Year: 2025

I have come to realize that achievements in any area of life are journeys, and not destinations, and that the bends and bumps in the road are part of the journey. Over the past year, I have had to change how I do things, and also how I view the process.

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Those who have been following me for a while know that between March 5, 2017, and March 4, 2019, I lost 55 pounds and more than 12 inches off my waist, and put my type 2 diabetes and crazy high blood pressure into remission. I documented this process in a blog I started called “A Dietitian’s Journey”.

Much to my surprise, following a very low-carbohydrate diet during this period also put the MCAD (Mast Cell Activation Disorder) I had been diagnosed with in 2013 into remission.  

The pinnacle of my achievement was my “little black dress” moment in June of 2019; however, in August 2020, before routine testing (or vaccines) had become available, I had what my doctor assumed was Covid. I self-isolated for two weeks, but for several months afterwards, I had muscle pain and weakness, tingling and numbness in my fingertips, brain fog, and unbelievable fatigue. I went from being reasonably active and fit and hiking in Golden Ears Provincial Park in the spring, to finding it difficult to walk up or down a flight of stairs by August. It took months until I began to feel reasonably normal.

Despite having had both vaccines in the spring and summer of 2021 (no choice as a healthcare professional), I came down with what my doctor assumed was Covid again because the symptoms were the same as in August 2020: muscle aches and joint pain, being exhausted, but with the addition of feeling cold all the time.  I was loaned an oximeter by a family member whose mother is a nurse, and I found it strange that my body temperature was always two degrees below normal, even though I had fever-like symptoms.  It was then that I started to wonder whether my symptoms were due to hypothyroidism, rather than Covid.

It wasn’t until June 2022 that I was diagnosed with profound hypothyroidism, and as I’ve written about previously, it was a diagnosis that was a long time coming. I finally understood why it took me two years to lose the same amount of weight that it takes others, including my clients, less than half the amount of time to lose! 

In August 2022, I was prescribed thyroid hormone replacement medications, and once the dosage was stable, the symptoms slowly resolved over the following year, just as my doctor said they would. My weight normalized, but even though I continued to eat a low-carb diet, it did not go back to what it was before I was diagnosed. 

Things were going well with my thyroid for about a year, during which time I was going to the gym 3 times per week, but then I faced a bit of a ‘hiccup’ in early June of 2024, where it turned out that both of my thyroid meds needed to be adjusted. By the end of this summer, I was feeling much better, but what I hadn’t factored in was that the higher dose of thyroid meds would contribute to higher blood glucose levels. The higher blood sugar resulted in my insulin levels rising, which caused me to be hungry all the time (which doesn’t normally happen when limiting carbs), and to add insult to injury, all of this was causing a flare-up of Mast Cell Activation Disorder (MCAD) symptoms. Even though I was a Dietitian who understood the various mechanisms involved, I was frustrated and felt like I couldn’t win.

What worked previously wasn’t working anymore because the circumstances had changed. I realized that I needed to change with them. 

At the beginning of March, I decided to begin eating a very low-carb (ketogenic) diet instead of the low-carbohydrate pattern I had, while continuing to focus on consuming sufficient amounts of highly bioavailable protein three times per day, which I need as an older adult.

By the second week of March, I had learned about the four types of movement that Orthopedic Surgeon, Dr. Vonda Wright, recommends for retaining and building bone and muscle mass as we age. I adopted them that week.

I started walking 30 minutes per day, 4-5 times a week, and sometimes a longer walk on weekends. Once a week, I follow Dr. Wright’s “carry something heavy” recommendation. Since this was consistent with the “lift to muscle failure approach” that I used to follow based on Dr. Doug McGuff and his book Body By Science, and I already had the equipment, incorporating it wasn’t difficult. 

I consistently incorporate flexibility and equilibrium (balance) exercises into each day, such as 8-10 squats between clients and standing on one foot while I get dressed or ready for bed. In the evening, I do active stretching, gleaned from some training I took with Vinny Crispino of the Pain Academy. 

I have to take thyroid replacement hormones for the rest of my life, so this is something outside of my control.  I can keep being frustrated by their effect on my blood glucose and insulin levels, or I can change what I can in my diet and incorporate exercise to counteract the effects.  I chose the second option. Exercise enables muscle cells to take in the excess glucose, and it doesn’t require training for hours a day in the gym. It requires a 30-minute commitment a day.

Lower glucose levels mean lower insulin levels, which leads to less hunger, with gradual weight loss as a byproduct. My goal isn’t weight loss, although that’s happening. It’s to address the higher blood sugar due to the thyroid medication — and to have strong muscles and bones as I age, so that I can do things well into my 90s. I don’t want to be frail when I’m old, and that requires me to invest in activities now to avoid it. 

Being my best physically, mentally, and emotionally both now and in the future required me to change how I did things, and how I thought about them. 

I realize that achievements in all areas of my life are journeys, and not destinations, and that the bends and bumps in the road are part of it. I’ve come to accept those, and focus on the rest of the journey! 

To your good health,

Joy

 

You can follow me on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jyerdile
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BetterByDesignNutrition/

 

Copyright ©2025 BetterByDesign Nutrition Ltd.

LEGAL NOTICE: The contents of this blog, including text, images, and cited statistics as well as all other material contained here (the ”content”) are for information purposes only.  The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, medical diagnosis, and/or treatment, and is not suitable for self-administration without the knowledge of your physician and regular monitoring by your physician. Do not disregard medical advice and always consult your physician with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or before implementing anything you have read or heard in our content.

 

 

Last weekend, I listened to a podcast that featured Dr. Vonda Wright, MD who is an orthopedic surgeon and longevity expert who spoke about our choice to do nothing and become frail as we age, or to implement mobility activity so we can retain and build muscle and bone mass. It was woth sharing.

After listening, I immediately began implementing the first of the four types of movement that Dr. Wright said are essential to maintaining a vibrant lifestyle as we age. By this weekend, I had implemented the first steps of all of them. Dr. Wright uses the acronym “F.A.C.E” to represent each of four types of essential movement, so I have dubbed my daily appointment with myself to do these as “FACEtime”. 

The podcast began with Dr. Wright talking about her experiences interacting her older hospitalized patients who had fallen and broken their hip, and the reality that of those who break a hip, 30% will die. Dr. Wright’s passion is that this outcome is not inevitable. It can be prevented but it takes a conscious effort and a belief that we are worth the effort that it takes to avoid becoming frail as we age. 

Dr. Wright highlighted the difference between lifespan and health span, and that while we are all going to get older, we do not need to become frail. She said that women, on average in the U.S. live to age 80, and men to 76.4 but life expectancy does not equal health span. She pointed out that many times, the last 20 years of a person’s life is spent going to a doctor’s office three times a week in a steady decline, but that it does not have to be this way! 

We don’t need to be the victims of the passage of time that we will all succumb to if we are not intentional. We don’t need to become breakable and frail — we can apply the “medicine of mobility” to pursue a different way to age.

Dr. Wright talked about “Sedentary Death Syndrome” which are the 33 chronic diseases that kill people in the U.S., including obesity, type 2 diabetes, heart attack and stroke, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and osteoporosis — and that are directly treated by moving. Yes, we can take a pill for high blood pressure, or to lower our blood sugars if we have diabetes, but moving is the medicine that positively affects all of these. Layering Dr. Wright ‘s simple method for mobility on top of a diet that targets sufficient amounts of highly bioavailable protein and the amino acid leucine (both required to initiate muscle synthesis) rounds out the picture for aging well.

Dr. Wright points out that while there are health issues we cannot control, our lifestyle (both diet and exercise) can positively impact many things, including the health of our mitochondria (the energy of cells), the number of senescent cells that circulate, (so-called “zombie cells”), as well as the level of inflammation in our body. We do not have to be the victims of the passage of time. 

Dr. Wright emphasized that if we want to feel better now, then that is an action step. Reading more about what could happen to us and putting the book aside won’t accomplish our goal. What is required to to take action to change the trajectory of the future, or else become a victim of the passage of time.

Dr. Wright who is also a researcher said that our understanding of aging is skewed because the studies that indicate a steady decline as we age were done with a study population of people that didn’t move much. Statistics show that 70% of Americans (and she said this is quite similar around the world) don’t do any form of mobility, or exercise in a day.  What we know from these large-scale population studies is what happens if we don’t move. This really hit home with me.  There are many days that I am working at my desk from early morning and even if I use a standing desk, I have been sedentary far too much during the week.  

But what happens if we do move? What if we take sedentary living out of the occasion?

Dr. Wright’s research has found that if 35-40-year-olds — up to seniors in their 90s continue to be active their entire lives, they can maintain their bone mass, muscle mass, and cognitive function. She feels that age 35-45 is the best time to “course-correct” and choose an active lifestyle, because careers have usually been chosen, and family life is more established, and this is before things begin to change at age 45 for women (and to a lesser extent for men) due to the hormonal changes of perimenopause. 

The most encouraging thing Dr. Wright said was that it is not too late for those of us over the age of 45 who have been sedentary for too many years.

“There is no age or skill level where the strategic stress we put on our body in the form of mobility, strength training, and smart nutrition will not dramatically change the trajectory of your health.” 

Dr. Wright said we can take steps to change the fact that we have been sedentary, to feel  better and be healthier. Since our primary skill as humans is walking, even if we can’t do anything else yet, she encourages people to start by walking around the block. We don’t need to start by walking 5 miles. We just need to get up from our seated position, and move.

This is life-changing. We expect to get frail because we expect to slow down and stop moving, but that is backward. We need to expect to keep moving because our bodies are designed that way. 

So what does movement “look like” — regardless of our age?

Dr. Wright uses the acronym “F.A.C.E.” to describe the four types of movement we should all be doing to maintain a vibrant lifestyle, and on which we can layer other types of activity or sports. 

F.A.C.E. stands for:

F– Flexibility
A– Aerobic exercise
C– Carry a load
E– Equilibrium

Dr. Wright’s philosophy is that we need to incorporate these four types of exercise into our daily lives to “FACE our future” as we age. 

Flexibility is required to keep from becoming stiff and this involves regularly moving our joints through their full range of motion. If we don’t, our tendons and ligaments continue to become tighter and tighter. We need to invest in making it not so.  Two examples Dr. Wright gives for flexiblity activities are Pilates and yoga, but she mentioned that there are other types of flexiblity programs available online.

Aerobic exercise – we must invest in a healthy cardiovascular system and this does not mean high intensity excercise all the time, and it also does not mean working out in a mid-range all the time (which Dr. Wright feels is an easy way to get injured).

Dr. Wright recommends walking for 3 hours per week, broken into four 45-minute sessions. Then twice a week, after doing a walk, she recommends finishing by sprinting as fast as we can for 30 seconds, then letting our heart rate back down, then doing it again for a total of 4 times. As we age, we need these intense bursts of activity to stimulate muscle and bone building. Yes, it is grueling to move that fast, but it is only 30 seconds!  Alternatively, the 45 minutes of activity and 30 seconds of high-intensity exercise done four times, twice a week can be on a bike, an alpine, a rower, or a treadmill. 

Of course, we don’t have to start by doing it all the first week! If we are just getting into this, we can start with walking 4 times for 45 minutes and sprinting the last 30 seconds once. Then the next week, add a next layer.

Carry a load – it can be done at home with ordinary heavy objects, such as doing a farmer’s carry with two jugs of water across the front yard. Women especially need to lift heavy objects in midlife and by age 50 because when we enter peri-menopause, we no longer have estrogen stimulating our muscles to grow, and we don’t want to become the 1 in 3 women that ends up frail.

We must build muscle mass by lifting heavy. When Dr. Wright says “heavy” she means we must be able to lift our own body weight for a minimum of 2x / week.  We all need to be able to do at least 11 regular push-ups (NOT on our knees) and then progressively load the weights to do bench presses, and deadlifts, as well as pull-ups.

Why is lifting weights important?

Aside from being able to get out of a chair, or off the toilet as we age, lifting heavy enables us to produce a longevity protein called Klotho. Dr. Wright has conducted studies and found that 70-year-olds who put loads on their muscles regularly produced more Klotho than 35 year-olds who were sedentary. That’s encouraging!

E– Equilibrium and foot speed – Can we balance? Can we move our feet quickly to avoid an obstacle in our pather and avoid falling?

According to Dr. Wright, starting at age 20, we begin to lose the some of the muscle required to balance well, so being able to stand on one foot while we brush our teeth, for example, or quickly step on and off a step will enable us to stay upright and not fall, as we age.

Final Thoughts…

“FACE time” is easy to implement into our lives which is what makes it perfect. All that is required is to make the commitment, and set aside a time to do it. We make appointments with others; this is an appointment we make with ourselves to invest in our present- and future selves. 

With the recent time change, it is daylight in the morning which makes it much easier to get up an hour earlier to go for a walk, come home and shower and head to work.

If a 45 minute walk is too challenging to do at first, start with twenty minutes. Since the goal is to do 3 hours per week in four 45 minute increments, doing 3 hours over shorter sessions will get any of us over the excuse that we can’t do it. Starting is more important than getting the program perfect right away.

The first few weeks don’t have to have the four 30-second sprints at the end of a walk, but we need to plan to add them. The first time can be as one 30-second sprint after one of the walks, and then we can build up from there, adding a second, then a third, and a fourth.

Walking 4 days per week makes it easy to set two other days per week to carry a load, and we can be either be systematic about stretching daily, working a different area of our body each day, or we can follow a program. Equilibrium activities can be as easy as standing on one foot while brushing our teeth (one Dr. Wright suggests) then standing on the other leg the following day, or getting in and out of our pants or pajama bottoms standing on one foot.  It’s easy to come up with foot speed activities using a step or a hula hoop ring on the floor.

Like changing how we eat, we don’t have to do get it all perfect the first week.  All we need to do is commit to changing, and have a roadmap for successfully implementing it.  I think Dr. Wright’s method dovetails well with my approach to designing Meal Plans for peri-menopausal women, as well as older men and women which focuses on eating to retain and build muscle and bone mass.

If you would like to know more about how I can support you, please feel free to have a look at the landing page.

To your good health,

Joy

 

You can follow me on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jyerdile
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BetterByDesignNutrition/

 

Copyright ©2025 BetterByDesign Nutrition Ltd.

LEGAL NOTICE: The contents of this blog, including text, images and cited statistics as well as all other material contained here (the ”content”) are for information purposes only.  The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, medical diagnosis and/or treatment and is not suitable for self-administration without the knowledge of your physician and regular monitoring by your physician. Do not disregard medical advice and always consult your physician with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or before implementing anything  you have read or heard in our content.

Reference

1. The Mel Robbins Podcast – “Look, Feel and Stay Younger” with orthopedic surgeon, Dr. Vonda Wright, MD

 

It’s the beginning of January and many people are heading off to the gym to fulfill their New Year’s resolution, but yesterday I quit the gym. Yes, I quit, but why? Sure, the gym will be over-crowded for the next 2 months until all those who were well-intentioned on December 31st find themselves too busy to continue, but the timing of me quitting had more to do with having spent much of October and November re-evaluating my priorities.

At the beginning of October, I hurt my back doing something as benign as sleeping funny. Seriously! I slept in an odd position for a few nights in an attempt to make myself more comfortable as the result of an unrelated issue, and much to my surprise ended waking up one morning in debilitating pain. I thought that a few days of taking it easy and using muscle relaxants would solve it, but it didn’t. My doctor said that I may have aggravated the same area that was injured in a car accident I was in about 15 years ago and recommended physiotherapy. After another two weeks of wearing a back support and taking alternating pain and anti-inflammatory meds, I finally gave in and took a four-day class to learn how to gently stretch the area, and to keep the muscles from going into spasm. It was a life-saver and have been practicing the stretches most days since.

In the many days that I spent lying on a heating pad unable to sit or stand for more than an hour, I gave a lot of thought about what needed change so that I don’t find myself in this position again. Every second morning when the reminder on my phone would pop up saying “gym”, I would groan and mutter to myself “yeah, right. I can’t get out of bed“. I knew that something had to change, but what?

This wasn’t the first time that I found myself at this type of crossroads.  As I wrote about in my 5-year update to my significant weight loss and health restoration, after I got Covid I experienced months of post-viral symptoms that left me finding it difficult to walk around the block. The difference this time was that my son got married and moved out almost 2 years ago, and I needed to find it within myself to make the changes, without someone encouraging me. 

At the end of 2022, I was diagnosed with profound hypothyroidism which also affected my mobility but once I was stable on two types of thyroid medication, the symptoms resolved over the following year just as my doctor said they would. Things were good with my thyroid for about a year, during which time I was going to the gym, however I faced a bit of a ‘hiccup’ in early June.  It turned out that my thyroid meds needed to be adjusted and my doctor worked with me to get them tweaked. By the end of this summer I was feeling much better and rejoined the gym. I really enjoy going early in the morning and having that dedicated “me time”, but hurting my back at the beginning of October brought that to an end. 

The last two months made me realize that I not only need to do weights and resistance training, but also work on flexibility and balance — but at my own pace due to my recent back issue. 

I have had success exercising from home previously and since I already have the training resources, equipment and space that I needed to workout, I decided to not renew my gym membership right now, and exercise at home over the winter. 

I already know that I prefer to workout first thing in the morning, and have planned to rotate stretching, balance, weights, and resistance training on different days. I will probably incorporate a bit of high intensity interval (HIIT), for good measure. 

To get ready over the holidays, I cleaned and organized my exercise area so there was nothing preventing me from starting when I was ready.

Monday I weighed myself and took my measurements, as I did when I started my Dietitian’s Journey back in 2017. I am five pounds up from my post-Covid weight in 2022, so I have a total of 25 pounds to lose to get back to where I was, but as I tell my clients, my focus will be to lose the extra inches around my waist, which is where the health risk is.

As an older adult, I designed myself a new Meal Plan which focuses on sufficient highly bioavailable protein, and the amino acid leucine at each meal to retain and build muscle mass, delicious, healthy fats, leafy greens, and some berries to make things tasty.

I am ready to start this new year off right — not as a resolution, but a committment to myself and an investment in my health because the “best time to start” is now.

To your good health. 

Joy

 

You can follow me on:

Twitter: https://twitter.com/jyerdile
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/BetterByDesignNutrition/

 

Copyright ©2025 BetterByDesign Nutrition Ltd.

LEGAL NOTICE: The contents of this blog, including text, images and cited statistics as well as all other material contained here (the ”content”) are for information purposes only.  The content is not intended to be a substitute for professional advice, medical diagnosis and/or treatment and is not suitable for self-administration without the knowledge of your physician and regular monitoring by your physician. Do not disregard medical advice and always consult your physician with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition or before implementing anything  you have read or heard in our content.