Episode 288: Metabolism, Hormones & Weight Loss with Dr. Jade Teta
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On today’s show, Erin talks to Dr. Jade Teta about all aspects of health - from stress management to metabolism to hormones to the best exercise for you. Dr. Jade has worked in-person with over 10,000 clients — most of them women. As a result, he’s become an expert in female metabolism, hormones and weight loss. His unique depth of knowledge makes him the perfect candidate for this well rounded discussion.
Dr. Jade Teta is an integrative physician and personal trainer with over 25 years of experience. The majority of his clients are women, so as a result, he’s become an expert in the unique attributes of the female metabolism and its hormonal strengths and challenges.
To date, he’s worked in-person with over 10,000 people, helping them achieve their weight loss and health goals. And he’s helped hundreds of thousands more with at-home programs he’s created.
Dr. Teta has a Bachelor’s degree in biochemistry and a Doctorate in naturopathic medicine, a distinct specialty of medicine focusing on lifestyle approaches to health, fitness and weight loss. He carries his license to practice medicine in Washington State and California where he is a registered primary care physician.
Dr. Teta writes and lectures internationally as a continuing education provider for the medical and fitness fields. He is the author of several other best-selling programs including Metabolic Aftershock and Metabolic Prime. He also contributed both the exercise and sport nutrition chapters to The Textbook of Natural Medicine, the most widely used natural medicine textbook in medical schools across the country.
In this episode:
The one adaptogen you haven't yet heard about [8:51]
Metabolism: learn your language of biofeedback [18:17]
Safety vs Safeness & how these states affect your immune system [25:41]
Why thinking in the grey zone promotes health [32:37]
How to balance the weight loss equation for lasting results [41:14]
The top two types of exercise that everyone should be doing - plus one that may raise your hunger levels [53:18]
Resources mentioned:
Connect with Dr. Jade Teta:
Kion Aminos (Get 20% off monthly orders and 10% off one time orders)
Ned Natural Remedies (get 15% off your order with code FUNK)
LMNT Electrolyte Replenishing powder (Use code FUNK get a free sample pack with any purchase!)
Qualia Senolytic (get up to 50% off and an extra 15% off your first purchase with link + code FUNKS)
Learn more about Metabolic Health and Hormones
Related episodes:
282: Building Muscle for Overall Health with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon
187: Metabolism Series Part 1: High Blood Sugar, Insulin, & Weight Loss
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Erin Holt [00:00:02]:
I'm Erin Holt, and this is the Funk'tional Nutrition Podcast, where we lean into intuitive functional medicine. We look at how diet, our environment, our emotions, and our beliefs all affect our physical health. This podcast is your full bodied, well rounded resource. I've got over a decade of clinical experience, and because of that, I've got a major bone to pick with diet culture and the conventional healthcare model, they're both failing so many of us. But functional medicine isn't the panacea that it's made out to be either. We've got some work to do. And that's why creating a new model is my life's work.
Erin Holt [00:00:37]:
I believe in the ripple effect, so I founded the Funk'tional Nutrition Academy, a school in mentorship for practitioners who want to do the same. This show is for you if you're looking for new ways of thinking about your health and you're ready to be an active participant in your own healing, you'll get things here that you won't get other places. Please keep in mind this podcast is created for educational purposes only and should never be used as a replacement for medical diagnosis or treatment. I would love for you to follow the show, rate, review and share, because you never know whose life you might change and, of course, keep coming back for more. Now give me the mic so I can take it away.
Erin Holt [00:01:15]:
Hello my friends. You’re in for a treat today. At least I think so. I enjoyed this conversation probably more so than I don't know, any other conversation that I had this year and that’s saying a lot. I’ve got my friend Dr Jade Teta on the show and he’s just the best if you ask me.
We are talking about metabolism, weight training, weight loss, especially in women because that’s really his wheelhouse. Dr Jade is an integrative physician and physical trainer with over 25 years of experience. The majority of his clients are actually women so as a result he’s become an expert in the unique attributes of the female metabolism and its hormonal strengths and challenges. That's kinda the name of the game of today’s show, we’re gonna get into some hormone stuff too. To date, Jade has worked in person with over 10,000 people. I don't know how to tell you what a big deal that is. He has a tremendous amount of experience. And so, he helps people achieve weight loss and health goals. He’s also helped hundreds of thousands with his at home programs that he’s created.
So this guy has a lot of experience and these are the people that I seek out to learn from. These are, whenever everyone asks me who do you learn from and how do I know who to trust? It’s this. It’s the experience. I wanna learn from the people that have been doing this longer than me and have worked with a lot more people than me. And Jade really fits that bill. He’s also just an extraordinarily kind and compassionate human. And I think that will come out as you listen to him talk. I just enjoy speaking to him so, so much. And I really hope that you enjoy this conversation. When we recorded this a couple of months ago, and at the time he was going through something really big and challenging and stressful. So the very beginning of the podcast is kind of centered around that. Because this is a whole human show and yes I brought him on to the show so we could all learn from him, but he’s also a human being having a human experience and so i didn't want to edit any of that out. I just really honor and respect and adore the way that he thinks and the way that he speaks - sometimes I'm like, are you the male version of me? I just,. I think we think about things so similarly and you will see that as you listen to this.
Now, interestingly we totally didn’t plan this, but I was on his podcast. Our interviews were like a month or two months apart, but he just released the conversation that we had over on his podcast just last week. So if you enjoy today, and you want to keep learning, hearing from us, and learning more, head over to his podcast Next Level Human. Anyway, he’s an awesome guy with so much knowledge and wisdom to share and I’m just super glad that he decided to sit down and share some of it with us.
All right, welcome to the show. I'm so excited to be able to chat with you today.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:04:18]:
Erin, it's so good to be here. How are you? I can't wait for this conversation.
Erin Holt [00:04:22]:
Yeah, I'm good. I've been looking forward to this. I want to start off all right, so we had a private chat before we started recording, so I was going to start off with this question of what's it like to be Jade lately. So you can go as honest as you want.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:04:39]:
Yeah, well, I was telling Erin it's funny, it's been great to be Jade. For the last decade, I've just been really crushing in business. But in the last few months, my business has literally deteriorated, my number one business. And so I was telling Erin, for all you listeners before we got on, that I'm in a very stressful time right now in my life. Probably the most stressful I have been since my affair and my divorce from my wife, which was just crazy sort of stressful. But what's really neat is since the self development work that I've done over the last 20 plus years, the tools do work. So I'm surprisingly good, given everything that's going on. And, yeah, life has this thing that Erin and I were talking about before we came on live.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:05:28]:
It has a way of pushing you where you need to go. However, I wasn't quite ready, but it decided to say, you know what? I'm going to shove you in the back and you're going off this cliff and you'll figure it out. And so that's kind of where I am. So actually, struggles like this are really interesting because on the one hand, I'm very scared. It can be scary when a lot of your major income dries up real quick. But I'm also really excited to build some things that I've been really wanting to build. And so life is giving me that space and a little bit of action, alarm action, to be like, let's go. Time to get it done.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:06:03]:
So, yeah, that's where I am right now. But, I mean, honestly, as a whole, it's funny, Erin. I was thinking about this. I really do just love my life. I've been incredibly blessed to be able to do what I do, to be a teacher, to have anyone even care about what I say. It's just so bizarre that to even get invited on a show like this and that people want to hear what I have to say, I've always found that a little bit strange. And so I really just try to stay grateful. I've been incredibly lucky.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:06:35]:
I try to maintain that mindset.
Erin Holt [00:06:39]:
Do you feel that leading up to this implosion, as you mentioned, do you feel like there was intuitive nudges you were getting? Like you were getting internal guidance, and you just weren't listening to it.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:06:49]:
100%, no question about it. And it just seems to work that way, right? Life has this way of whispering in your ear and then tapping you on the shoulder and then kind of pushing you in the back and then kicking you in the stomach and punching you in the balls. And then you're basically like, okay, I'm listening now. And so we're at that kick me in the stomach phase. And I really have been wishing and wanting for the time and space to do some other things, and now I have the opportunity to do that. And luckily for me, I'm an entrepreneur. That's kind of what I've been doing for a while. So I do have other businesses.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:07:24]:
It's just a big difference between how much it's a huge lifestyle change, let's just put it that way. So I probably would have about six months to a year to kind of get back to where I am. But, yeah, life is basically saying, Jade, I want you to go in a different direction. At least that's how I've seen it. You know what's interesting, Erin, and for the listener, I mean, I don't know what your belief system is. We all have different belief systems. I am relatively agnostic. I'm not atheist.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:07:51]:
I believe there's something out there, but I'm not necessarily religious either. But the more I interact with life and get these kind of lessons, the more I think perhaps there's something much bigger going on. And so I've learned to just listen and in a very Daoist way, just follow the flow and see where it takes me. And it usually turns into either someplace more beneficial than what I thought or a lesson that I never could have gotten otherwise. And all my biggest lessons have come from struggle. So this time around I really am looking at it that way. And I'm proud of myself, so to speak, to be able to be like, okay, while I'm in the process. Normally it takes years looking backwards, right? And you're just like, oh, I get the lesson now.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:08:34]:
But while I'm in this process, I'm actually seeing the lessons and listening. So, yeah, it's interesting and I'm excited and to be completely vulnerable, very afraid as well. And both of those things seem to be playing in my psyche right now.
Erin Holt [00:08:51]:
You've got, I would imagine a very big tool of resources during this acute stress period. Right now, what are you leaning on in terms of resources and tools?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:09:04]:
Yeah, well, you know, it's really interesting. Social media has been a you know, I think for all of us, we kind of see it. I don't know how you see it, Erin, but you and I are both very active. I follow you. We teach a lot, both of us, on that platform. That has, you know I think that's lesson, you know in general, I haven't always been excited about social media. It's kind of something I feel like I have to do, but now I'm grateful that I have a following there. But as a business person and anyone listening to this who's a business person to me, I still think your email list is still your number one sort of place to be.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:09:35]:
And so for me, leaning on that email list is just really nice. The ability to be able to make tens of thousands of dollars with a few emails when you're having difficulty is really nice. So that is really what I'm leaning on heavily, my email list and my following.
Erin Holt [00:09:54]:
So this is funny because tell me you're an entrepreneur without telling me you're an entrepreneur. Because I meant like, what are you doing for your stress? Are you taking some adaptogens, mushrooms?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:10:06]:
I love it. Erin, you're like Jade, you just went completely off on a tangent. We know where your mind is. No, actually, so you know what I do. So I'm huge on this and this can get us into sort of a discussion about metabolism. From my perspective, it is all about stress management, right? So whether we're feeling psychologically stressed or whether we just have metabolic tension because we're doing too much. And my go to in my house, one of the first things I built was a sauna and cold plunge. And I've been doing sauna and cold plunge.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:10:35]:
It's now all the rage, which is really cool to see. But you know what, I went to medical school, naturopathic medical school, back in the late 90s. And that's when I first got introduced to cold plunge and sauna. And I've pretty much had some form of cold plunge or sauna in my house since the early 2000s. And so that's primarily what I do almost daily, working out and meditation. And actually, funnily enough, one of the things that's happened to me over the last couple of years that I do think has been incredibly beneficial is I've been the least active I've ever been in the last two years in terms of hardcore weightlifting and stuff like that. But every morning, I would say about 90% of the time I wake up, I do a yoga flow. A yoga flow that, believe it or not, came to me with an LSD ceremony that I did that just basically I just started doing this yoga tai chi flow.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:11:28]:
And I've been doing it ever since. And then meditation. So I do that every single morning. That sort of sets the tone. And I do sauna contrast hydrotherapy pretty much every night before I go to bed. And I will tell you one thing that might be new to your listeners and maybe even new to you, but I discovered a product called kanna, which is what I would call a psychoactive adaptogen. Not psychedelic, but psychoactive. It's used by the Khoekhoe and San in South Africa.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:11:59]:
It's been around for a while, but I started using that. It's one of the most powerful products I've seen. So it's my new favorite adaptogen. And so I've been really using kanna as my major sort of stress reducer. And so for those of you who haven't heard about kanna, it's kind of psychoactive, meaning that it sort of is like a nootropic, but you feel the effects of it. It kind of lifts your mood and helps you think sort of more laterally, which is really nice when you're going through a stressful time like this. It doesn't get you psychedelic, though, so you're not seeing all these things. And it's adaptogenic in that it does reduce glucocorticoid.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:12:35]:
So it actually controls cortisol. It's one of these things that accesses SSRI, so serotonin reuptake inhibitor and also causes you to release more serotonin as well as release more dopamine and release more GABA. And so you're getting this very powerful brain effect with this particular product, but some of this lowered cortisol effect. And so that would be my one, two, three. Meditation, yoga. I am a hardcore weightlifter, so I do a lot of that and then sauna contrast hydrotherapy. So, as you can see, I take this seriously, this particular question I do a lot, like, daily for me, at 50 years old now, didn't used to be this way, but I feel the aches and pains and I have to take a lot of rest and recovery. And if I don't, my metabolism will let me know that things aren't going well. And to me, that is the first question.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:13:25]:
Anytime we talk about metabolism, anytime we talk about health, to me it's stress management. It's unfortunate that the term stress has become so cliche and normalized because I don't even think we really understand what stress is anymore because it's so commonplace, we almost need a different term for it. But it doesn't surprise me because I follow you and you're right on top of this, like you and I both, that stress is the number one thing. I don't mean just the psychological stress I'm under right now. I mean just the physiological stress. Oftentimes we're super stressed out. We don't even know it, but our metabolism is suffering the consequences.
Erin Holt [00:14:02]:
So is kanna K-A-N-A?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:14:06]:
Kanna is K-A-N-N-A. Yes, and it's Sceletium tortuosum for those of you who are herbalists. And the way I think about it, tortuosum sounds like torture. So kanna helps with sort of mental, emotional torture. And it was used by the San and Khoekhoe, those tribes. There was a popular documentary done way back when, Why the Gods are Crazy or something like that, that I think featured the San, and they live in a very dry desert, and they use kanna, the whole herb. They chew it and it gives them stamina. It's really good for hedonic cravings.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:14:46]:
Actually, we're starting to see, or I'm starting to see in my clinic use, and they would chew it for stamina and stress reduction when they were on these long periods out in the desert. And they also use it, believe it or not, in very high doses in a ceremonial setting, almost like you would use a psychedelic sort of substance. So they use it both daily as sort of this adaptogen, and also it's a very important part of their tribe. So it's a really fascinating herb.
Erin Holt [00:15:17]:
I can't believe you're 50. You look really good.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:15:21]:
Oh, thank you.
Erin Holt [00:15:21]:
That's very all that stress management work is really paying off.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:15:25]:
Yeah, I think my mom looks very young for age. She's 76, and she looks like, I don't know, 60. So part of me thinks it's just genetic.
Erin Holt [00:15:34]:
You started off the conversation mentioning an affair. You casually dropped in about an LSD journey. I'm going to stick to the topic because I want listeners to hear you talk about this. But there's so many places that have nothing to do with hormones and weight loss, but we'll stick to that. Your Instagram bio says mindset, muscle and metabolism. So I would love to know, real high view. Why are those the three call outs? Why are those the three tenets of what you do?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:16:06]:
All right. Yeah. So it's funny, right? I started out as a personal trainer for 25 years, and so that's where the muscle component comes from. It's like I'm very much into fitness. And honestly, to be honest with you, my company that we were just talking about, that's mainly how I've made my money throughout my career. Even when I started as a physician, I still was doing personal training. So that's the muscle component. The mindset component is I am a psychology geek and a philosophy geek, and I am getting my PhD now in psychology.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:16:36]:
Everyone thinks I'm crazy for going back to school and getting a PhD. But I'm also one of these people that's like I know I've done all the research sort of out of the box, but I want to know the box as well. So to me I'm one of these people that just I know that there's all the stuff I know I don't know, so I want the education. So that's where the mindset stuff comes in. I'm very much into the philosophy and psychology and as a matter of fact, I actually think that is the most powerful thing in medicine, to me, Erin, is the placebo effect. We still don't know what that actually is, but it's the belief effect. We don't know exactly how it works, but to me it is the most powerful thing that we have in medicine.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:17:15]:
In fact, I have a theory that pretty much everything that we all, most of the benefits that we gain from our lifestyle comes from the belief that the lifestyle is doing positive things for us. There's a lot that comes from that. And of course, the metabolism piece is the part that you and I both do, which is that idea that ultimately I have been involved with functional medicine and primarily weight loss and endocrine sort of issues primarily in women. And so these are the three areas that I feel like are constantly, people are constantly asking me about that I study. And I'm one of these people. Some people go breadth, they know a lot about a lot of things or a little about a lot of things. For me, I'm one of these people that doesn't know a whole bunch about much else other than these three very deep holes. So I don't pay much attention to politics, I definitely don't pay much attention to sports.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:18:10]:
I just eat, live, breathe psychology, philosophy, training and metabolism.
Erin Holt [00:18:17]:
And how would you define metabolism?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:18:21]:
Well, to me I would say that it's all the ways in which our body assesses stress in the environment and adapts to it. And so I know people would say, oh well, metabolism is really like how the body takes in and utilizes fuel. I look at it as all of the processes of adjusting to our environment and getting back to balance. To me, metabolism is really a stress management tool. And if you want to understand it, the best way that I talk about it is almost like a stress barometer, like a thermostat that is measuring stress in the outside environment, taking in all those signals, also looking inside the internal environment and deciding what the body needs, and then plotting a course back to balance. If you can imagine a satellite with one dish facing out into the environment outside and another dish facing into your body and then integrating those signals in the hypothalamus to bring us back to balance, to me, this is what the metabolism does. Yes, it's fuel management, but to me it's so much more than that. It's the nervous system, it's the hormone system, it's the immune system, it's the way the muscle talks to the fat cells and the way the fat cells talk to the brain.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:19:33]:
And what we now know is just this big, huge communications hub all linked together, all sort of being analyzed and scrutinized in the brain and then allowing us to adjust to environmental conditions. And so metabolism to me is what drives everything about our physiology.
Erin Holt [00:19:53]:
And how would you know if it's a communication system? What are the messages that might be coming in? Because I don't think everyone's always super aware of the messages, like coming from inside the house, so to speak. So what would be some signs that like, hey, something's off here?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:20:09]:
Yeah, I love that you asked this question because to me, this is the thing that we should be talking about in our industry, right? It's like ultimately what we tend to do with people is we say, hey, follow this diet. And it usually turns into and what I think a lot of people, a lot of your listeners may not know, but you and I know that practitioners are not immune to the novelty bias either, right? So they get excited about all these new things that come about. But what we really should be doing is we really should be teaching people how to read the signals from their own metabolism. So the metabolism is speaking to you all the time. Only thing is, it doesn't speak English or French or Spanish. It speaks metabolism. And we need to know that language. So what is that language? Well, that language is a language of biofeedback.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:20:49]:
So when your sleep is fragmented and difficult, that is biofeedback. When your hunger is insatiable and out of control, that's biofeedback. When your energy is unpredictable and unstable, biofeedback. When your cravings are unrelenting, biofeedback. So I use a funny little acronym that I'm famous for called schmec, which is S-H-M-E-C, and it stands for sleep, hunger, mood, energy, and cravings. This is biofeedback. So when your quote shmec is in check, your metabolism is probably not under stress. But when sleep, hunger, mood, energy and cravings go out of check or are no longer under your control, it's a signal that your metabolism is under stress.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:21:31]:
And by the way, it's not just hunger, energy and cravings and sleep and mood. It's exercise performance and exercise recovery. It's digestive function. It's a huge one. It's menses and libido and erections. It's signs and symptoms like headaches and joint pains and things like that. This is the way the metabolism is talking to us. And what we do is we tend to not look at it that way.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:21:56]:
Your body is sending you signals so that you pay attention. In the same way when you sprain your ankle, your body goes, hey, pay attention, stay off of that. You're going to have to do something about it, get crutches, do some rehab, all that kind of stuff. Your metabolism is doing the same thing. So we don't always understand that these signals are meant to tell us something. That's the reason we feel them in the first place. Same thing goes for the psychology and our psyche. So I have an acronym for that, too.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:22:25]:
It's afraid. Whenever you feel yourself stuck in certain emotions, like the afraid acronym, which stands for anger and frustration and resistance and anxiety and insecurity and depression, that means psychologically, you're stuck in some way, and we're meant to pay attention to that stuff, not avoid it. If that makes sense.
Erin Holt [00:22:44]:
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. I think there's a natural human tendency to want to move away from pain and avoid pain, and I think we have a lot of ways that we can do that. I think busyness is one of those things. Everybody is so busy all of the time, and I'm like, how much of that busyness is a choice? I mean, I'm throwing myself into the ring here, especially with work. Workaholism is the addiction that's most praised. Like, people are like, you're killing it, you're doing great. I'm like, I'm fucking drowning here. But it's like pat on the back.
Erin Holt [00:23:15]:
Keep it up. But it can be a way to avoid the pain and the discomfort of sitting with our stuff.
Erin Holt [00:25:18]:
And I'm so glad that you bring up the mood and the piece, especially the anxiety, because we're so quick to want to pathologize any swings in mood when more often than not, it's really just our body or our higher self. Whatever you believe in. It's trying to communicate to us that something's off, something's out of balance. Something needs to be looked at. I just went through something.
Erin Holt [00:26:06]:
I was so in such a season of overwork that I was like, I'm going to take a sabbatical. Never have I ever pulled this move. But it was bad. I'm like, I need a full month off. And that month happened. It was going to be in July and it was like the first day of my sabbatical. And all of a sudden I'm like, what is happening? Like, I had this major massive health flare up. And it was like, oh, shit, I created space in my life and now my body is like, okay, we're going to tell you what's up.
Erin Holt [00:26:39]:
And I had to really sit with that. Instead of spending the month drinking margs on the lake, I was like, we're going to sit with what's coming up. And it was a wild time, but this stuff is so important and if we keep trying to escape and run away from the pain and the discomfort, our bodies are pretty fucking good at telling us what we need to know about our life.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:27:06]:
Yeah, you want to know what's interesting about that? If you look at this, a lot of people aren't able to tie this together. But one of the first classes I had at Naturopathic Medical School, which at the time I thought was a bogus concept because I came in as a biochemist, was very heavily science oriented and they talked about this idea of the healing crisis. And what that essentially was, is that when people started to get better, they would start getting better for a time, and then they would have this flare up, this sickness, and then if they made it through that, they sort of went on their healing way. And I was just baffled by that and did not really give much credibility to it at all until all the years later, now what is it, 20 plus years that I've been doing naturopathic medicine. I graduated back in 2003. So I'm like, yeah, that's the truth. And now we actually have the science to kind of look at this. If anyone who's familiar with polyvagal theory, this is how the vagus nerve and the balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic arms of the nervous system.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:28:05]:
It's especially true for anyone who's undergone adverse child events or any kind of adverse event when they're young. What happens is we have essentially switches, for a lack of a better term, in terms of our threat response, our striving response, and our rest and recovery response. And they really are kind of like switches in a sense. Like, in other words, when your threat switch is on, your rest and recovery switch is off. And so when you look at this, there's sort of three ways we can go. We can be in threat mode, which would be like, well, if we're out on the plains of Africa and we see a lion, we're going to be in threat mode. We're going to be running, we're going to be fighting, we're going to be doing something right now, once we get safe and the lion's gone, if we're still out on the plains of Africa, we might not see the lion. So we're safe in a sense, but we don't feel completely safe because we still have to be hyper vigilant to look for that lion, right? And that's the striving response that a lot of people get in this hyper vigilance striving response where they're looking for danger.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:29:04]:
And whenever you're in threat or striving response, you cannot be in rest and recovery response. And so what happens is people might feel like they've gotten safety, but they don't have safeness. And there's a difference when you start looking at this research, safety means, okay, the lion's gone. Safeness means I'm no longer on the plains of Africa. I'm in a house a lion can't get me, period. I don't even need to look out for it anymore. And most of us can't get to safeness. And so what we do is we move out of threat into striving and then back from striving into threat and then threat, striving, striving threat, and we never get to rest and recovery.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:29:41]:
And that is what happens when you go, okay, I'm going to take July to myself, and you're finally in safeness mode and your body goes, okay, I don't need to be down regulating my immune system. I can provide resources to other places. I can do other things. And by the way, that's exactly what happens. A lot of people don't know this. When you're striving, cortisol is elevated. cortisol is an immune suppressant. So when you stop striving, you go into rest and recovery mode.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:30:06]:
One of the first things that happen is cortisol drops, which then allows your immune system to sort of express itself. And that's why we oftentimes will get sick after a hard bout of work or a very stressful time. You don't get sick during it. You get sick after it. And what that's a sign for all of us? This is, again, biofeedback. What's that's a sign is to say, okay, if that's happening to me, that means I am stuck in threat and or striving mode too often. And by the way, that's also saying you're aging faster, you're having some issues.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:30:38]:
You're going to be in a position where you're using resources. It's really a resource oriented thing, right? If you're driving the car fast, you're using fuel. If you're idling the car like crazy and not moving, you're using fuel. You need to park the car, fill up the tank, leave it in the garage for a while, change out the spark plugs, get the tires rotated, all of those things. And if you never do that to your body, then what happens is you start to sort of reap the negative consequences. And it is telling us this all of the time. The way it will pop up, by the way, and I'd be interested if this was happening to you, is that you'll start seeing it with sleep and mood first, but sleep starts to become this sort of fragmented affair. It's like I'm sleeping, but I kind of feel awake, right? And I wake at odd times of the night and I don't feel like I'm getting completely rested.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:31:29]:
This is one of the first things you'll see. And it makes sense physiologically, right? Because if you're waiting for the lion to show back up, you're not going to be in deep sleep. You're going to kind of be in a very light, fragmented type of sleep. So that is what I believe is going on there. And we do have some science explaining this, even though there's some controversy around polyvagal theory. And some people say it's not necessarily complete the way we think about it, but it does certainly make sense and we have some clinical experience, certainly I do, that this is exactly what's going on with people.
Erin Holt [00:31:01]:
First of all, there's controversy about everything. And I just want to before I continue on with this conversation, because you just dropped some bars. But this is like in the age of YouTube, social media, internet, everything is so dichotomous. And I just feel so badly for people who are like, I just want to get healthy. What do I do? It's this or that, it's pick your lane. And I'm thinking about there was this reel that you shared. There was this reel that you shared. Somebody took one of your videos and kind of shit talked your approach and you reshared it, which is like chef kiss perfection.
Erin Holt [00:32:39]:
I love that. I'm just going to call attention to this. I'm not going to hide. But the general gist you were talking about hormone imbalance, and this guy was like, hormone balance is a made up thing. Just go get tested and go to an endocrinologist and they can help you. And I know everybody listening is like, hey, that's not very helpful. We've been there, we've done that. It doesn't work right? We don't get the help.
Erin Holt [00:32:58]:
And he also went on to say that hormone imbalance isn't real. It's just an excuse that people use to not work out and to not diet, which is just lacks such compassion, lacks so much understanding. And I mean, when have you ever seen good, positive, sustainable change come through shame tactics? It just doesn't happen. But I think that we don't have to throw out one whole paradigm in order to build another one. I don't think it has to be this or that. You were saying, like, I think outside the box, but I also want to learn about the box itself too. And I think there are just so many people that are out there screaming about misinformation and it's not misinformation or misappropriation of the science just because it misaligns with your beliefs. We have to be open.
Erin Holt [00:33:47]:
All the controversy about everything is actually doing us a lot of disservice. I think as humans who are trying to live a healthy life, it's overwhelming enough so just to shout you're doing it wrong from every side of the internet. I'm just tired of that. I'm really tired of that.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:34:05]:
Yeah, same. And what I'll say here, and this goes to the psychology philosophy background. One of the sicknesses of the human brain in my mind is binary and dichotomous and biased thinking. And what I mean by that is that we're programmed to find differences, right? And we're also programmed to think that our side of the equation is the better side of the equation. And so wisdom comes from and all the wisest people that have been around on the planet, wisdom comes from taking the other position. And this is ancient philosophy. This is Daoism. Essentially, most people, when they look at the yin and yang symbol, they see a white fish eating the tail of a blackfish and a blackfish eating the tail of the whitefish and they just see that direction.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:34:49]:
What they don't understand is that the blackfish was able to consume the whitefish. The blackfish itself kills itself. It disappears because now it's just all black. So we need these two opposing points of view to actually understand what's going on. The problem is we see them as opposing points of view instead of synergistic points of view. In other words, you can't understand day without night. And we also understand that it just doesn't become nighttime. There's dusk and then there's dawn.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:35:21]:
And in that dusk dawn state in that gray zone is where the truth lies. We've seen this with COVID. To me, with the pandemic, to me, what happened was two sides saying I'm right, you're wrong, and the other side saying, no, I'm right, you're wrong. And to me, I'm going both sides have some things that are right and some things that are wrong. And very few people, there were some, but there were very few people who could avoid the binary black and white thinking and were taking the best from both worlds, saying things like, okay, look, perhaps we need vaccines, but we should also be able to question the efficacy of these things and test whether they're effective or not and be a little bit careful and asking the tough questions about should we be doing lockdowns and for how long. Now, of course, we were in a time where we had incredible uncertainty about this, and so it makes sense we're a little bit confused. However, from my perspective, you can see very quickly people in medicine setting up these camps.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:36:24]:
I just simply don't like to do that. That's the whole point of functional medicine. It's why you and I do what we do, because knowing you from following you, you're a very gray thinker. You think in the middle. So do I. I would say we're rare, Erin, you and me, in that regard. Functional medicine really is that gray zone. It's basically know, it's very simple to us, but it seems not simple to other people.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:36:46]:
You don't go from being completely healthy to sick, right? There's a dusk and a dawn phase where you're moving into sickness, and that is where you should be catching people. That's what Erin and I do. We work in this gray zone because long before you become diseased, you develop dysfunction, and we want to correct that dysfunction, which is why we practice functional medicine and functional nutrition. And ultimately, anyone who's thinking in black and whites, I think, is doing their patients a disservice, their clients a disservice, and themselves a disservice. As a layperson, trying to get help setting up camps does no one any favors. You should be looking at all different aspects of things. I'll tell you one of the things I do to avoid this, just politically speaking, if you looked at my Facebook feed, you would think Jade was a right wing nut job. If you looked at my sort of Twitter feed, you might go, Jade is a liberal nut job.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:37:46]:
I specifically set myself up so that I get opposing views from different places. And we have to do that because if we don't, we'll just get fed back to ourselves what we think we know. And this particular person who called me out, these call out cultures online, it's fine. It's part of the culture. I think what's missed there is people who are buying into this kind of thing. What they're not seeing is that bias of this type and dogma of that type blinds you to other things that could potentially work. So while I understand it, and I do think there is a time and a place to call out people who perhaps aren't as qualified and things like that, I think it's usually a very bad look. And when we're just talking about ourselves and getting ourselves help, it's almost always going to be in the gray zone.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:38:37]:
So for me, I tend to look for people like yourself who are very balanced, who can see both sides and are walking that line, versus individuals who are extreme. And you'll see it if we have another pandemic or anything like that. You'll continue to see it, it seems like it's getting worse. And the final thing I'll say here, because obviously you can tell I'm passionate about it, is it's up to all of us who are listening, and in this conversation right now, all of us listening to this show, me and Erin and all of you listening, it's up to us to be the experience and the example. People start to adjust their thinking when their peers adjust their thinking. We are an experience for the world, and we are an example for the world. And so when we start showing up in a balanced, non binary, non biased way, the people around us will start doing that as well. And so I think that's what we need to be doing with metabolism.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:39:32]:
We need to be doing that with politics. We need to be doing that in all areas. I actually think that's the way that culture is evolving.
Erin Holt [00:39:39]:
Yeah. And I love to learn, and I love to learn from other people. And when I'm seeking out, who do I want to learn from, it's always the people that have a lot of experience. So maybe not the loudest voice in the room or the biggest Instagram account, but maybe they've been doing this work for a really long time. They have a lot of practice with actual human bodies, hundreds, if not thousands, and they listen to people's lived experiences, and they use that. So maybe not every single thing they say has a white paper to back it up, but they listen to actual stories from people, and they believe them, and they use that to kind of guide their philosophy and their beliefs. And I think that that's sometimes missing.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:40:23]:
It's part art and part science, right? It's like, bottom line is it's always part art and part science. And for you listening, if you're kind of like, well, what's the art part? The art part is what Erin and I were talking about. It's listening to the biofeedback signals. That's the art part. And then the science part is certainly understanding the research. And then from my perspective, you have to understand research is a tool for averages, not individuals. And so then what you do is you use the research to refine your approach. You try it on, hey, maybe I'll try keto, maybe I'll try fasting, maybe I'll try this, maybe I'll try that supplement, and then you see what's my metabolism think.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:40:55]:
I might like it psychologically, but does my metabolism like it physiologically? It's going to tell me. And that's the way we do this, and that's the way that you adjust. And when you work with usually a functional practitioner, that's what you're going to get.
Erin Holt [00:41:08]:
Well, maybe that's a whole other conversation. I don't think we have time. I want to go back to the lion discussion. When you were talking about safety versus safeness, and I've never heard it put that way, and I'm thinking a lot about that. But can we take this conversation into dieting for weight loss? At what point does that trigger potential lack of safety? I mean, we've all heard kind of like move more, eat less, and that's the recipe for weight loss, which can absolutely be true and appropriate in some situations. But I think about the underslept, overstressed, under resourced average person and maybe going on a 1300 calorie diet and going to CrossFit or Orangetheory six days a week, it's probably not going to end well for that person. So I think this idea is oversimplified, but it's still kind of like where we land when we're not really sure what to do. I want to lose weight.
Erin Holt [00:42:07]:
I want to get fit. I'm just going to default to this. I'm just going to move my body more and eat less. And you had put a post recently like what you said it was mind the calorie gap. And you were talking about the gap between caloric intake and caloric output is a major metabolic stressor, which is not dissimilar to things that I've talked about on the show before. But can you speak into that a little bit more, particularly for the woman who is looking to lose weight or get fit?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:42:35]:
Yeah, I'll tell you, I'll drive this home with a story from a near death experience I had. It will explain what happened. I was driving across country and I decided to go for a hike in the Grand Canyon. I'd never been before, and I was by myself. And the day before doing that, I fasted all day, drank a ton of water, and I had never understood what the Grand Canyon was. Middle of the summer, this is about five years ago, and I start going on this hike. Well, they basically had to pull me off that mountain just about. I barely made it out of there because I became hyponatremic.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:43:04]:
I had no water. I was losing so much salt. It was so hot out there, right? Now, you might say, what does this have to do with Erin's question? Well, it has to do with the fact that you don't go on a hike in 112 degree weather in the Grand Canyon without being prepared. That was basically like me saying, I'm going to go on a diet and lose weight without preparing my metabolism for that stress. Right? So that's what most people do. They're like, I'm going to lose weight, I'm going to go on a diet. And their metabolism is not conditioned to be under that kind of stress.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:43:34]:
When you go from a couch potato to a CrossFitting paleo person overnight, that is just subbing one stress for another stress. That's what I did. No one in their right mind would do what I did. It's like a no duh moment. You're just like thinking to yourself, Jade, what the hell did you do that for? No one would try to drive across country and go, I'm not going to pack anything. I'm not going to fill up my car and I'm just going to drive. No one would try to enter their car into a racing competition without getting the tires changed and all that kind of stuff. But that's what we do in a very silly way.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:44:08]:
When we want to go on diets and try to lose weight, we just go, I'm just going to change my eating right away. Well, that is a stress for the physiology. This is what people don't understand. Whether you're eating more and exercising less, the couch potato, or whether you're exercising more and eating less, the dieter. Isn't it interesting that both of their shmec, their biofeedback, don't they both have issues with hunger, energy and cravings? The chronic dieter has issues with hunger, energy and cravings. The chronic couch potato has issues with hunger, energy and cravings. Why? Because both states are stressing out their physiology. We even see this in science.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:44:44]:
We've actually seen that abrupt keto diets, they can be beneficial over the long run, but in the first few days, they make you more insulin resistant. Going from a very high calorie diet to a very low calorie fasting state in the short term can make you more insulin resistant. Why? Because glucocorticoids go up, cortisol goes up. That's another way to become insulin resistant. People don't know this. And in the real world, what happens before you even clear that initial stress? People, they get one day, and then they get, my cravings are so bad, I'm just going to binge, and I'll try to fast the next day. And that is a very stressful situation for the body.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:45:19]:
So the gap between calorie intake and output, eating more and exercising less, or eating less and exercising more is a stress to the physiology. We don't realize there's other ways to do this. You can eat less and exercise less, which narrows that calorie gap a little bit, right? You can eat more and exercise more, which narrows that calorie gap a little bit. Eat less, exercise less. That's what the hunter gatherers do. That's what the old Parisian lifestyle was. Lots of walking, not a lot of heavy exercise, but lots of walking and very little calories. I mean, even the last time I was in Paris, two years ago, you still see people eating their croissants and their baguettes and all the foods that we're told not to eat here in the United States.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:46:02]:
And yet these people are walking up their four story flats and they're still walking a lot to and from. And they tend to remain fairly lean. Of course, that's changing in Europe now, but the hunter gatherers are like that, too. They would walk anywhere from 8000 to 12,000 steps a day. Not that much. Most of us could do that. And they're not eating huge amounts of calories because they simply can't get them. Usually most of them are consuming below 2000 calories per day.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:46:27]:
When we study these people that's an eat less exercise less lifestyle. And then of course, there's the eat more exercise more lifestyle, which is the lifestyle of an athlete. No athlete in her right mind or his right mind is going to cut calories. They do not do that. If they want to perform well at their sport, they exercise and they eat enough to fuel that exercise. These two metabolic toggles are the ones we need to play in rather than the couch potato and the dieter toggle because they're less stressful on the system. So if you're someone who loves exercise, then eat just enough to fuel that exercise. If you're someone who doesn't like exercise, fine.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:47:02]:
You're going to have to cut your calories down via food. And we all have to move. People say, oh, we're built to run. No, we're not. We're built to walk. We are walkers. We are not sitters. We should be up and moving around as much as possible.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:47:15]:
And when you do things this way, it changes things. And the other thing I'll say that you alluded to, Erin, is that when your goal is weight loss, right, psychologically speaking, that is the wrong goal and the reason why it's the wrong goal. It's very similar to when we were teenagers and you had a crush on somebody and you were crushing after them like crazy and they were just like, this person's so needy and they'd just run away from it. Wouldn't matter how hard that you'd want to get their attention, they'd be like and stiff arm you. But as soon as you were like, I'm not interested in you, then all of a sudden they were interested in you. It's sort of like that with weight loss. The more needy you are, the more clingy you are. Let me try to lose weight, the more it will seem to elude you because you don't realize you're putting yourself under psychological stress.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:47:57]:
So if you just switch the goal a little bit and just go, you know what, I want to feel better, right? I want to feel better. I want to understand my body. I want to see this as a process. You arrive when arrival is no longer the goal, so to speak. And so what happens is you just simply say, I'm going to treat this as a process. I'm going to go one at a time. I'm going to start with I'm just going to stop eating junk food and walk more. That's step one and that's the goal.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:48:23]:
Let me just get 8,000, 10,000 steps a day. I'm not trying to lose weight. I'm just trying to get my steps up and let me just not eat food that is packaged and junk food. We all know what junk food is. So you just stop eating junk food and you start walking and that's your goal. Those two things are your goal. Weight loss should never be the thing driving it, because weight loss is an amorphous thing anyway. Sometimes it scales up, sometimes it scales down.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:48:50]:
Sometimes you look in the mirror and you look fat as hell to yourself. Regardless, you could be down on the scale and you just don't feel good or look good in your body. And so from my perspective, you want to begin to readjust and rejigger this idea that I got to look good. And by the way, I'm middle aged now, so one of the things that happens is vanity concerns are only motivated to a 20-30 year old if that. All of a sudden, as you age, vanity concerns become less and less and less, and vanity concerns are fleeting. So they're not going to hold you to that point where you're like, I got to keep living this lifestyle, right? Whereas purpose pursuits are forever. And so the idea is then, okay, well, how do I want to look, function, feel, so that I can do what I do? I don't know about you, Erin, but we both teach the same thing. I see myself, my purpose as a teacher, and I try to attach the way I look, function, and feel my health to my ability to perform this, to keep my brain sharp, to have the energy to do what I need to do, to have the energy to go through the stress that I'm going through now.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:49:51]:
That becomes a more sustainable reason for me doing what I'm doing. No one at the end of my life is going to be like, Jade had such a great six pack. Wasn't he awesome with his six pack? Or, no one at the end of my life is going to be like, Jade had so much money in his bank account. What they're going to do is they're going to know he was an incredible teacher, incredibly kind. He was there for me. He made time, he was generous. Those are the things they're going to say about me. But more importantly, those are the things I'm going to appreciate about myself.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:50:19]:
And when we start focusing on that stuff and being healthy and fit so that we can be more of that, I think it changes the conversation. I know that's little bit woo woo for some people, but I'm telling you, those are the people that I see be successful when they come in and they go, I want to stay healthy and fit for my grandkids. I want to be able to perform at a high level in my work because I feel like my brain fog is there. And those are the people who make the biggest difference when someone comes in and goes, I want to look good for my high school reunion. I'm like good luck. You may or may not look good on the day of your high school reunion, but I can guarantee with that goal you're not going to look very good a couple of months after for most people.
Erin Holt [00:50:58]:
Yeah, I mean, I'm 39, so I will say, still vain. Still vain. However, my goals have definitely shifted into more immune health. Like, I just want to feel good. And brain, because my brain is my money maker. It's important. It's kind of a big deal. So I totally agree with that.
Erin Holt [00:53:02]:
I want to talk a little bit about exercise. Because you're a fitness freak, you can talk to this, and I would like partially credit you for my shift a few years ago toward walking and weightlifting as my two primary forms of exercise. I walk a lot.
Erin Holt [00:53:44]:
It's my favorite, and I do like to lift. But my goal moving into that was overall health and feeling good in my body, I will say that. And that was the way that I chose to do it. But what I thought was really interesting because I don't have a scale. I haven't weighed myself, and I don't just don't weigh myself. But I had to go to the doctors a couple of months ago because I had the flu. It's part of my July crisis. And they had me get on a scale.
Erin Holt [00:54:11]:
And I was really kind of interested to see that I was significantly under what I consider to be my sort of weight set point. I'm usually hovering around like 150. It's just like where my body goes, kind of despite what I do. And I was below that and I'm like, I've just been walking and lifting weights for two years. But that was not my primary goal, was I was not intentionally trying to lose weight.
Erin Holt [00:54:38]:
I just wanted to feel good. So I think it can be a both. And what would you say is for somebody that's looking to maybe we can speak to two different cohorts or maybe it's all the same. If somebody just wants to feel good in their body, what's the best approach from an exercise standpoint? And if somebody wants to lose weight, what's the best approach from an exercise standpoint?
Dr. Jade Teta [00:55:02]:
Yeah, in my opinion, it's both. And there is going to be some question here. You should always do a little bit of what you love, but what you love is not always what works. So I'll give you if you had told me I was going to be a walking proponent ten years ago, actually, ten years ago I was, but like 20 years ago, I would have laughed and said, Erin, get out of here. There's no way walking, what does that do? But it really just comes from understanding the physiology and working with clients. So to me, walking, yes, because it's the only activity, really, one of the only ones that simultaneously sensitizes the body to insulin, lowers cortisol levels, pretty much everything else will raise cortisol as an activity. Not necessarily bad when you're doing exercise, by the way, but walking, and it can be done a very long period of time and it doesn't seem to have the negative consequences of raising hunger for most people, unless you're a professional hiker or something like that. And for most people, it's not compatible with eating.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:55:56]:
So most people aren't going to be walking down a greenway eating a Big Mac, basically. So it has multiple and yes, it burns some calories. So from my perspective, that's the number one thing. It's sort of like the lifestyle adaptogen that everyone should be doing, walking. Then you go, okay, so got my walking down. To me, that comes first. Become a mover instead of a sitter. That's the first move that everyone should make, and it might be the only move you need to make.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:56:24]:
Go tell the Parisians that they got to do metabolic conditioning workouts and the hunter gatherers, they might laugh at you. And they're way leaner than most people in the United States. So the next thing is then, okay, well, I got walking down. What do I do next? Should I run? Should I do a bunch of cardio? Unfortunately, most people think that if they don't get breathless, they didn't get a good workout. Now, there's nothing wrong with cardio except for the fact that when you look at research and the biggest study I like to tell people about, because it was done in perimenopausal women, women between the ages of 35 and 65, which is most of the people you're going to see if you're a clinician, that's the age range you're going to see. And those are the people you're going to see. And this was in the alpha and beta trials out of Canada.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:57:09]:
So they were basically looking and they had different cohorts. Group one did 60 minutes, five days per week running on a treadmill. That's a lot, right? An hour a day for five days per week running on a treadmill. Another group, 45 minutes running on a treadmill, five days per week. Third group, 30 minutes, five days per week running on a treadmill. They basically were told, don't make any conscious changes with your diet. So most people would say, well, everyone lost weight, they didn't change their diet, right? So they must have lost weight. 25% did lose weight, the other 75% didn't.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:57:42]:
50% of those stayed the same, lost a little, gained a little, basically were in the same range and 25% gained weight. Why? In part, it was because they overcompensated with food unconsciously, because they were hungry and having cravings. So the reason I go through that is because there's going to be about 25% of you listening to this, based on that study, roughly, who can do cardio all day long and not get hungry and not overeat. You probably know who you are and you probably have a friend that you're like, oh yeah, she must be or he must be that kind of person because they run like crazy and they do great. But that's only a quarter of people. Everyone else, all the rest of us, probably need to do something that doesn't elevate hunger, or if it does, tends to drive any extra calories we consume into muscle gain rather than fat gain. And the only exercise that is going to drive extra calories into muscle is resistance training. And resistance training seems to.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:58:35]:
Now, we need more studies for this, but it seems to have less of a hunger response than long duration cardio. Short duration workouts will have a slight depression of hunger in the short run. You can even get nauseous, in a sense from very short, intense stuff, but then it has a hunger increasing response. Very long, moderate duration or high intensity has a hunger craving response right away. But resistance training done between 20 minutes and maybe 60 minutes seems not to have that effect. Now, again, we need more robust studies to really tease this out. So Erin and I can have a conversation several years from now and be like, was this right or wrong? So based on that, hunger doesn't increase or walking doesn't increase hunger. Resistance training doesn't seem to increase hunger, and if it does, at least walking is sensitizing the body to insulin.
Dr. Jade Teta [00:59:24]:
And resistance training has a very interesting impact on insulin resistance. Most people think insulin resistance comes from the whole body. No, your body has different components that can be more or less insulin resistant. So the liver can be sensitive or resistant, the muscle cells can be sensitive or resistant, the fat cells can be sensitive or resistant. What you want is a sensitive liver, a sensitive muscle and an insensitive fat depot if you want to lose fat, right? And so resistance training is one of the only ones that makes the liver due to these muscle myokines that are released from muscle when you move. And you release signaling molecules that go to the liver and say handle insulin better, and they also help the muscle handle insulin better. And so not only are you using extra calories to gain lean muscle mass, but you're resensitizing both the muscle component and the liver component to insulin. And so these two components, for those reasons I just mentioned, walking and resistance training are going to be the things that work the best for most people.
Dr. Jade Teta [01:00:26]:
I'll just say this and I'm sorry, I'm rambling on, but to me we have it wrong with resistance training. The most important people that should be resistance training are women in menopause or past the menopausal transition. And for some reason resistance training has been seen as a young man's thing. The person who's going to get the most benefit is actually going to be a perimenopausal, menopausal, postmenopausal, woman to maintain their muscle mass, to use some of their, they tend to be low in estrogen, progesterone and testosterone, but they're oftentimes a little bit more relatively dominant in testosterone than they were in their younger years. To me, that's why these two forms of exercise, they help with hunger, they reduce stress, they deal with insulin resistance, and they don't have any of this compensatory mechanism. The final thing I'll say here is if you love running, do it. It's very good for depression. It's the best form of exercise for mood enhancement depression.
Dr. Jade Teta [01:01:23]:
Although resistance training is the best for self esteem, they've actually studies in anorexics where they actually have them resistance train and they're far less likely to go back to being an anorexic. They like their bodies better. So resistance training is better for self esteem. Cardio is better for mood. So if you're someone who has mood issues, then you probably want to keep doing your cardio. Do enough to get the benefits, not so much that it starts making you hungry. It's kind of the same thing with food. If you love wine and you love tiramisu like me, the Italian in me, then you can't say that you're never going to have those.
Dr. Jade Teta [01:01:56]:
You learn to have them enough, but not too much. And so that's what I would say on exercise.
Erin Holt [01:02:02]:
All right, I'll let you go. I've been talking to you forever. Thank you so, so much for coming on the show. We talked about a lot. I super appreciate you. I super appreciate your work. Can you tell everybody where to find more of you?
Dr. Jade Teta [01:02:13]:
Yeah, sure. You can find me at jadeteta.com. That's my website. You can also find me at nextlevelhuman.com. That is my podcast. And if you're interested in some of the philosophical, psychological stuff Erin and I discovered, nextlevelhuman.com is where to go. And then @jadeteta on all the social platforms. And Erin, thank you for your work.
Dr. Jade Teta [01:02:33]:
I was really touched to get an invite from you because I love your work and I appreciate you so much.
Erin Holt [01:02:38]:
Awesome. I appreciate you, too. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining me for this episode of the Funk'tional Nutrition podcast. If you got something from today's show, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review, share with a friend, and keep coming back for more. Take care of you.
