before. So all these changes are important. We are not always aware about the way our hormones become unbalanced the moment we don't sleep enough or we skip some hours of sleep. So I think it's important to remember the fact that timing our sleep and also prioritizing sleep is important. So what do we get when we sleep enough, right? What are the juicy things we get? First, skin health, a more youthful appearance, a more rested appearance, if I can call it like that, emotional regeneration and better relationships. I just mentioned the fact that we snap at people and we are cranky and we are not the same. We are not ourselves. I like to say this to my clients. Then there is a decreased risk of stroke. And this is coming out from studies and also cardiovascular disease. Fewer accidents. I don't know if you are aware, most accidents happened, big accidents happened in history. They were associated with someone who was in charge with a specific task and the person was sleep deprived. Most of them happened around 4 in the morning, which is interesting because that's when we get the second injection of melatonin, right? So of course we become more sleepy because that's the sleep hormone. So most accidents happen around 4:00 AM or 5:00 in the morning. Lower levels of inflammation. We speak more and more about inflammation. We like to call it silent inflammation. This is the chronic inflammation and it's called silent Also because we are not aware of that necessarily, unless we don't do— there are specific ways we can identify that. And inflammation is the type of condition, if I can call it like that, that triggers so many diseases in our body. And we want to keep that as low as possible. And I oftentimes talk about the impact of whites. I like to call them whites and the whites are sugar, dairy products, white flour, and alcohol. The more we consume those, the higher the level of chronic inflammation in our body. What's going on the plate is definitely very important as well, along with sleep. So I would say if we would need to prioritize two health factors in order to age slowly and to do age prevention, these two, I would start with these two and then with lotions and potions and minimally invasive procedures and There are so many things available on the market, but the fundamental factors are definitely diet and then sleep, or I would place them at the same level. I wouldn't say sleep is the second. I would say they are on the same, definitely they have the same importance. Our immune system is also triggered when we don't sleep enough. So when we spend the right amount of hours and also the quality of our sleep is right, is high, our immune system is definitely in the right place. Lower risk of cancer and infection is also on the list. Our hormones are balanced, more balanced when we sleep. And then we have a faster rate of weight loss. I mentioned this earlier. One of the interesting things happening when we don't sleep, we lose our brain glucose, a significant percentage of glucose, and our body next day, and this is something that everyone can check. Next day after, I don't know, skipping a few hours of sleep, we are prone to consume more junk food and more sugar. And the reason for that is definitely our brain's wish, if you want, or desire to put back the glucose. So it's interesting to see how we behave the next day, because lots of things are so different. The way we feel, the way we react in conversations and in certain relationships, and then also of how we behave around food, right? Alzheimer's— there are studies, important studies showing the fact that there is a lower risk of Alzheimer's disease and cognitive decline in general, better memory, longevity overall, stronger bones. So the list is so long. I don't have enough words to persuade everyone to prioritize sleep. It's so important.

So what were some of the things that you did that you felt really made an impact on your energy?

Great question, Dana, as well. And obviously it's personalized, everyone's going to be a little bit different as well. And I think that, and exactly as you said, women tend to be like, as long as everyone else is fine around me, I'll be fine. But it's relearning, and for me this was the case, to actually check in and be like, how am I? And not just from an emotional point of view, but like, how is my body? Am I exhausted? What do I need? And being better at self-care and self-love, which was something that I definitely wasn't good at, and I've learned the importance of it. And I'm not in a good place, how am I supposed to be in service to others? So it's paying attention to that as well. So some of the strategies that have really helped me is starting off with a morning priming session. I get up a little bit before the kids do as well, just because as soon as they're up, it's a whole nother level of intensity. And just to have that time to myself. And I start off with having daylight exposure. I live part of the year in London, sometimes in Florida where there's more sunshine, but try to get that daylight exposure. And I do a little sort of gratitude practice. And as I'm sure you've shared with your listeners as well, there's so many studies that show the power of gratitude and just getting into that positive vibration. And it's literally 2 minutes with the sun on my face. I did it this morning as well. It was beautiful. The sun's out again and just focusing on things. And it's not just saying I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for that, but it's actually feeling gratitude. So I really implore people to understand the difference of, oh, I'm grateful for my life. I'm grateful for my bed. I'm so grateful that my heart is beating every day. I don't even think about it. Like, I have a nice bed to sleep in. I have two children who are healthy and happy. Whatever it is, I'm happy for a new pen that I got, whatever it is that it can be. It doesn't need to be something super profound, but to really feel that gratitude practice. So that already sets you up in a great way. For me, I have low blood pressure and I found also for cognition and different benefits around that. BDNF. What I like to do is I have a Peloton at home, which I got during COVID when gyms were closed and things like that as well. And I'll just do, even if it's a short 15-minute session with music that I like, you can program your thing and I do some weights and movement as well. And then I do a morning priming session, which is a mixture of qigong. So really getting into the body, some breathwork, some meditation, and visualization as well. And obviously there's tons of studies that show the power of this, of really visualizing your day, seeing things as done, like you've actually accomplished it, because you're rewiring your brain to, oh, I don't know if I can achieve this, to it's actually been done. You can even write it down, which is really powerful. And again, circling back to the gratitude and things that you're looking forward to, then it's into the shower. And depending on how brave I am, at the beginning it was literally putting the shower cold at the very end and sort of one hand or the other, but having some sort of cold shower if it's even 4 minutes or longer as well. It's good for your hair. It's good for your skin. But if you're in your head with stress, cold water will definitely get you into your body and like focusing on the present moment like nothing else. So that's really powerful as well. And so that's just a little morning practice that I have. And typically I'll get that sort of 90 to 98% of my days, but I really notice the difference if I don't have that. So that's just a little kind of sneak peek into that, that part of my morning routine. But I think other big game changers is really taking sleep seriously and not just seriously, but getting that quality sleep and really tweaking things, making sure it's a dark room. I have light sensitivity, the blackout curtains, that the temperature is also okay. I'm a cozy person. I can have warm temperatures. I know now the importance of a colder room and that sort of sleep hygiene around that. And obviously it starts with the evening routine as well. So the lack of blue lights and there's so many things you can do. There's the flux f.lux, free software you can download on your laptop to just change it to a warm light versus the blue lights, avoiding screens, avoiding news, television, things like this as well around bedtime. A long answer to a short question, but those are some of the things that really helped me set up the day to, to win. Obviously nutrition, exercise I had been doing, but I made some alterations as well. And maybe just one point on exercise. So my sort of A-type personality was very much, I had to do an hour of spinning and then I did an hour of some sort of weight training, 2 hours, like overkilling myself. Cortisol, adrenals maxed out, etc. And realizing that's not just the way you need to do things. Like, you can do it in a softer way and your body will thank you as well. So that was also a revelation that it wasn't just about push, push, but actually like to be a bit more calm and centered. I had a daily meditation practice before, but it just took it to another level and having that as a routine as well.

So our mindset strategy number 4 is around limiting beliefs. And are limiting beliefs and fears holding you back? So we touched a little bit on this before, but it's really just to bring light to the awareness around limiting beliefs and how to face fears and how to reframe things.

How to face fears.

If you think of fear this way, as what you want, what you desire is at the other side of fear. So your ego is typically the fear that's holding you back. I don't know, maybe it's you've started a new business and you have to cold call people, like the fear of that, like how the shame, the embarrassment, like we build up all of these scenarios in our heads. But like, how could you reframe that? Be like, what the product or service that you're launching with your new business, I am there to like really help these people who are struggling with a problem. So I'm actually sales as a service, for example, right? So I'm really here to help the person and resolve their problem. How can you reframe something that you are fearing to do it in a different way. And whatever that fear may be, understanding, is it coming from a childhood limiting belief? Like really dig into, sit with it, be like, why am I so— it might be fear of flying or whatever it may be, public speaking. Where is that fear coming from? And then how can you reframe it in a way that if you're public speaking, for example, you have to go up on stage, you've got this amazing invitation to speak in public, maybe make it about serving the people who need to hear your message. And not about yourself. That shifts that, shifts that focus as well. Knowing that what's keeping you from being the best version of you are typically these limiting beliefs made up in your mind and childhood. And that there are strategies like the reframing that will allow you to step into the new you, step into the stronger, faster, better, whatever you want to call it, you really enjoy life at a whole nother level.

Yeah. I love that. That's so key. This is, I get all passionate around all this kind of topic because I immediately go to what are we thinking? And Claudia, have you ever heard that saying, we are what we eat?

Of course. Yeah.

Which is a depressing one. It's a reality, really. I think.

Yeah.

But I think the reality is really much more, if this makes anybody feel better, we are what we think.

Yeah.

And I just think it's incredibly fascinating just to reflect on all the negative emotions that we as humans share. The anger, the jealousy, the pride, the envy, frustration, sadness, but they're all rooted where and what we're thinking about, right?

Yeah.

And so to your point, so this awareness that you're speaking of is, it's all about our thoughts. It's so crucial. It's the first step in taking responsibility for what we're choosing to think. We often believe it's all the things outside of us or the circumstances, right, in our lives that dictate our feelings and reactions. And this is a bitter truth pill to swallow, but it's always our thoughts that we've chosen to think that are causing our emotional response. People don't really like to hear that one, but it's really true. And, but this better than most, Claudia, neuroscientists have been able to demonstrate that every thought we have is sending signals, electrical signals throughout our brains affecting every cell in our body. It's affecting our sleep, our digestion, chemical makeup of our blood, right? Yeah.

The fight or flight pattern as well. So you could be living in this high stress state where you assume that every horn that honks is someone like honking at you, whatever it may be, because you're in this hugely stressed way, cuz you're interpreting it as that everyone is against you and the world is against you and I have to survive this day. Versus like today is a gift and like I get to explore. Shift that.

Shift out of that.

Yes.

Exactly.

And I just think it's important too that people understand how many thoughts we actually have flying through our minds. I think research is a little confused on this. They, whatever you read, it's somewhere between 6,000 and 50,000 thoughts that we have a day.

A lot.

Which is a lot. And I collapse the 6,000 cause I'm pretty sure I've already had 6,000 by breakfast. But I guess it just depends on our brains. But if we really think that through, that's really either really good news or bad news because every thought we're having, right, is either moving us towards our potential or away from it. Yes. Every thought we have either is moving us, I believe, towards our God-given potential or away from it. There's this quote by Tommy Newberry that kind of blew my mind when I heard it. I had to like, what? But he said, he wrote, the secret conversations that you hold in the privacy of your own mind are shaping your destiny little by little. So I think we really need to think about that one and ask ourselves, where are we mentally shining our spotlight currently?

Is it that negative self-talk or is it that being your best cheerleader and being like, okay, I've had a trip up today, but I got this. I can totally do this. And who can I reach out to, whatever, to help me? Like I'm solution-oriented. And I got this. Like I can—

And it's beautiful when we catch ourselves, isn't it? It feels great. You're like, oh, look at me go down the rabbit hole.

Exactly. No, I'm smarter than that.

I am smarter.

I love it.

No, but I always say, turn your spotlight on your future self. I encourage people to consider their future self in 5 to 10 years from now. Who have you become? What have you created? Get excited about that. I don't know. We will have to have another conversation sometime around the future self. I love to take my clients on a journey of letter writing to, as to what their future self would say to them right now, give them advice.

Can you expand a bit on that just for my audience as well?

I love the idea of that.

Yes.

It's this idea that our future self has the wisdom. So it's actually saying we actually, if we can listen long enough to our future self, they're going to give us the advice that we know intuitively already, but we haven't quite accessed. So if you take the time, as you say, put pen to paper, And think of yourself 10 years from now. And I'm saying, dear Leanne, I know that you will have achieved this dream. You have, you've been working hard and now you're at a place where, and you get such marvelous advice when you think of yourself in a future place. It's really a lot of fun.

I really love that. And also just what immediately comes up is so many things then get put into perspective and things that you think are like a big deal or a big decision, you realize like in 10 years' time, I'm going to look back at, will I even remember this as well? So I had what some people call like the rocking chair test, right? So like when I'm 95, looking back, am I going to be like proud that I stepped out of my comfort zone and did this? Or am I going to look back and be like, oh, I missed opportunity. And so I want to be doing the things where I'm like, oh cool, I did that. And oh yeah, I was brave enough to do that. And oh my gosh, that was super uncomfortable, but I did it and I loved it. And that was amazing as well. I've had a few experiences in my life and each and every one of them have just confirmed the more discomfort it was to actually go and do it, the bigger the upside, if you will.

Exactly. And isn't it interesting too? It's something that we're tapping back into that we were so good at as children, but when we're writing from our future selves, we're, we're using your imaginations again. And we're also our intuition and our, we're being our best encouragers. It's fascinating. We're employing a lot of different things that are very helpful to us.

I love that.

Bringing the imagination back.

Yeah. I'd love to hear your opinion on the keto diet. And what your members are also seeing. Obviously from blood glucose spiking level, that should not be the case, but are there different effects? What are you seeing around your members with who are on the keto diet?

I think keto diet could be different for different people, especially research has shown that women respond to keto diets different than men. So I think there are modified keto diets that accounts for some of this. I think in certain phases of cycle, you may need more carbohydrates for cycling women. So I think it's important to take the context into consideration for keto diets. So it may work really well for some people and not so well for others. So I think just knowing that, again, there's no one-size-fits-all is really important. For the people that it does work for, it could be quite powerful. I've experimented with it for a while, and I find that, A, I don't need as much sleep, so my body's a lot more tuned to being able to deal with less sleep. My energy levels are a lot higher. I find that I don't have crashes or that hangry feeling that we all get when we're really hungry and we don't eat for a while. Like, I don't get that anymore. The head nods are completely gone because you don't have these rollercoaster of energy changes. So basically keto diet, what it does, it changes your fuel source from glucose to fat. And so what that does is if you think about, we all carry around 100,000 to 200,000 calories worth of fat. Even if we're slim, right? So you take somebody that let's say is 150 pounds. Well, let's just take an average person, right? Average slim person. And you say that their body fat levels are 10 to 15%. So they're carrying anywhere between 15 to 20 pounds of fat. And so each pound of fat is about 4,000 calories. So a slim person is carrying something like 60,000 to 80,000 calories in fat, and then you can go up from there. Some people maybe carry 200,000. So there's no shortage of energy in our body. It's just your body knowing how to use it. And so when you switch to a ketogenic diet, your body learns to use fat as a fuel source directly instead of glucose as an energy source. And because of that, you have this constant energy resource that's available that's decoupled from eating.. And so what that does is obviously you're burning that fat and then when you eat it, you obviously replenish it, but you have a very stable energy source where you don't do this, which means that your energy's constant. You don't have these moments of hangry. Mm-hmm. And it also helps with sleep. I think for the people that works, it works. And there are many types of ketogenic diets. There is the really strict one that keeps the carbohydrates to really low levels and is very hard to maintain. And there's a modified version where you try to avoid added sugars, but you could have starches, complex carbs as part of your meal and also as part of a mixed meal. And if you build an exercise where you're consuming that carbohydrates as well, it creates a balance where you can actually have the best of both worlds where you can have the stable energy of ketogenic diet but not have to be so strict so that you can't maintain it. So I think the, I think that's constant between diets is do the thing that you can do for a long time and you're not just cycling in and out because the cycling in and out inevitably leads to ups and downs and people being in there, in it for a month, but killing themselves and then out of it for 9 months because they're just trying to recover from that.

And then they have the spike in the wrong direction.

Exactly.

So I think ketogenic diets, I think the, the net of it, at least from my perspective, it's different for different people. And then do the thing. That you can sustain, because if you don't sustain it, then you're just going to go through the roller coaster and you're just going to defeat yourself.

I think that's a really valid point. And I think also because it's such a high-fat diet that if you have too many carbohydrates or even too much protein, I think people don't realize that as well, that you're just, you're not in ketosis and you're just consuming a lot of fat as well. So it's almost binary, like a very strict one as well. But I think, yeah, if you can find that balance and for different people to try different things also. So I'd love to kick off just digging into female aging, fertility, and reproductive aging specifically. Can you expand a little bit why this is your area of specialty and what is it that women need to know about this area?

Absolutely.

That's quite a, that's quite a quote to kick off with. To be clear, that's not my work. That is the results of several studies that we're looking at correlations between reproductive span. So that's the age at which a woman goes through menopause and her overall lifespan. Now, I would say that those are average numbers. And so I always want to back that up by, by telling women that even if you go through an early menopause, that doesn't necessarily mean that you're doomed to live a short life. In general, female reproductive biology is really incredibly distinct and stochastic and variable at the level of the individual. So what we're talking about here are averages, just to, of course, to be clear.

I work on—

I am a neuroscientist, but I work on understanding how the brain communicates with the rest of the body and how that changes during aging. And that led us to reproductive aging, thinking about how the brain talks to ovaries and the uterus and other reproductive organs. And the reason I I find this area of science so compelling is because we don't know that much about it. So this is an area of biology that has really been long neglected. And if you don't know anything about ovaries, and to be honest, I didn't know that much about ovarian function until 5-ish years ago, even though I happen to own a pair. If you don't know that much about ovaries, they're fascinating.

Share with the audience why they're so important above and beyond just pure reproduction.

Yeah, there's so much to understand about them. The first thing to know is that they're incredibly complex, right? Unlike any other organ in the body, they go through this like dramatic dynamic remodeling every single month during adulthood. Every single cycle that a woman goes through, there's this huge macroscopic dynamic remodeling of the tissue that happens. And so they're incredibly dynamic, but they're also the first system in the body to age. So ovaries are essentially aging at something like 2.5 times the rate of other tissues. And what that means in practice is that a woman's ovaries are already showing overt signs of aging in late 20s, early 30s, which is when most of the other organs in a woman's body are functioning perfectly, almost at peak performance. And so that comes as a shock to a lot of women. And we, we think that if we can understand why ovaries are aging prematurely, that will have direct implications on understanding aging in the rest of the body. There's, there's a misconception, I think, that, that women somehow have the ability to rejuvenate their ovaries or extend their fertility by preserving eggs, by taking reproductive hormonal birth control. And that's just not true. So women are born with all the eggs they're ever going to have. Somewhere around 26 weeks of gestation, a female human has about 6 or 7 million eggs in her ovary. By the time she's born, that number drops to about a million. By the time she goes through puberty, that number is somewhere between 300,000 and 400,000. And then once she starts cycling, every single month that she ovulates, she's going to lose about 1,000 eggs every single month. And so those numbers drop. And it's not just the numbers, but also the quality of the eggs changes and goes down with age during adulthood until somewhere in her 40s or 50s, she will essentially run out of eggs. And her ovaries will stop working and she will go through menopause. And menopause is a funny thing. It's a single day. We often, when we're talking about menopausal symptoms, we're talking about either perimenopause, so before menopause, or postmenopause, after menopause. Menopause itself is just the day on which a woman has not been, has not had a period for 12 months. So it's just a single day in time. Ovaries aren't doing a lot things that are important for health. I think most women are pretty familiar with the consequences of ovarian aging on fertility. Not as many women are familiar with the consequences of ovarian aging on overall health. So ovaries are also secreting a whole cocktail of different chemicals and hormones that are important for general health.

Why would you say Aerofit was originally developed, and can you talk a little bit about what the Aerofit device can do? And for those people watching, so I have been able to— I've had the pleasure of testing it, and honestly, Honestly, after even just a few sessions, I noticed a huge difference. If I went for a run, it was almost effortless, whereas before I'd have breathing issues. And I've actually retrained the ability from my belly, if you will, to actually move while I breathe instead of my lovely upper shoulders movements that weren't very effective before. So yeah. Can you share a little bit for us?

Yeah, gladly. So our device was actually founded by a Danish company called Ambu. Which is a health tech company, and they developed it to help with COPD and asthma and other pulmonary issues. But our CEO Christian, he actually found this device and wanted to practice it. I use it to help practice singing. So he was a classical singer filling audiences and filling the whole halls with his voice. Wow. And he wanted to pursue this a wee bit more and More air coming in, bigger lung capacity, you can sing notes bigger, longer. And the device itself was very big and it required Christian to be there while training them. So not a very practical device. And alongside this, his sons were very competitive swimmers and went to the Nordic swimming championships. And the eldest actually went with the hope of qualifying for one final. And after training with Airofit for just 3 months, not Airofit as we know and love today, but the original device, he came back with 7 gold medals.

Wow.

And on the back end of that, actually obtained a scholarship to a university in America. So full ride scholarship just from breathing through what was then the original Aerofit. Uh-huh. And Christian, being the ambitious man he is, started investing all of his money, all of his friends' money, and developing the device smaller. But one thing he noticed is he still had to be there to explain how to use the device. Hence, we now have an application which will actually guide you through all of these exercises. So it went from a small idea and just grew in his head and yeah, being ambitious and wanting to change the world, he actually set off on that adventure and I believe he has done so.

Completely. What an ROI, I think, for all parents out there listening and ambitions, sport ambitions for their children. And I think the beauty of it is that you're not adding any chemicals, you're not doing anything unnatural. You're just training what's naturally there and just improving it and improving the oxygenation and exhaling of carbon dioxide as well. So really phenomenal. Yeah, exactly. And for people wondering, what is the cadence? What is the frequency you recommend for using it depending on what I guess the use case is, right? But is this like a daily device or is it a few times a week? What would you typically recommend?

We generally recommend to begin with every day, so it's only a 5 to 10 minute Exercise. So that's the really cool thing about our device. It actually gives you your daily recommendation. So within the app, it'll tell you what you're doing. 5 to 10 minutes a day. And then after a 6-week period, you kind of plateau a wee bit. Either you can increase the duration or you can just decrease the frequency. So I, for one, I train at the moment, I've become a wee bit slack and I only train about 5 days a week. Okay, but I've got my level, and then when I do my lung test, if I notice a decrease, I just jump back onto 7 days. So our recommendation is 7 days a week, but it's only 5 to 10 minutes. There was a lady I was talking to in London, and she uses it every day watching Coronation Street. So in the ad break, we just use the Aerofit instead of going to go make a cup of tea, or instead of going to go reach for more cookies, she does something for her health. And she was adamant that Coronation Street saved her life, but I think it may have been us, but that's a great idea as well.

Exactly. Some, or even people watching Netflix or something like that. It's a great time. Exactly. Just sitting there.

Yeah.

What are some of the learnings or insights that the Aerofit clients that you work with have found the most valuable?

That they can change their breathing no matter how old they are. In 5 to 10 minutes, they actually see massive benefits and No matter your starting point, you can always increase something. So whether that is the inhalation or exhalation strength or the accessible lung capacity, the ability to open your lungs, everybody can get something out of training their breathwork because everybody breathes. So if I can better at it, yeah.

So that's really helpful.

Yeah.

And let's talk about the respiratory muscle training, right? So you were saying that it's beneficial not only for athletes. How long would you say it takes also to start noticing, would you, a difference basically for breathing?

As you mentioned with your own training, you have seen results very rapidly. Yeah, we had a study from a university in England that used a 6-week intervention with the Airofit, and they found on an average a 30% increase in the thickness of their diaphragm. So the main 30%, and that is just because it is such an undertrained muscle. You wouldn't see the— so if you train for another 8 weeks or 6 weeks, you wouldn't see that 30% increase, but you can train your biceps or quads and get 30% bigger in 6 weeks. That's phenomenal.

And this is men and women. It's the same.

Okay.

Wow.

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