Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast.
Speaker:My name is Vesna.
Speaker:Today I'm gonna talk about the new wellness revolution for women leaders
Speaker:from biohacking to body wisdom.
Speaker:So biohacking has been trendy for a while and it's definitely gaining momentum.
Speaker:I speak to women who are more interested to know bio hacking
Speaker:principles, and while a lot of those.
Speaker:Principles are great.
Speaker:I feel like we ignore a fundamental truth.
Speaker:And so by hacking can look like ice baths, extreme fasting, lots of
Speaker:supplementation, wearables, you know, the aura ring, which makes you obsessed
Speaker:about how much sleep that you have, right?
Speaker:like lots of data.
Speaker:I don't know if we need all of this data.
Speaker:And for women, it feels like another to-do list, right?
Speaker:So imagine you've had a busy day, you've got a lot of things to juggle.
Speaker:You didn't have a good sleep that night.
Speaker:You wake up in the morning and you watch you saying, you know what?
Speaker:You probably need to go to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon
Speaker:to catch up on a good sleep.
Speaker:And that puts you back already, right?
Speaker:You're already feeling like, oh, I'm so behind even on that.
Speaker:And so I don't know whether we need access to all of that data.
Speaker:We did pretty well without it, and I dunno if it's actually helping us.
Speaker:The other thing is that it's kind of this idea of Optimisation at all costs.
Speaker:Like we are really pushing ourselves to be this optimal being and ignoring the
Speaker:body's innate intelligence and the ability to self-regulate and heal ourselves.
Speaker:We're not tapping into that more, we're tapping into devices, um,
Speaker:which I think is not our superpower.
Speaker:I'll be honest.
Speaker:So for women that I speak to, it feels like another kind
Speaker:of another hustle, right?
Speaker:Another thing that they have to do.
Speaker:And if I'm not hacking my biology, then I'm falling behind and it's
Speaker:easy to get caught up on that.
Speaker:So it's another mental load.
Speaker:It leads to kind of this idea of perfectionism.
Speaker:Feeling that your body is a project to fix and It's turning wellbeing
Speaker:into more performance sport.
Speaker:And so I see, I speak to women who come to my workshops and they're
Speaker:like, I don't know what to eat.
Speaker:One person says this and one person says that, and I should be doing
Speaker:ketosis or I should be a carnival.
Speaker:I'm saying eat carbohydrates.
Speaker:Like, and everyone's got the science right.
Speaker:And you know, I was listening to someone talk about ketosis the other day, and
Speaker:ketogenic diets is something that I did many years ago in my practice, okay.
Speaker:20 years ago.
Speaker:So it's not anything new and I did it back then.
Speaker:And I could see that it was unsustainable for my clients.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And there is, there will be times where ketosis is important for making
Speaker:different changes in the body and different changes to health and
Speaker:metabolic health and mental health.
Speaker:But overall, I saw it that, you know, my, my patients would lose a lot of weight.
Speaker:I see them a year later.
Speaker:And they'd put most of it back on because it was unsustainable.
Speaker:And so I didn't, I didn't like that, you know, all this hard work that they
Speaker:did, they weren't able to sustain it.
Speaker:So what's the point of it?
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And so I was listening to someone talk about ketosis and you know,
Speaker:they're like, take this supplement and take that supplement.
Speaker:You're electrolytes and you need this, and you need that.
Speaker:And I was like, that does not sound like I'm living aligned with
Speaker:my body's intelligence, right?
Speaker:So at the end of the day, it is confusing to understand what to eat.
Speaker:Because there is so much information out there, and I just think that if we are
Speaker:taking out major food groups and we're having to supplement back what we've
Speaker:taken out, that doesn't make any sense.
Speaker:That means that our body needs it, right?
Speaker:And we are gonna thrive with it, and then we're gonna rely
Speaker:on supplements without it.
Speaker:And then we have to look at supplementation on a long-term.
Speaker:I'm not big on supplements, right?
Speaker:I, if you come through my programs, you'll see that I recommend supplementation,
Speaker:herbal medicines for different things.
Speaker:It's a periodic thing, gut repair, liver detox, um, sometimes things for mood
Speaker:and for stress, but temporary, right?
Speaker:the quality of supplements is what concerns me, right?
Speaker:So people buy things from the supermarket or wherever, and
Speaker:the quality is not quite there.
Speaker:And so we could be putting a lot of binders and fillers and other
Speaker:excipients into our body and which could have a detrimental effect.
Speaker:And so at the end of the day, Nothing is going to replace a good diet.
Speaker:Okay?
Speaker:And so if you're having to take major food groups out and replace it with
Speaker:supplements, you're gonna have to wonder.
Speaker:Why you're doing that, right?
Speaker:Your body needs those things.
Speaker:So why are we replacing that food with something synthetic?
Speaker:And the biggest reason why I don't like it is because Biohacking puts a
Speaker:emphasis on something outside of you that you need in order to be well.
Speaker:Whereas health and wellbeing starts inside, like we have a self-regulated
Speaker:system, so you cut your finger or you get a cold or a flu.
Speaker:You're not worried about mobilizing the immune system to attack this
Speaker:virus or this bacteria or to repair the cut and, and full a clot
Speaker:and grow new skin cells, right?
Speaker:You're not, you're not focused on that.
Speaker:You know that you're immune.
Speaker:System is automatic, and that's The intelligence of the body.
Speaker:You know, when you go to sleep at night, your brain is actually
Speaker:shrinks a bit so it can detoxify.
Speaker:It processes emotions.
Speaker:Your immune system is detecting any rogue cancer cells, right?
Speaker:There is so much happening in our body that, you know, a
Speaker:device just cannot do for us.
Speaker:And so I think the biggest reason why I don't like biohacking
Speaker:is because it takes you away.
Speaker:Your focus is no longer on your body's internal.
Speaker:Self-regulating system, this hugely intelligent body that we carry around
Speaker:all day, but your focus and the direction that you're looking is wearables and that
Speaker:I have to do extreme fasting and that, I have to do an ice bath every morning, or I
Speaker:have to track my sleep or whatever it is.
Speaker:None of those things are bad, right?
Speaker:But it's just when we, when all of our focus is there, we, feel like.
Speaker:This is another job, right?
Speaker:This is another thing on our to-do list that we have to manage.
Speaker:And it's not like that, right?
Speaker:We came to this earth with a self-regulating system.
Speaker:That's wasn't our job.
Speaker:We just have to live more aligned with nature.
Speaker:you know, there was a really great movie that I watched.
Speaker:I was on a plane it was called Wilding.
Speaker:And I really recommend that you watch it, a couple in the uk they transformed their
Speaker:huge farming property, which had been a farming property for about 200 years.
Speaker:So it was this enormous, enormous property.
Speaker:And they rewild it, the property, right, because they could see that actually, they
Speaker:were destroying the trees and the soil that they had didn't have soil anymore.
Speaker:They just had dirt.
Speaker:All the micron organism.
Speaker:Nothing could live in that soil anymore.
Speaker:the whole point of me sharing this story is that the things that happened
Speaker:that animals did, as a part of that rewilding, like a bird would pick up
Speaker:an, an acorn from an oak tree and, and put it in the middle of a blackberry
Speaker:bush so that as it was, going into the soil and growing, it wouldn't
Speaker:be eaten by the oth other animals.
Speaker:It was protected by the thorny blackberry bush and grew up into an oak tree.
Speaker:And when it was stronger and it appeared through, then it was stronger to grow.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:they had all of this thistle, which is a pest plant.
Speaker:you know, they were very concerned because their neighboring farmers
Speaker:were, you know, they were like, this is gonna get us shut down.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:And then all of a sudden she woke up one morning and there was
Speaker:thousands of butterflies that came.
Speaker:And the butterflies.
Speaker:They planted their eggs on, the thistle and the caterpillars came out.
Speaker:They ate all the thistle.
Speaker:Everywhere.
Speaker:and then the thistle never came back year after year.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And so there was these really amazing scenarios, right.
Speaker:Of the intelligence of nature.
Speaker:Right.
Speaker:And she was saying that when a cow, gives birth, the first thing she does
Speaker:is she goes to eat nettle plants.
Speaker:'cause nettle has, is very rich in iron, okay?
Speaker:And that's the only time she'll eat nettle is after she's given birth.
Speaker:She won't eat it any other time of the year.
Speaker:And like I grew up with cows, they don't look very smart to me, but there's an
Speaker:intelligence that's guiding them, right?
Speaker:And I think that We have lost touch with that intelligence.
Speaker:We have lost touch with the intelligence
Speaker:within our body,
Speaker:the intelligence within our life.
Speaker:And nature, if left alone, their strategy was they weren't
Speaker:able to do anything right.
Speaker:They had to let them roam free.
Speaker:Um, find their own food and find their own water.
Speaker:Like they were completely untouched and they thrived.
Speaker:Right?
Speaker:They really thrived and there is an intelligence in nature.
Speaker:There is an intelligence in the animal kingdom.
Speaker:There's an intelligence in your body because you know that, you know, when
Speaker:you go to sleep at night, you know that you are going to breathe while you're
Speaker:sleeping and passed out, That your heart's going to pump, that your immune
Speaker:system's gonna do what it needs to do.
Speaker:And we wanna support those things rather than ignore them, rather than
Speaker:thinking that we need something else outside of ourselves to do the job.
Speaker:Okay.
Speaker:And I think that if we look more towards the intelligence, we get more answers,
Speaker:we get more intuition, we get more of a sense of inner knowing of what we need.
Speaker:know, sometimes people come to my workshops, my weapon, and they're like,
Speaker:one person said, cut out carbohydrates.
Speaker:You're saying add them in.
Speaker:And I'm like, well.
Speaker:Tune into what's right for you.
Speaker:that's what I would always say.
Speaker:Tune into what's right for you.
Speaker:Does it feel right for you to never eat carbohydrates again, to have to
Speaker:replace those things with like fruits and vegetables with supplementation?
Speaker:Does that seem right?
Speaker:And so you've gotta ask yourself those questions and go with
Speaker:what resonates with you.
Speaker:I'm not against biohacking.
Speaker:I've definitely used different tools like glucose monitors, and I've
Speaker:got now something for meditation just to check my brainwaves.
Speaker:And I use these things temporarily, right?
Speaker:For a bit of inside knowledge, but not ongoing, right?
Speaker:And so I'm not against them, but I just, I think your body's wisdom
Speaker:and body's intelligence is far stronger than any data that you're
Speaker:gonna get from one of those apps.
Speaker:And if you tune into that direction, you'll have higher levels of health
Speaker:and wellbeing and look and feel better than you have in years.