[00:00:37] Vesna: Welcome to the Peak Revival Podcast. My name is Vesna. Today I'm gonna talk about the new wellness revolution for women leaders from biohacking to body wisdom. So biohacking has been trendy for a while and it's definitely gaining momentum. I speak to women who are more interested to know bio hacking principles, and while a lot of those. Principles are great. I feel like we ignore a fundamental truth. And so by hacking can look like ice baths, extreme fasting, lots of supplementation, wearables, you know, the aura ring, which makes you obsessed about how much sleep that you have, right?
[00:01:13] like lots of data. I don't know if we need all of this data. And for women, it feels like another to-do list, right? So imagine you've had a busy day, you've got a lot of things to juggle. You didn't have a good sleep that night. You wake up in the morning and you watch you saying, you know what?
[00:01:26] You probably need to go to bed at four o'clock in the afternoon to catch up on a good sleep. And that puts you back already, right? You're already feeling like, oh, I'm so behind even on that. And so I don't know whether we need access to all of that data. We did pretty well without it, and I dunno if it's actually helping us.
[00:01:43] The other thing is that it's kind of this idea of Optimisation at all costs. Like we are really pushing ourselves to be this optimal being and ignoring the body's innate intelligence and the ability to self-regulate and heal ourselves. We're not tapping into that [00:02:00] more, we're tapping into devices, um, which I think is not our superpower.
[00:02:05] I'll be honest.
[00:02:06] So for women that I speak to, it feels like another kind of another hustle, right? Another thing that they have to do. And if I'm not hacking my biology, then I'm falling behind and it's easy to get caught up on that. So it's another mental load. It leads to kind of this idea of perfectionism. Feeling that your body is a project to fix and It's turning wellbeing into more performance sport.
[00:02:27] And so I see, I speak to women who come to my workshops and they're like, I don't know what to eat. One person says this and one person says that, and I should be doing ketosis or I should be a carnival. I'm saying eat carbohydrates. Like, and everyone's got the science right. And you know, I was listening to someone talk about ketosis the other day, and ketogenic diets is something that I did many years ago in my practice, okay.
[00:02:47] 20 years ago. So it's not anything new and I did it back then. And I could see that it was unsustainable for my clients. Right? And there is, there will be times where ketosis is important for making different changes in the body and different changes to health and metabolic health and mental health. But overall, I saw it that, you know, my, my patients would lose a lot of weight.
[00:03:10] I see them a year later. And they'd put most of it back on because it was unsustainable. And so I didn't, I didn't like that, you know, all this hard work that they did, they weren't able to sustain it. So what's the point of it? Right? And so I was listening to someone talk about ketosis and you know, they're like, take this supplement and take that supplement.
[00:03:27] You're electrolytes and you need this, and you need that. And I was like, that does not sound like I'm living aligned with my body's intelligence, right? So at the end of the day, it is confusing to understand what to eat. Because there is so much information out there, and I just think that if we are taking out major food groups and we're having to supplement back what we've taken out, that doesn't make any sense.
[00:03:50] That means that our body needs it, right? And we are gonna thrive with it, and then we're gonna rely on supplements without it. And then we have to look at supplementation on a long-term. I'm not [00:04:00] big on supplements, right? I, if you come through my programs, you'll see that I recommend supplementation, herbal medicines for different things.
[00:04:06] It's a periodic thing, gut repair, liver detox, um, sometimes things for mood and for stress, but temporary, right? the quality of supplements is what concerns me, right? So people buy things from the supermarket or wherever, and the quality is not quite there.
[00:04:20] And so we could be putting a lot of binders and fillers and other excipients into our body and which could have a detrimental effect. And so at the end of the day, Nothing is going to replace a good diet. Okay? And so if you're having to take major food groups out and replace it with supplements, you're gonna have to wonder.
[00:04:37] Why you're doing that, right? Your body needs those things. So why are we replacing that food with something synthetic?
[00:04:44] And the biggest reason why I don't like it is because Biohacking puts a emphasis on something outside of you that you need in order to be well. Whereas health and wellbeing starts inside, like we have a self-regulated system, so you cut your finger or you get a cold or a flu. You're not worried about mobilizing the immune system to attack this virus or this bacteria or to repair the cut and, and full a clot and grow new skin cells, right?
[00:05:10] You're not, you're not focused on that. You know that you're immune. System is automatic, and that's The intelligence of the body. You know, when you go to sleep at night, your brain is actually shrinks a bit so it can detoxify. It processes emotions. Your immune system is detecting any rogue cancer cells, right?
[00:05:26] There is so much happening in our body that, you know, a device just cannot do for us. And so I think the biggest reason why I don't like biohacking is because it takes you away. Your focus is no longer on your body's internal. Self-regulating system, this hugely intelligent body that we carry around all day, but your focus and the direction that you're looking is wearables and that I have to do extreme fasting and that, I have to do an ice bath every morning, or I have to track my sleep or whatever it is.
[00:05:56] None of those things are bad, right? But it's just when we, when all of our focus is there, [00:06:00] we, feel like. This is another job, right? This is another thing on our to-do list that we have to manage. And it's not like that, right? We came to this earth with a self-regulating system. That's wasn't our job. We just have to live more aligned with nature.
[00:06:14] you know, there was a really great movie that I watched. I was on a plane it was called Wilding. And I really recommend that you watch it, a couple in the uk they transformed their huge farming property, which had been a farming property for about 200 years.
[00:06:28] So it was this enormous, enormous property. And they rewild it, the property, right, because they could see that actually, they were destroying the trees and the soil that they had didn't have soil anymore. They just had dirt. All the micron organism. Nothing could live in that soil anymore. the whole point of me sharing this story is that the things that happened that animals did, as a part of that rewilding, like a bird would pick up an, an acorn from an oak tree and, and put it in the middle of a blackberry bush so that as it was, going into the soil and growing, it wouldn't be eaten by the oth other animals.
[00:07:04] It was protected by the thorny blackberry bush and grew up into an oak tree. And when it was stronger and it appeared through, then it was stronger to grow. Right? they had all of this thistle, which is a pest plant. you know, they were very concerned because their neighboring farmers were, you know, they were like, this is gonna get us shut down.
[00:07:22] Right? And then all of a sudden she woke up one morning and there was thousands of butterflies that came. And the butterflies. They planted their eggs on, the thistle and the caterpillars came out. They ate all the thistle. Everywhere. and then the thistle never came back year after year. Right. And so there was these really amazing scenarios, right.
[00:07:43] Of the intelligence of nature. Right. And she was saying that when a cow, gives birth, the first thing she does is she goes to eat nettle plants. 'cause nettle has, is very rich in iron, okay? And that's the only time she'll eat nettle is after she's given birth. She won't eat it any other time of the year.
[00:07:59] And like [00:08:00] I grew up with cows, they don't look very smart to me, but there's an intelligence that's guiding them, right? And I think that We have lost touch with that intelligence.
[00:08:09] We have lost touch with the intelligence
[00:08:10] within our body,
[00:08:11] the intelligence within our life.
[00:08:13] And nature, if left alone, their strategy was they weren't able to do anything right. They had to let them roam free. Um, find their own food and find their own water. Like they were completely untouched and they thrived. Right? They really thrived and there is an intelligence in nature. There is an intelligence in the animal kingdom. There's an intelligence in your body because you know that, you know, when you go to sleep at night, you know that you are going to breathe while you're sleeping and passed out, That your heart's going to pump, that your immune system's gonna do what it needs to do.
[00:08:43] And we wanna support those things rather than ignore them, rather than thinking that we need something else outside of ourselves to do the job. Okay. And I think that if we look more towards the intelligence, we get more answers, we get more intuition, we get more of a sense of inner knowing of what we need.
[00:09:00] know, sometimes people come to my workshops, my weapon, and they're like, one person said, cut out carbohydrates. You're saying add them in. And I'm like, well. Tune into what's right for you. that's what I would always say. Tune into what's right for you.
[00:09:11] Does it feel right for you to never eat carbohydrates again, to have to replace those things with like fruits and vegetables with supplementation? Does that seem right? And so you've gotta ask yourself those questions and go with what resonates with you. I'm not against biohacking. I've definitely used different tools like glucose monitors, and I've got now something for meditation just to check my brainwaves.
[00:09:34] And I use these things temporarily, right? For a bit of inside knowledge, but not ongoing, right? And so I'm not against them, but I just, I think your body's wisdom and body's intelligence is far stronger than any data that you're gonna get from one of those apps. And if you tune into that direction, you'll have higher levels of health and wellbeing and look and feel better than you have in years.
