Bone Health Lies & What You Can Do Now to Age Stronger with Debi Robinson | Heather Aardema

So what in the world does— what's the connection between phones and clutter? I know there's a connection. What would you say it is?

Well, you know, when you and I were speaking, I'm super intrigued by your work because I think clutter is such an underestimated, unknown thing until you actually start to focus on it. And that's what your work does. And it really helps people remove clutter. And once you do, you feel this freedom from that, right? So when you and I were discussing, like, you brought up the word clutter, and when I thought of Bones, what I do, I thought of the clutter component of Bones a couple of different ways. Like, what are the things in our body that contributes to bone loss? So if I'm gonna talk about physical clutter in the body, I'm thinking of things that are getting in the way of bones building and instead contributing to bone loss. And one of those would be, one of the root causes is, is not moving enough or appropriately. So then I think about the physical clutter. And when I think about clutter, one of the things I love to share and teach is clear your cobwebs. So that is like, I think about what is stuck or sticky or getting in the way in your body that you could remove to allow for more mobility and more freedom and more movement.

I love this idea of clearing the cobwebs. When we clear the cobwebs, how do we feel? What's, what's the benefit of clearing those cobwebs when it comes to bone health?

Well, let me tell you one thing about how I, how I thought about this. I was on a retreat at the Isle of Wight, which is the south tip of England. And I was out, we were doing a morning walk. We did yoga in the morning and then we were on a morning walk. And this lady said to me, she said, oh, doesn't this feel great? We're clearing the cobwebs. And I said, Are you referring to mental cobwebs or physical? And she goes, huh? And she didn't know. And so I thought about when you're talking about how does it make us feel? It depends. Like, what are we talking about? If you're doing the physical cobweb clearing, it means you can move more. So especially for those of us that are aging, meaning that we're out of our 30s. So we're in that category. Me, I'm actually a sexagenarian, just became a sexagenarian. Uh, which I love because, you know, here I am. So let me just love whatever it is, wherever I am. Uh, so when I think about clearing the cobwebs in my body, if it means that I can move more, I can move more freely, which means I can go on an African safari. It means I could play pickleball. It means I could play with— I don't have grandkids yet, but if I did, it means you could play with your grandkids and get down on the floor and get up up from the floor. So to me, clearing the cobwebs means that you clear the clutter and you allow for freedom of mobility, which then allows you to dance, run, hike, and all the things that we should and could do for the rest of our lives.

What do you think some of that clutter is in the body? Things like inflammation and— yeah, how do you see it? Yeah, how do you— what are those cobwebs?

Heather Aardema: If we use the word arthritis, right? We know that word arthritis. So what does that really mean? People say I have arthritis. So we have aches and pains and, you know, I teach live classes. So I see about 120 people a week. I've seen thousands over the years and you could see that there's less movement. So less movement. I could tell those people have more buildup, more, more clutter. So if you think about arthritis, we hear the word. Oh, I have arthritis. Almost like, I, it's okay that I'm not moving anymore because I have arthritis.

Right.

So it's like that, that diagnosis of whatever it is the doctor told you you had, and now you have it. So, okay, I have arthritis and I have aches and pains. Well, we could actually clear that. So arthritis is a buildup of minerals. Calcium is nature's band-aid. So calcium is a jagged, sharp mineral. And if it's in your joints, it's going to lead to pain. Calcium comes out of the bones, and 99% of our calcium is stored in our bones. There, that's a bank, the reservoir minerals. The calcium comes out of your bones when there's a need. If you're sedentary, sitting a lot, if you have poor posture, if you're not moving, you're going to get that need for buildup in those joints because it is, it is a Band-Aid. It's protecting you if you need protection, if, if something is happening in your body. So we could think of arthritis as the clutter of minerals that accumulated. And now we need to figure out why, so we can reverse that and free up that clutter. That's powerful.

Joint clutter. Yeah. Yeah. That's so powerful because then that means that there's actually agency, that this isn't something that you just have to succumb to, whether it's arthritis or other issues. And so talk to me. I want to hear a little bit about your story. And I also want to know when you realized that bone health is so much deeper than just aging. So often I hear, well, we get older, Heather, we get older. Those are words from my dad. And these things are just natural. You just expect them. And so tell us about your story and then Tell us about this deeper, this deeper understanding that you have.

Yeah, so I just turned 60 and usually we don't get a— the typical gold standard scan that we do for bone health is around age 65. That's when Medicare pays for it. So many women don't even find out that they have bone issues until then. My story is that in my forties, my favorite yoga teacher at the time, he pushed me too far and tore my hip joint. So my labrum tore in my hip, which led to instability in my hip and me having hip issues. So all, although that wasn't osteoporosis or osteopenia, it was me turning my eyeballs inward, going into my hip visually and wondering what the heck is happening in my hip, learning about the bones, about the pelvis, about the muscles that mobilize and stabilize the pelvis. I was also a yoga teacher at the time and then became a yoga therapist, which is even a deeper study. I wanted to understand this and know this and learn this. That injury eventually led to a surgery and that surgeon took too much bone off, which collapsed my hip joint. So the biggest area that we worry about when it comes to bone health, you know, once you get a diagnosis of osteoporosis or osteopenia, hip, the hip becomes such a big critical part because Heather, people die from hip fractures. I mean, that's the reality is that 25% of the women that fall die from a hip fracture. 25% go into a home to never come out and die within a year. And that once you get in the osteoporosis world, that becomes the biggest fear thing. So here I am with this hip, I'm learning all that I can. I'm actually visualizing my bones. Are they honeycomb inside? I did at the age of 50 have a baseline DEXA scan to look at my bones and I wasn't in osteoporosis, but something was, you know, I was kind of okay at that point. Hadn't gone through menopause, which is where the biggest decrease of bone density occurs is when we go through menopause. And so here I am, like, living honestly in my mind, in my hip, in my pelvis. And that's what made me want to learn more, know more.

What do you mean by that? I was living in my mind and my hip, my pelvis. Is it just leaning into that curiosity and wanting to know yourself better? What do you mean?

Well, when you have an issue in your life, it becomes your focus, right? It becomes everything you do. So I couldn't really walk. Well, by the time I had my surgery, 5 years after that tear, I couldn't walk. Like I would walk and my hip would be throbbing at night laying in bed. I couldn't sleep cuz my hip was throbbing. And so I knew there was something happening there. I just didn't know what it looked like. And then I had an MRI. Well, actually the MRA, when you do it, when you do an MRI of a joint, it's called an MRA cuz it's an arthroscope cuz your joints are arth is the name there. So I had that with Di and we found out what it was. Um, and so when I say I was living in my mind, my hip wasn't stable. I was cautious. Tensive. I didn't know if I was doing damage. I actually used to think that my, the top of my hip would break off. Like, I felt super fragile and breakable, which is exactly what women feel like when they get a diagnosis of osteoporosis or osteopenia. They feel fragile and breakable. They stop moving because they feel so fragile. I call it scared still. They become scared still. And when you don't move, you lose more, which happened to me. I didn't move as much. Because I was worried. I thought the top of my leg is gonna break off. And then I would try to visualize, where will I be? Will it hurt? Will I be on the ground? Will I be able to get up? Will I be screaming? Like, I used to think that. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I think this is probably actually common to have these kinds of thoughts, right? They're common because I don't think we're really given many options when we have a diagnosis like that. But you know that there are options. You know that this is not just an age thing or a calcium thing. And so tell us about that. Because somebody said to me the other day, I was talking on the phone and she said, "Ugh, you know, I've been diagnosed with both, you know, and I guess I just have to go on the— is it Fosamax? I'm not even sure what it's called." Yeah. Foxamax. So this person feels helpless and feels like there really isn't anything she can do to help her situation out. But I think that's not true.

It's 100% not true. And that is why I do what I do. That's my mission to globally change the way we diagnose, manage, and treat bone health. We have a broken bone healthcare system, and it all started in the '90s with big pharma and healthcare getting together. There was a company that had a drug called Fosamax there that was Merck that had that. And there was a machine, an X-ray that was being developed, and Merck helped to fund that X-ray machine. That X-ray machine categorized almost 50% of the women over age 50 into two categories: osteoporosis or osteopenia. Now, Merck had this huge population to market to, and they did. And so we kind of bought into— the gynecologist at the time, the endocrinologist at the time— what did we buy into? We bought into osteoporosis, bone loss is progressive degenerative disease or condition, and then 50% of the women are gonna be in that category. And oh, We have a pill for it. Well, unfortunately they started to learn that those pills don't work. They, they actually create, they can contribute to fractures. They could break down the jawbone or they could create spontaneous femur fractures. And so, and then the Women's Health Initiative in 2002 took away women's hormones, which was another bone protective measure that we had. So the unfortunate story that we've been told, we were misguided and misled since the 1990s when it comes to bone health. And it was diag, it was scan with a DEXA scan. Diagnose and treat. And the only tool in the toolbox were medications. Then they started to recommend calcium supplements and vitamin D. Calcium supplementation in excess actually can contribute to heart attacks. So they started to pull away a little bit from that. So we actually have a completely wrong system from managing women's bone health. It is so completely backwards. And that's why I do what I do, is to empower women to take control of their bone health naturally.

You mentioned briefly the Women's Health Initiative and that, that was also very misleading and misguided. I just wanted to put that in there in case somebody hadn't heard of it before.

Yeah, the Women's Health Initiative took hormones away. And for those of us— I'm 60, but women in their 70s and their 80s, people born in the '40s, '50s, '60s— what happened is when the Women's Health Initiative in 2002, they were doing hormone replacement. The problem is they were doing the wrong things. They were giving estrogen by mouth and they were giving the wrong form of progesterone. So they actually were giving the wrong hormones in the wrong way. So the whole thing was not good and they were showing higher incidence of cancer or stroke. So in 2002, bam, when that— they started the study, but when they started to see that cancer or stroke rate went up, they pulled the study, stopped. And so all the gynecologists started taking their women off of hormones. And, and what the gynecologist I spoke to during those days told me then their ladies started fracturing, but there wasn't anything they could do. So the Women's Health Initiative took away women's hormones. I grew up thinking it caused cancer and bone crows. However, that study has now been debunked. It was not peer-reviewed. There's a lot of problems. And in women's health, there's so many fantastic female physicians leading the charge to change women's, uh, health. And so in 2025, in November, they removed the black box warning on hormone therapy. And hormone therapy is one of the best things that can be done to support bone health.

Oh, here, here. I agree. I'm on HRT, and I'm so grateful that I have it accessible. And I just feel so sad that my mom's generation, they, you know, they did not have it, and they went through a lot because they did not have that. And you're right, so many issues with, with the study. The population wasn't very healthy, so many kinds of issues there. So you are here now, and you're like, okay, All right. You see what's going wrong. Where do we start? Where do we go from if, if there are things that we can actually do?

Okay. So just want to say one thing. You said HRT, but it's really BHRT. The hormones we give are bioidentical hormones, are exact same hormones our body makes. So BHRT is the term to use. So there's that. So as you're speaking, you know what I'm thinking? If I'm going to change bone health globally, which I'm doing, and am doing. If I'm going to change this, you know what I need to do? I need to clear up the clutter of misinformation and misguided and the old story that we grew up in that was controlled by Big Pharma, big healthcare, and really male-driven for the most part. I need to clear up the clutter of the story that we thought and reframe with new information. Out with the old, in with the new. That is what we need to do, Heather. And that is what I'm doing.

Okay. So pretend you're me and you're on the phone with a loved person and she's saying, okay, you know, I've been diagnosed and there's nothing else for me but to go on Fosamax. What would you say?

Well, I talk to you every day. I talk to Heather, Heather, and Heather and Heather, because that's who I meet. I meet women who are scared still, women who don't know what to do, women who have been either belittled, bullied, or pressured by their doctor. Because unfortunately, if you're going to go to the traditional medical model broken system that we have, you're going to get a DEXA scan. If you are petite and you have low BMI, you're on the petite side, Heather, you're going to be diagnosed with osteoporosis because the DEXA scan misdiagnoses petite women or women with low BMI because you do have smaller bones and it's an X-ray. So your bones are going to capture less light because there's less bones to capture, right? Doesn't mean that they're fragile and breakable. And then we've, we've put the attachment to whatever that finding is, the T-score, the bone density, as your fracture risk, which it isn't. And it just came out in 2026 that the T-score does not determine your fracture risk. So I have to clear up the clutter and the misinformation. That's a big part of, of what to do. And then for those women sitting in the office, might be you, might be your listeners, They're naturally minded. They don't want the injection, they don't want the pills. And those things, we, we only go on 'em for a short period of time because they lose their efficacy or they start to negatively affect your kidneys and your liver. And so then you have to go to the next one or the next one, or you do an artificial building of bone. You build fake bone and you now need to bring in the, the drug that stops that fake bone loss with a fake bone loss drug. That's all. It doesn't even build real structural bone, which is the kicker of it all. So when I have I have Heather sitting in front of me that is naturally minded and said, here's what my DEXA scan said, what do I do? So I have to first put her mind to ease, share the information that I learned from orthopedic surgeons. So I learned from orthopedic surgeons, people that are doing the surgeries that are touching the bones, that see not correlation between what that scan tells them and what they actually see. So I put their minds to ease and then I say, okay, here's what you could do. There are 3 areas that, that major areas that come into our body that lead to stress. You have musculoskeletal. So this is the physical movement piece. This is how do you move to create stronger muscles, stronger bones. And then there's the biochemical, physiological, or metabolic, which is all about supplementation and diet. There is a diet to support bone building, and there is a diet that contributes to bone dissolving. So what does that look like? And then there's a mental-emotional layer. Stress, stress, stress will dissolve your bones quicker than anything else. And if you don't clear the mental clutter of stress, of emotions, of whatever you're carrying around, right? We don't even see that. We don't see that. I mean, it's so weird. I don't even think of the word clutter as much, yet all of this is clutter. If we clear the clutter of what we're carrying around mentally and emotionally from this lifetime or lifetimes before, from your grandmother, your great-grandmother, then You're gonna have that riding on your back, and that is actually gonna be dissolving your bones in the background. So what are you thinking every day and how do you manage those thoughts? What are you eating? What could you eat or not eat? And how are you moving? Those are the 3, like, main areas that I would work with someone on to naturally do what they need to do to support their bone health.

I would love to explore all 3. Let's, let's start with the movement, because at the very beginning of this conversation, you talked about not moving or improperly moving, and I'm like, what is is improperly moving. I don't know. So let's start with movement and then go to the, the, um, what we're eating, what we're consuming, and then the stress management.

Okay. So when it comes to movement, I first want to say musculoskeletal. Let's start with joint alignment and posture. If you are not aligned properly, half of all the fractures are in the spine and they're in the front of the spine. So head forward, poor posture is going to lead to fractures. And so posture and postural awareness becomes so critical. And, you know, you don't have to go to the gym, pump iron to have strong bones. You don't.

So I'm so glad. I'm so glad.

Right. I don't do it from a musculoskeletal perspective. First, I like to talk about spinal health, joint alignment, and posture. And so I do a lot of posture work. One of the chair— one of the classes I teach every week is in a chair. I have people in there that, you know, they hear the word yoga and they're like, I'm not flexible, I can't get on the ground. So no, I do chair work. And when you brought up that word clutter, I started to think about, you know, there's clutter physically from an arthritis perspective that we spoke about, but we also have protection. So if you have your posture in a slouched position, your head is forward and you're putting all this pressure, what happens is when your spine is off alignment, if it's off alignment, your bones need to lay down more surface area the vertebra above to have a place to rest. So you've heard of the word bone spurs, right? We all hear the word bone spurs because we get them. Maybe those are protection. That's your body laying down bone tissue, not structural bone tissue, but extra bone tissue. So you lay down this bone tissue. Well, before it becomes bone, it actually looks like cobwebs, to be honest. So clearing the cobwebs, it looks like cobwebs in the tissue. So So as the calcium is coming out of the bones for protection, say you're out of alignment and your, your body's starting to bring calcium to protect, at some point it calcifies, it becomes hard. So if you see someone that's like Mr. Magoo with a super rounded posture, there might be a part of that calcification in the spine that you can't actually get. But for those of us that haven't yet calcified, which is most of us, let's keep ourselves open. Let's keep ourselves fluid. So is there a visual part to this podcast or is it just audio?

No, it's both.

Okay. So let's do a little visual thing that I love that feels amazing for all of us. We could do it. Take your hands on your shoulders. So people know, they hear the word rotator cuff. Sometimes people call it a rotator cup, but it's a cuff. It's actually 4 tendons that actually holds the humerus bone in the socket. The shoulder is a ball in a socket. It's a very shallow set joint, but if you take your, your your— you make your own rotator cuff and you just bring your elbows up on the inhale and down on the exhale. Up on the inhale, down on the exhale. Now, if you imagine that you're up against a wall and you push your head back, like the center of your head touches the wall, I want your elbows to slide up and down the wall. You want to be as close to the sides as possible. You are clearing the cobwebs from your shoulder blades. Your shoulder blades are actually going out and back down, like your wings are opening and coming back to center. This action here is clearing the cobwebs in your shoulders. So freeing up your wings. And we could even take that into crazy metaphorical places. Where do you still wanna fly? What do you still wanna see?

Right?

So really, it really matters, Heather. It's not just like weird, fluffy, let's put in words that mean things. But if you get stuck, 'cause I see it, I work with it, I've seen thousands of people. If you get stuck and immobile, your life becomes very very small. I was living in a small box. Okay, now let's go down. Bring your elbows towards me and then push your elbows towards me, which is going to separate your shoulder blades in the back, stretching your rhomboids, muscles that actually bring them together. Now let your chin go up with your elbows to the sky. Keep your teeth together. Feel that stretch in the front of the jaw, front of the neck, opening up the throat. And then reach your elbows up, out, back. Start your exhale, bring your chin to your chest, bring your elbows down, chin comes straight down towards your chest. Elbows are down. Now bring your elbows forward as you start your inhale. Elbows up, elbows out. That's your inhale. As you go down, you start exhale back and down. And if you close your eyes, inhale up, out, around, back.

I get— that felt so amazing. And what was, what was so important is that you said keep your teeth together. It felt such a powerful stretch right here. I've never felt that before.

Because Heather Aardema, our head, we have 3 scoops of ice cream. So if I'm going to talk about an alignment principle, when I talk about the musculoskeletal component of breakdown, you're a 3-scoop ice cream cone. Your legs are the cone. It's a sugar cone. It's gluten-free and low sugar because we will talk about that from a diet perspective.

Yes.

Your pelvis is scoop number 1. Your rib cage is scoop number 2, and your head is scoop number 3. Scoop number 3, they need to be aligned just like an ice cream cone. If you had an ice cream cone and scoop 3 starts to go forward, what happens? It's going to slide right on off.

Okay.

So scoop number 3, the muscles that hold scoop number 3 are all of these neck muscles attached to the base of your skull, base of your jawbone, and the top of your, your rib cage. So right now, what we just did with teeth together, we went into spinal extension in your cervical spine. These muscles get tight. Also stress, we clench. There's a whole subconscious component of what happens to the jaw. And when we sit a lot, this whole area fascially is connected to pelvic floor. So talking about an upright spine posture, bone health, spinal health, critical. So those little things right there. So I gave you a couple. I gave you 3 scoop ice cream. You're gonna keep— where's your 3rd scoop? Oh, where's your 3rd scoop? Don't let it be forward. Put it back where it belongs. Put stack your, your scoops. That's one piece. The other one was to make your rotator cuff and go up and down so that you're— and you're stretching here, all the musculature and all the tissue underneath the arms. Lots of lymphatic vessels here. So you're starting to get lymph flowing. That's gonna be clearing that internal environment. Important for hormones, important for fat-soluble vitamins moving around and immune function, which— oh my gosh, really? We're doing all that? Yeah. Oh my gosh, we are. Okay. And then the forward, up, back, and around is really really freeing up that whole shoulder girdle.

So I feel amazing. I also am thinking, Debbie, oh my goodness, I see this like tsunami of people having poor bone health earlier and earlier and younger and younger because I was at a soccer game the other day and I could see kids running on the field. These are healthy kids. They play soccer, they play competitive soccer. And so for those of you just listening to the audio, I'm going to show in the video right now. But what they look like is that the neck was way out, away from the body. And I talked to my kids about it and I said, this is what I'm seeing some of the kids on the field looking like it. And what did they call it? Like turtlenecking or something like something.

Text neck, it's called.

Text neck. Yes. It's all the social, it's all the looking at our phone. Phone because that's now that my top, the top scoop of ice cream is falling off. Now I'm looking down at my phone.

Exactly. So you could look at your phone up here. That's going to be part of what helps it. You know how the mama cat picks the kitten up by the nape of the neck? It's the nape of the neck that becomes that text neck bulge. So even if you think about picking yourself up, I mean, there's so many posture cues that I could give like that because spinal health, you know, older cultures, like in Greek cultures and in India as well, there are a lot of sayings that say the health of the individual is directly linked to the health of the spine.

Yes, yes, yes.

You could see it, you know, because if you watch a person that's hunched over it and then— so that's physical, right? That's a physical. But physically also what that does, that closed chest, when you have that restriction in your lungs, you're going to restrict your ability to bring in oxygen. Oxygen is how your cells cells make energy, energy production. The other component to that, Heather, is that the lungs and the kidneys are the two body systems that regulate blood pH for your biochemistry. And if the kidneys dissolve the bones to release alkalizing minerals into the system, so you don't want your calcium and magnesium that's in your bones to be dissolved into your blood to manage your pH. The other regulatory system is lungs. So if you're able to breathe efficiently and effectively, then you can actually do that regulation of carbon dioxide and waste products with oxygen to manage blood pH. But if you're closed off in your chest, if your third scoop is forward, it then brings the second scoop forward. It closes off the chest, brings the shoulders forward. You're gonna start to tear your rotator cuffs in your shoulders. You're gonna start to compress your chest. Lungs are not muscular, they're elastic. And if you don't allow the elasticity and the stretch of your rib cage, So it's just like deep, deep and deeper. It's like, so, you know, for health and wellbeing, there's so many components to why posture and spinal health matters.

Let's, let's move to nutrition.

Yeah. Nutrition. So bone loss is a metabolic process and what we're learning. So we thought it was a progressive degenerative disease of aging. No, it's not. It's a metabolic and inflammatory driven disease. And when you know that, then you can affect reducing inflammation. And one of the main ways that we trigger inflammation is through the foods that we eat. Food sensitivities. I'm not talking allergies. Everybody thinks, but I don't have a food allergy. We have food sensitivities. What comes in our mouth, we need to make sure what comes in our mouth, our food is actually the building blocks of our bones and all of our body tissues. So you're eating bone building blocks. And those bone-building blocks need to go through your gut to be digested and absorbed into your system. So what we bring in, the reason why we have an inflammatory response in our gut, 80% of our gut, we, I think most of us have heard this often enough to know that this is a fact that 80% of your immune system is right by in the gut. Why? Because this is when the outside world becomes the inside world. This is when what you bring from outside the food, you know, chicken and the vegetables, the nuts, the seeds, when it crosses the barrier of your gut line becomes you. So your immune system is there to be like, uh-oh, what's coming in? Is this okay? So this is why we trigger so much inflammation from our diet. And so then we need to adopt an anti-inflammatory diet and the anti-inflammatory diet. I mentioned there was bone building foods and bone dissolving foods, the bone dissolving foods, the things we need to remove. Gluten is one of the top because gluten is going to interfere with that metabolism. It's going to negatively affect thyroid, which is a master metabolizing hormone, and it contributes to leaky gut, or it causes holes in your gut lining, which allows things to spill into your body bigger or faster than they which triggers inflammation. So gluten is number one, dairy. And this is a hard one, cuz all the ladies are thinking, but that's where I get my protein, my probiotics, and my calcium. The problem is, is that dairy has proteins that are inflammatory. And I, I've run, uh, blood food sensitivity labs on women with osteoporosis or osteopenia, 99% reactive to gluten. And wheat and 85 to 90% reactive to dairy. So this is not just guesswork. And in the functional medicine world, all the doctors will take you off of this initially. It's an anti-inflammatory diet just to reduce the fire of inflammation. And then you start to reintroduce to see if you're reactive. The food most women realize they're reactive to when they bring it back is dairy. So, and dairy also has a growth factor because cow dairy is for calves, not for human bones. It's for cow bones. Bones. So it's actually stimulating. It's got a growth factor that for quick growth for calf bones, which is a trigger for our immune system. So dairy, gluten, and sugar are the top, right?

Sugar is not a surprise. I, I want to share just a little bit of my personal experience right now. So I used to love milk. I mean, I probably still would love milk if I drink it. I don't drink dairy. I don't eat dairy. I I don't eat gluten because those things are clutter in my body and they set off all kinds of symptoms. When I was a kid, I would take out— I just told my parents this the other day— I would take the milk, I think it was like the 2% milk, out of the fridge. And if nobody was looking, take the lid off and I would chug milk out of that jug. I loved it. I felt addicted to it. My two sisters, I'm the middle, they didn't like milk. They had no desire. They did not want it. Maybe they were more in tune with what their body was truly saying. And so not only did I have so much milk growing up, so much milk, and as a 51-year-old adult, I have broken 18 bones. So did that milk do me any good? I really don't think so. Now, there's a big factor. I was taking in some clutter. I was taking a heartburn medication, which really messes with your bone health. Didn't know it, nobody told me, didn't realize you're only supposed to be on these things for 2 weeks. I was on them for decades, so I'm no longer. But that, that was a big trigger as well for all these broken bones. And I'm a bit of a klutz, so, you know, a lot of these were sports accident related. And so that's, that's there too. But the milk, just going back to the milk, I thought it would be something that I I would really struggle letting go of, but there are so many wonderful alternatives that aren't unhealthy that you're not missing out on anything when we decide to get rid of the dairy.

Yeah, it's true. And so then they say, what about protein? What about probiotics? Actually, the probiotics that are in dairy are actually not the probiotics that support our gut. They're not the repopulating. They're not the ones that support what we need. Um, so yeah, the dairy kind of is a harder one. We know that sugar is inflammatory. So those are the foods not to eat. The foods to eat, of course, protein— we need 75+ grams a day. We need 30 grams of fiber because fiber helps to support your beneficial bacteria in your gut. And we have bone-supportive or bone-building bacteria and bone-dissolving contributing bacteria. So it's always about turning on the bone-building switches and turning off the bone dissolving stress switches when it comes to diet or metabolism. I have 3 Ms to my approach. I have the musculoskeletal, so I call that movement. What can you do from a movement perspective? Then I have the metabolism, which is meals. And so that, that's that part there.

And then the third, the mindset. And so if somebody is thinking, oh my gosh, I'm so scared, or am I— I'm going to be weak for the rest of my life. Those are thoughts that are actually going to impact impact our body, right?

Yeah. So I call it scared still, Heather. And when you get a diagnosis of osteoporosis or osteopenia, back to my story, when I had my total hip replacement at the age of, uh, 51, I was teaching 8 live yoga classes. And after that re hip replacement, I couldn't even lift my leg up off the bed. That's how weak my, my, my left side had become because it was so degenerated. So I thought, okay, let me do everything on that left side. So I would do those 8 classes every week. I would, all my demonstrations were on my hip replacement side 'cause I wanted to build my new hip, build my, not really build my new hip, strengthen my left side is what I was thinking. I wasn't even thinking about the hip because it's a hip replacement, right? So 2 years later I had a DEXA scan and which I think the DEXA scan's a bunch of baloney anyway now, but I did have a DEXA scan 'cause that was our standard or gold standard. And I had that DEXA scan and it put me at -2.4, which is 1 point away from osteoporosis. And this is me at age 53. So I actually could really strongly correlate because I wasn't using my right, my natural hip anymore. And that's when we were looking at with the DEXA scan. So then I said, oh my goodness, what am I doing? My left hip is fake. So for the next 2 years, I then did everything on my right side and I started to focus more on my right hip. And my next DEXA scan was -1.9. Now, Now there's variation in that, and I'm telling you, the DEXA scan leaves a lot to be desired. But the point is, is that that actually was a thing. And when, you know, you talk about like, I call it scared still because to feel fragile, you know, I did feel that way, right? I felt like the top of my leg was gonna fall off. And that's what women feel like. They tell me they feel like they're walking on eggshells. They feel like they're gonna break. They're really, they ask me, can I do this? Can I do that? Like they start to think that they can't do things. And it's so, the less you move, the more lose. Yeah, it's a use it or lose it proposition. So when we, when we talk about the mindset and clearing up the clutter around the mindset, we have to disassociate from that old story that is a lie. I call it the bone loss lie. And we have to like disassociate with that. And now we have to understand also how the mind is linked to bone loss. The The number one bone dissolver of all is stress. And if you could eat perfectly, give up all those foods, eat perfectly, you could do crazy exercises every day, all day. And if you do not manage stress, you are gonna be dissolving bones all day long. It is the biggest bone dissolver, actually the musculoskeletal system. The bones are actually one of the first body systems to respond to stress. When we need, when our body thinks it needs to get the heck outta Dodge, the bones dissolve the minerals they store. The body systems to function. We take our, our energy moves away from digesting the foods that we're eating so we can get muscles so we could get out of here. The pupils dilate, the brain goes into a place where we're focused so we could look for the threat, the threat, the threat. So brain fog. I mean, it's just so crazy that stress is such a strong, strong factor that links to bone What's, what's one of your favorite tools to address that stress? So I think that, you know, awareness, I say education is queen. So first step is, is even learning this and learning that you're in control of bone loss and bone building every single day. And so when you realize that, and then if you're gonna come to stress will dissolve your bones fast.

Yeah.

We are consumers, right? We eat food and we eat food to build our bones. And so I say, I said, don't eat these and eat these things. I'm gonna bring in another consumption awareness piece. We eat, we consume with our eyes and our ears. What are you listening to? What are you watching? What are you paying attention to? And if you're watching scary stuff that is triggering fear or scarcity and is telling you that you're not gonna have anything or they're taking everything or whatever it is, whether it's news or whatever, you have to pay attention to what are you eating with your eyes? What are you eating with your nose and your ears? What are you allowing to come into your being? And that is huge and powerful. People don't realize that, but I tell ladies, turn off the news. Definitely don't have the news on when you're trying to sleep. Most bone remodeling takes place during sleep. Don't watch news before sleep or don't watch news when you're eating, because then your body is going to turn off digestion because it thinks, oh my gosh, look, look what's happening. I can't believe they're doing this.

Right. Right. Wow. Finish the sentence for me. The lighter path is—

the lighter path is to realize that You are actually in control of everything. You're in control of the way your body ages, the, what you bring into your being. You're in control of understanding that you're a human being and not a human doing. And when you educate yourself with what is going to come into me that is going to actually support my bones, support my health, support happiness, give me the life that I want. When you realize you have actually, you have that control, you have the power of choice. It's what makes us different from animals. Animals don't have— they're instinctual. And we have an instinctual brain. We have a hindbrain. We have an amygdala. We have that small baby brain in the back that keeps us safe, but we have this prefrontal cortical brain. And how do we come here? How do we come to the place of that? Well, in yoga, I'm a yoga therapist. In yoga, we come to the present moment. So that could be watching the hummingbird buzzing above a leaf. It could be looking at the bee as it goes into the flower and out of the flower. When you come present moment, you're not stimulating bone breakdown because you are in a harmonized place. You're right here, right now. You're not in yesterday, you're not in tomorrow. You are human being versus human doing. So the tools in yoga, the tools that I share is the present moment awareness. Look around. What are you, what are you consuming with your eyes and bring beautiful things in. Beautiful. And especially when we're in nature, this is why nature has such a healing therapeutic effect on all of us. So then we bring in, if we're gonna stimulate prefrontal cortical brain, this is a sensory brain. This, if you go to the place of feeling, the brain is incapable of feeling, which is choice brain, human brain, higher intellect, and thinking at the same time. The brain cannot be in the feeling zone and thinking zone. So get out of the thinking zone, come into the feeling zone, whether you're doing breathwork or meditation. In yoga, we do things with our hands called mudras. We might say that, and you might repeat it. You might repeat things. And can I give you my favorite?

Yes.

So the word mantra, the word man, it's Sanskrit. The word man means mind and tra means tool. Now, when I first started yoga, I'm like, wait, I'm not, I'm not Indian. Is this Hindu? You know, I thought, I don't want to do those things. And then someone said, but we have our own mantras. I'm too fat. I don't have enough money. I don't have enough time. I don't have the energy to do that. We have all this negative mantras that we say over and over. So it's just words we repeat to ourselves. Ourselves. So close your eyes, sit up straight, whoever's listening. You wanna have those 3 scoops nice and arranged: pelvis, rib cage, head. And then have your elbows under your shoulders because that will help to keep the shoulder blades in the back and support your posture. So I'm gonna give you a little mantra, a little self-talk to clear your mind, to bring you to present moment, and to put your body in the bone building zone. So repeat to yourself silently, I am safe. I am safe. And feel what that feels like. I am safe in this moment. I am safe now. I have enough. I have enough. And the next one, I am enough. I am enough. Say that to yourself. Own that. Feel that. Experience that. And then go ahead and open your eyes.

I felt that. I felt that. That was beautiful. Debbie, uh, what is the best way to reach out to you, to follow you. And then I know you've got a great class, the Bone Loss Live webinar that you teach as well. So we'll drop a link for that in the show notes. How do we follow you though?

So Debbie Robinson, my name is Debbie, D-E-B-I Robinson. I have a website, so a lot of stuff is there. And then Debbie Robinson Wellness is my YouTube channel.

And your website, debbirobinson.com?

Yeah, debbirobinson.com.

Thank you so much for your gift of experience, of knowledge, of wisdom, of just joy and light. I feel lighter than I did before the beginning of this call. And that's some of your magic, Debbie. I just love it. Thank you so much.

Thanks for having me. This is great.

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