Cheryl Buckley- Holistic Nutrition-Physical (2 of 5)

Mike Hartman, performance mindset Strategist. This is Develop the Mindset of a Champion with former Stanley cup champion, Mike Hartman. Welcome to another episode. Today my guest is Cheryl Buckley. Cheryl is a registered dietitian. We did hear her story on a previous podcast and today we're going to talk about how to implement holistic nutrition into your lifestyle. Today she's going to discuss the physical component for us. Cheryl, great to have you here with us.

Thanks, Mike. Glad to be back on. Appreciate you giving me the opportunity to educate people on holistic nutrition. And if it's okay with you, I thought it would be good if I gave a recap on what holistic nutrition means.

Absolutely.

Okay. So it's basically the mind, body, soul approach and there's five components of it. And like you'd mentioned, we're going to discuss the physical one of it today. But also there's the emotional, social, spiritual and mental part of it. And all of these components really play into one's individual wellness and how they succeed in life. So today I know you wanted to talk about the physical and you know, I, I know as an athlete you probably can relate to a lot of the things I'm going to bring up. So I'll get started on what the actual physical component is. Basically, it's making sure that you have the physical wellness to move your body. So that would be in the form of exercise, making sure that you're eating a well balanced meal, which is obviously fueling your body with the proper nutrition. It's also sleeping and having a good sleep schedule. It's also managing your stress levels. And finally, it's to avoid any type of toxins that you be putting in your body that affects your physical abilities, ranging from tobacco, drugs and alcohol. As we look at all these components as part of the physical wellness, if we can control what we're doing with these, it really will help us to lead us to an optimal physical, physical wellness that we really need in order to lead a healthy lifestyle. Go through each component for you that that makes up the physical part.

Yeah, go right through it. We want to hear this. They hear enough of my voice. We want to hear from you.

Okay, so the first component is exercise. And this is really just about getting 30 minutes a day in. And I know that I've seen you on Facebook when you're out doing your walks or your body weight or your band training, it's really important just to get physical. 30 minutes a day. And that can be really anything from walking. Somebody could do a walk, run, it could be body weight exercises. It could be swimming laps in the pool. It really should be something that the person has a connection to, that really enjoys so that you're improving your cardiovascular health and also your conditioning of your muscles. And I know you know a lot about this as an athlete, and you're conditioned to work out extensively in your career. I know that you're doing a lot of this now outdoors, right?

I am. I have a program that I. That I put myself on. It's usually six days a week with the recovery day. And I will do like a walk run one day, or if I feel like walk, run, stretch on that same day, and then the opposite days, I'll use bands and body weight. And there's so many. I mean, with the Internet today, there's so many different ways to get training and. And there's great personal trainers. So I make sure I put myself on a really good, balanced program today.

Yeah, that's great. And you're right. There are a lot of. Ever since COVID there's a lot of resources out there. Like, Peloton has given away three months of online training. I know my fitness pal has given away the same thing to really give people options to while they're at home to do physical activity and allows you to pick many different activities, much like what you're doing, to give your body a good range of movement and really staying physical and that exercise component. So that's great. The next piece is eating a well balanced meal plan. And that is obviously the nutritional component of how we fuel our bodies. And it's not just, you know, eating to, you know, stay awake and sit at a desk and work. It's really about keeping your mind and body connected in an activity level. So that allows you to have the energy to sustain a full day's worth of work, working out and just being on your a game of being able to get through the day with the proper energy that you need. And I know again, as an athlete, you had a very strict eating plan. And I'm not saying people need to be very rigid, but it's really something where we need to look at. Especially I think with COVID it really has brought up the importance of building a strong immune system. And how we do that is making sure that we have a diet that's very nutrient dense, which means foods that are not highly processed. So if you look at the standard diet that Americans are consuming today, it's called sad. It's a standard American diet. It means that it's a very highly processed food. Diet, which has a lot of foods that are either fast food or they're not in its more natural whole state. So I would definitely promote people to consume a higher plant based food plan. And I like to connect it with the Mediterranean meal plan, which is, you know, an emphasis on fish, limiting the meats of red meats in particular. There's really no processed foods in it. It's encouraging nuts and seeds and a lot of plant based foods, foods such as fruits and vegetables. So I don't know if you can relate to your, your listening group here about how you used to eat as an athlete and the importance of that. If you want to tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, back, back in the day we had dietitians like yourself, so that's what was very important. So they pretty much told us what we needed to do. So personally, I didn't dive into it so much. I knew I had, we had protein and we had spaghetti pasta on a day of a game with some vegetables or we would have fish. Everybody was different. We knew we wouldn't put steak in our body because we were told it takes a long time to digest. So we had a person like yourself who has a degree in nutrition and they would guide us. So back in those days, I would try to eat as clean and as healthy as I could. I wish I knew, you know, like what I know today, I wish I knew back then. But it's great. And I'm fortunate enough to have you to guide me as well.

Yeah. And I enjoy it. Obviously, I'm passionate about. That's what led me into this career. And the nutrition component, you know, it's so important not just, you know, fruits and vegetables, but also to encourage whole grain consumption. That could be wild brown rice, could be quinoa, and also the proper, proper amounts of protein that you had mentioned. And that could be fish, it could be chicken, it could be turkey. There are even vegetarians out there or, you know, strict vegans that, you know, remove any type of animal products. So they're consuming the soy based, maybe tofu. But yeah, it's really important to make sure that you include all components, but also that you include fats, which could be your nuts and seeds, or it could be extra virgin olive oil, or it could be avocado or even avocado oil that maybe you drizzle on your vegetables just to make sure that you have the right components and mixture of your carbs, proteins and fats at each meal. And the reason for that is just to make sure that it'll give you the appropriate energy levels to sustain you throughout the day so you don't crash in the afternoon. And typically what happens for somebody like that is if they crash and don't have the right components of their meal plan, they start craving certain things. It could be sweets, it could be salty foods. And sometimes people will reach for those highly processed foods that are really not healthy for us. And what it does is it's counteractive and produces a cycle where we get caught up into possibly eating bad for the rest of the day. And it's hard to get back on track. So if you keep a nice mixture of your fruits and vegetables, fats and a protein at each meal, you'll have greater success of not only keeping your energy up, but being able to remain on a good, healthy meal plan to build your immune system.

That's great. It's so important because sometimes throughout the day I feel tired and drained. Especially we'll talk about exercise a little bit. Like after my exercise, sometimes I'm a little drained. I'm tired, and of course I'm thirsty. I'm dehydrated, but I'm so hungry right after I work out. Why is that?

Because you're depleting your energy sources. So the best thing for you to do after a workout is, like you said, you're probably dehydrated because you're always working out outside in extreme heat. So you need to make sure that you're getting a minimum of 8 cups of water a day. Now, this is different for each person based on their body weight. But first thing I would do is have a cup of water when you get back to replenish the, the, you know, the. From the sweat. And you've lost a lot of water with your working out, so you want to have a cup of water. And then I think the best thing for you to do would be to have either a protein smoothie smoothie shake, which could be again, the protein powder. It could be with some kind of, you know, milk beverage. It can be non dairy almond, or it can be dairy actual cow's milk. And then I like to add in some fresh fruits and vegetables. You can add in a frozen cauliflower, or you can add in a handful of spinach. You can put in some frozen blueberries, you can even have some frozen bananas. And you mix it all together. It's a great, great recovery drink that you could have. And it also is hydrating you. For those who don't really like protein smoothie shakes, you could actually have something such as a hummus with carrots and celery as a dip. Or you could have maybe a half a sandwich on whole grain with some turkey and maybe some lettuce and tomato on it. So whatever, you know, really interests you, food wise, I would just make sure that you get some carbohydrates and protein combined together just to restore the, the muscles that you depleting from your workout.

A lot of people talk about water weight. I don't even really know what that is. Sometimes if, oh, it looks like you've lost like three or four pounds of water weight after they exercise or they play a sport, or if they play, you know, they're playing tennis and they are outside in the heat. What does that exactly mean?

So it's exactly, you know, what we mentioned before is when you're out and you're exercising, your body is perspiring or what we call sweating. And so that's where you're releasing the water weight from, is from sweating. And so you need to replenish those waters that have been depleted from your exercising or exertion through sweating. So it's basically water weight loss from sweating and perspiring with your physical activity of exercising.

So we talk to a lot about exercising and recover recovery. Like I used to tell people, the definition of fitness is the ability to recover. I still bring that up. How is or why is recovery so important?

Super important. Then that's the component. Next I want to talk about is our sleep. So you know, when it comes to exercise, and I'm not an exercise specialist, you have way more training as an athlete of understanding how this works. But you do know that you have to have at least a day of recovery so that your body can repair, meaning that your muscles can repair from the exertion that you've put them through from working out, let's say six days a week. But the other major component of it is sleep. And if we don't get seven to eight hours of proper sleep, we're really putting our body at jeopardy. And what I mean by that is, is during the sleep time, which is again, we want seven to eight hours of good restful sleep every night. What's going on in that time is your body is not just only repairing itself from a muscle standpoint, but it's also detoxing. It's, you know, the liver is detoxing any of the toxic things that have been brought into our body throughout the day. And that can be anything from air pollution that you're bringing in. It could possibly be from Pesticides that you're consuming from the fruits and vegetables that you're eating. It could be from skin care if you're putting, let's say, sun lotion on. All these things are considered toxins to our body, and the body has to process them through and process it through the liver and kidneys to excrete it out. So at night, it's extremely important that we're getting that restful sleep because your body is basically doing a cleaning process and a repairing of your muscles. So it's so important to have that piece. If you don't have that component, what's going to happen is you're going to wake up the next day not feeling rested, not having the proper energy, and then you're actually going to put yourself at risk for maybe injuring yourself when you're exercising, but also maybe not having the alertness and the mental ability to react at work while you're trying to work on a project or if you're on a conference call and you have a lot of moving pieces going on. You need to be in your A game. And if you don't have that restful sleep, it really can spill over into many aspects of your life.

Well, you said a magic word. Be on your A game or be on your game. It doesn't matter if you work in corporate America, if you're going to school, if you're an athlete, sleep and eating well and everything that you're talking about is so monumental in your everyday being, Even if you sell real estate and somebody would say, well, why? If I'm a realtor, what does this have to do with anything? Well, I would say because you don't want to sell something and look tired and exhausted, who's going to want to buy from somebody that looks tired and burnt out? Or if you're an athlete and you don't take care of yourself and you don't get the proper sleep, well, you're not going to perform at your highest level, just like in corporate America. So everything you're telling us, Cheryl, is great information and we're so happy that you are on our show and we have more segments to do.

Yep. And I have. Yeah, I just want to cover a couple more components. And I think this really relates back to what we have going on with COVID and just, you know, I mentioned earlier that our immune systems are, you know, compromised right now for a couple different reasons. You know, maybe some of us didn't have access to the best foods because online grocery shopping was hindered, and maybe you weren't able to get to the grocery store and you weren't eating the best. But the other components that we need to discuss is stress levels and actually the alcohol, tobacco, drug component. A lot of people when they're under stress will turn to alternative types of drugs. And again, that could be, you know, recreational drugs, it could be smoking tobacco, it could be alcohol. And the other component is how we're dealing with our stress. And I think what we need to keep in mind is it's something as simple as breathing for handling our stress. And I always like to recommend people to try out some type of meditation. There's many different apps out there. The ones that I personally use are Headspace and Calm. They have anywhere from a three minute to a five minute breathing exercise. And that'll actually get you to calm down, get into a rhythm of breathing. And it's actually been scientifically shown that it reduce your stress levels. And it's really important because right now, as we're seeing on the news, you know, with COVID we, we thought we were kind of getting out of the area of concern and now we're seeing that we're actually going backwards. So we need to make sure we keep ourselves physically in a good place and handling and managing our stress is huge. The other component of I was mentioning to you is, you know, the drug, alcohol, tobacco, part of it, when we're under stress, a lot of times people will have things that they kind of gravitate towards to relieve the stress. And a lot of times for people it is those types of things. Or for others it could be eating or it could be binge watching TV and not exercising. That's why it's really important that we take the actual exercise, the eating, the proper nutrition, the proper sleeping, and again, looking at ways that we can manage the stress. So we're not reaching to, you know, toxins such as alcohol, tobacco or drugs and really handling the stress through any type of meditation or breathing techniques. I like to call it a box breathing technique where you breathe in for four, you hold for four, you breathe out for four, and you repeat it. And it really allows you to get yourself into a settled place. But if you don't feel comfortable doing that, these two apps that I mentioned to you, Headspace and Calm, they give you free opportunities to use them and, and you can do a three minute one just to kind of get yourself in a sense of relaxation. So let's say you're stressed at work or you're just stressed about watching the news and what's Going on do a three minute meditation to help reduce your stress levels is extremely important as well.

Well, you mentioned great apps and you gave us a lot even more great information and you really have helped me. So I have to look at it. I have to be a product of the product. And you have completely changed my mindset with some of the things that we do. And the whole part of our program is stories to develop the mindset of a champion. Well, if you talk to any champion in anything, it's all about taking care of your mind and your body and following a plan. You mentioned there's a lot of great apps that are out there. One of them is because I used a heart rate monitor for years and then I also had the watch that measured my steps and then the battery went out and I realized another app is that health. If you have an Apple phone, that health app that has a little, it's like in white, it has a little red heart on it that will help you as well. And ever since you told me this is something that you taught me as well as I used to go hard, I used to think I have to run four or five miles three days a week. And then my, now that I'm getting a little bit older, my back is sore, my, my hips are tight, my groin is not feeling great. You brought that walking to. I've never thought about walking because you used to walk so much. So when we started doing a lot of walking, I feel the best I have ever felt. I can't believe that. So the exercise and the nutrition and everything that you brought to me has been fantastic and to many clients of mine and many people that I know. So, Cheryl, we're very fortunate to have you. Is there a way our listeners can reach out to you if they want to email you questions? Is there any place for them to go to say, hey, you know, I'm eating too much, I have a little bit of a belly. I feel like I've heard the word. I might. Somebody says I have this leaky gut thing going on. Can somebody reach out to you or where can they reach out to you?

Yes, absolutely. So if you go to my website, www.CherylBuckley.com and I'll spell my name for you, it's C H E R Y L B U C K L E y. So it's www.CherylBuckley.com. if you go there, there's a message that'll pop up that you can fill out your, your name and your email and I will get back to you and Actually, I'm giving away right now three free days of a meal plan that also will include the recipes and generate a grocery list. So if they go into that actual pop up and send me the information, I'll send them a meal plan and then they can also ask me questions in that email as well.

Well, thank you Cheryl. So www.cherylbuckley.com C-H-E R Y L B U C K L E Y.com Cheryl thank you so much for being here here and we look forward to the next time.

I do too. Thank you. Mike.