In today’s episode, I’m diving into something that may surprise you—cryotherapy!
If you’ve ever wondered what stepping into a chamber of freezing cold air could do for your health, this episode is for you. Trust me, it’s not just for athletes or Instagram influencers. We’re talking about real benefits for metabolic health, potential cancer prevention, and even mental health!
Have you heard that cold exposure can burn fat and boost your metabolism?
What about reducing inflammation, which is so important for us as breast cancer survivors?
I’ll be breaking down the science, so you don’t have to.
We’ll look at whether cryotherapy could help support healing by calming inflammation and enhancing your body’s natural defenses.
But that’s not all—I’ll also share how cryotherapy might give your mood a lift!
Imagine boosting those feel-good hormones and lowering stress in just a few minutes of cold therapy. Curious? You should be!
Of course, I’ll also cover some important risk factors and who might need to steer clear of this treatment. And don’t worry if a cryo chamber sounds too extreme. I’ll be talking about other options you can try in the comfort of your home.
If you’ve been thinking about new ways to support your health, this episode will open your eyes to the chilling possibilities. Tune in and find out if cryotherapy could be the next step in your healing journey!
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You're listening to better than before breast cancer with the breast cancer recovery coach, I'm your host, Laura lummer. I'm a certified life coach, and I'm a breast cancer thriver. In this podcast, I will give you the skills on the insides and the tools to move past the emotional and physical trauma of a breast cancer diagnosis if you're looking for a way to create a life that's even better than before breast cancer, you've come to the right place. Let's get started. Hello, hello. Welcome friends to episode 376
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of better than before breast cancer. I am your host, Laura lummer, and before we jump right into today's topic for this show, which is really cool, pun intended, I want to ask a quick favor. If you are a repeat listener and you've never left a rating or review, or maybe you're watching this on YouTube and you've never subscribed to the channel, it would be awesome if you're listening to this on podcast, just rate it, review it, leave some stars if you found some kind of a benefit. Just a quick saying of what you got out of this podcast or why you come back. And if you're a new listener, and you listen to this episode and you find it helpful for you, same thing like subscribe wherever you follow. I really appreciate it. And not only helps me out, but it helps other people to more easily find the podcast, and that could help somebody else out too. All right, so thank you for taking the time to do that. I appreciate it, and now let's get right into this episode. So for a long time, I have been avoiding a specific practice that I have been told by numerous people, and read lots of information on and been told that this would be beneficial for me and I should incorporate it into my healing plan. But there's something that I've been telling myself for a long time. Well, because it's true, I hate being cold, and this is cryotherapy. So I've heard so much about it. I have clients that do cold plunges, and I'm so impressed by their bravery to get their bodies to jump into cold water. I've gone to different spas where they have hydrotherapy. Even when we were in Iceland, there was a spa therapy, and it started off with an ice bath, and then you go from the ice to the heat to the cold water back to the heat. And I did all the heat and avoided all the cold. But when I got my 3x four nutrition genomics back, that not only looks at like how your body responds to food, but how your body responds to different lifestyle practices as well. And in my mood and behavior, my mental and emotional genetic pathways. I have some snips that would function better. Or let's say, when a gene is expressing if it creates a specific symptom in the body and it expresses itself, then we want to do lifestyle practices to quiet down that expression. If the symptom that it's creating isn't something beneficial, sometimes genes express themselves in very beneficial ways. So anyway, when I got my 3x four done, it showed me that one of the beneficial therapies for my mental and emotional health, as well as as well as my physical health and helping with detox and controlling inflammation is cryotherapy, cold plunges. And I thought, Okay, I got I, I have to at least try this, right? I don't want to be like the kid who says, you know, no, I don't like that food. And then you say, Have you ever eaten that food? And they say, No, I just know I won't like it, right? So I've never tried cryotherapy, and actually let me take that back one time I've tried cryotherapy. It was a few years after my I finished my first my treatment for my first diagnosis, and I did the Avon 49 walk. And the first day of that walk is the same mileage as a marathon would be. And I was hurting when we got back to that Airbnb, and I was in so much discomfort just driving home that I asked my sister to stop at a liquor store. I picked up several 20 pound bags of ice, and I made an ice bath for myself. That's the only time I've done it, and it was like a dire need. You know, I was still growing my hair back. And, you know, I wasn't that far out of chemotherapy, and I was still having a lot of symptoms from it, and man, did I get impacted hard from doing that walk. But anyway, so that was my one experience with it. It was uncomfortable to do, but it definitely did help with the inflammation I was experiencing in my legs at that time. So the gym that I go to as a cryotherapy chamber, and what the cryotherapy chamber is. Well, actually, I'll tell you the details about that later. So I decided to do it, and I signed up for cryotherapy, and I've done it three times now, and I have to tell you, it's a pretty instantaneous response that I felt. So the first. Time that I went in, it for two minutes. There's different settings on it. I went in for two minutes, and in my head, I was like, Oh, my God, oh my god, this is gonna be so uncomfortable. And so I got through the two minutes, and afterwards, I thought, Wow, I feel kind of refreshed. You know, it was, as you can imagine, it'll wake you up. And then the second time I did two minutes, and I started to notice how I was thinking and how I was thinking, and how is making it harder on myself by the way I was thinking. So the third time I went in, I decided this is not going to be hard. I'm not going to tell myself I hate this. I'm not going to tell myself this is hard. I'm going to tell myself I'm going to distract my mind. And I have a certain chakra mantra that I will do, and I thought I will do that mantra while I'm in there. It involves like, a long holding of a sound, which also is a vibration thing that stimulates the vagus nerve. Another therapy that was recommended for me vagus nerve stimulation. So I thought, I'll get into this cryo chamber, I'll do this mantra, and then I'll be stimulating my vagus nerve and getting the benefit of the cryotherapy, and it will take my mind off of it. And I was right. It did. It did. It took my mind off of it. The two minutes went by a lot faster, and I committed to the person who runs the cryotherapy chamber that tomorrow. I'll add on an additional 15 seconds so we'll see how that goes. But there are so many benefits that are coming out in studies. This is a huge trend. You probably see it on Instagram or Facebook or other social media platforms of people installing cold plunge tubs and things like that into their homes or in their backyard or going into these cryotherapy chambers. And just to give you forewarning, you can do this at home. You don't have to go join someplace. You don't have to go pay to do this. And I'm going to talk to you about what you can actually do at home to incorporate cryotherapy into your healthy lifestyle, and why you might want to do it. So let's just talk about first what exactly Cryotherapy is. So cryotherapy literally means cold therapy, and it involves exposing your body to extremely cold temperatures for a brief period of time, usually between two and four minutes, and the idea is to subject your body to this controlled cold stress, and that stress can help trigger a variety of beneficial metabolic responses. So there's two main types of cryotherapy. There's localized and whole body localized cryotherapy involves targeting a specific area of the body. Often, it's targeted there to reduce inflammation or pain. Maybe you have an injury, maybe you're healing from something whole body. Cryotherapy, on the other hand, involves stepping into a chamber that blasts your body with air from negative 200 it's negative 300 the one that I was in actually was negative, 150 when I went in. And so you go in, it for just a few minutes. And you can imagine at those temperatures, because one of the things that you do is expose as much of your skin as possible. So you could imagine at those extreme temperatures, you don't want to be in there for a long time with a lot of exposed skin. One thing you I do have to do when I go into the cold chamber, they give you ear mumps, gloves, and I have to wear shoes, right? You don't want to take a risk of harming your extremities. And I'll go into that in a minute as well. So why do this like why put yourself through this cold torture? Well, cryotherapy has been found to offer lots of potential mental and physical health benefits. Now the mental health benefits are primarily due to the effect of the cold on the body's nervous system and stress response. So here's some of the things that can happen mentally and emotionally for you when you expose yourself to cold. So cryotherapy triggers the release of endorphins, those body's natural feel good chemicals, and this can help improve your mood and reduce feelings of anxiety and depression. A study in plus one noted that cryotherapy sessions, particularly whole body, cryotherapy, can help alleviate symptoms of depression and anxiety by promoting the release of endorphins and improving emotional well being. Cryotherapy can improve sleep. So cold exposure can help regulate the autonomic nervous system. Right? The nervous system is functioning on its own the whole rest and digest piece of it, and this regulation can help people feel calmer and more relaxed, which then contributes to better quality sleep. So there was a study in sleep medicine reviews, and they indicated that cold exposure therapy like cryotherapy can enhance sleep by helping the body relax and reduce stress. So when it comes to stress reduction, cryotherapy can actually decrease cortisol levels. And as you probably know, cortisol is a stress hormone, and when it's elevated for long periods of time, it contributes to anxiety, depression and other mental health issues. And I'll also add here that what I see in many of my clients is in addition to the mental health issues, when cortisol levels are high. For long periods of time. When I see people enduring a lot of stress, I see that also affect their insulin and glucose response in a big way. So But back to mental health for now, we'll move on to physical in a minute. That reduction in cortisol levels after your cryotherapy promotes that overall sense of calm, like I just talked about, for the benefit sleep, but that benefit is often paired with a feeling of just physical rejuvenation. As I also said two minutes ago, it's like I got out and I felt like, wow, that was really invigorating, right? And so that can help reduce your feelings of stress. It also enhances a resilience to stress. So cold exposure activates our sympathetic nervous system. Also, that's the fight or flight part, and that can make our bodies more adaptable to stress. For example, I told you, when I first stepped into it, how my mind was stressing myself out. Because I was like, Oh, this is gonna be so hard. And then I realized this is a mind game. Staying in this chamber for two minutes is a mind game, and I've got to change my mindset to be able to do this. That is supporting resiliency to stress. It's reprogramming the brain. So over time, we reprogram the body as well, and as the body experiences this repeated cold exposure and the stress through it, it becomes more resilient. And that's why, when you're doing that kind of whole body cryotherapy, you start at a certain time and a certain wind chill factor in the chamber, and then as your body builds up resilience, you increase time and you increase wind chill. So it's really interesting. And this resilience is linked to a process that's called hormesis. And hormesis means small amounts of stress like cold that stimulate the body to become stronger and more capable of handling larger stresses. So another thing is the that can actually help us both mentally and physically, is a reduction in inflammation. So inflammation in the body is linked to all kinds of mental health disorders, including depression and anxiety, and cryotherapy can reduce systemic inflammation, so that has a positive effect on our mood and our mental clarity. Lower inflammation leads to improved cognitive function and more emotional stability. So by triggering these positive changes in our nervous system and our stress hormone levels. Cryotherapy has a lot of potential to support mental health benefits. Okay, really interesting stuff. So let's talk about physical health benefits. Maybe you're listening. You're thinking, I don't stress. I've got no issues emotionally. I sleep good. I don't stress. But what can it do for your body? Well, the reason why cryotherapy has gained so much popularity is because of its metabolic benefits. So when you're exposed to extreme colds, your body goes into this heightened state of thermogenesis. Thermogenesis is this process where the body burns energy to produce heat, and studies suggest that cryotherapy can help increase brown fat activity, the activity and that energy burning in our brown fat, unlike white fat, which is that fat that stores energy, brown fat in our body burns calories to produce heat, and this process can improve our metabolism and potentially support weight loss. So one of the goals I was given by the person running the cryo chamber is we go in and you want your body temperature to drop from between 25 to 40 degrees in the time that you're in there. And when it does that, it increases the amount of calories your body burns after the cryotherapy session to bring your temperature back up to normal, and then you have that lasting effect for the next 24 hours of burning more calories. So this is one of the ways that we that it can be potentially beneficial in supporting a healthy weight as well. So let's talk about what cryotherapy might have to do to benefit with cancer prevention and cancer healing. Because a lot of you listening to this, some of you are going through cancer cancer treatment. Some of you are like, I'm cancer free, and this is wonderful, right? When we're cancer free, we want to be so focused on creating a healthy lifestyle to reduce our risk of ever having it again, one of the biggest fears that we deal with, right, the fear of recurrence. I hear it every day from everyone I work with, the fear of recurrence. So when we step into incorporating practices in our life that help us to feel empowered about the fact that we're supporting our health, that empowered emotional state helps to reduce the fear. Fear is never going to go away and it's totally normal, right? Cancer is a threat to the body, but the more we do, the better we feel, the more empowered we are, and that helps to again, that's going to benefit benefit us emotionally as well, right? So there's a lot of emerging research in this field, but there. Is some promising data, and it's really regarding cryotherapy's role in managing inflammation. So I mentioned that a minute ago, with its benefits towards mental and emotional health, that inflammation is a key factor in cancer development. Inflammation and oxidative stress. Oxidative stress is the assault on our cells with free radicals or reactive oxygen species or toxins in our body, they can overwhelm the cells that stress is going to again create more inflammation, and we want to reduce that so inflammation and oxidative stress are believed to contribute to the progression of cancer, and cryotherapy can help by reducing this damaging process. So there was a 2019 study that was published in frontiers in physiology, and they found that cryotherapy reduced inflammation markers and enhanced antioxidant capacity in the body. So this suggests the potential for a cryotherapy to support an anti cancer environment. And there's a reason I am emphasizing support, which I'll talk about a second. It supports potentially an anti cancer environment in the body by lowering oxidative stress and inflammation. And it's important to note that cryotherapy should not be viewed as a standalone treatment for cancer. This podcast, in and of itself, is just to educate you on what can be offered through cryotherapy. But as I said a second ago, this is a therapy that is something we do to support a healthy environment, a healthy terrain. It's not something you would turn to in and of itself as a treatment, okay? So it's a complimentary therapy that has the potential to support your body's ability to heal. That's an important thing to remember. So while there are lots of benefits for cryotherapy, like any other complementary therapy, we don't just do it just because we hear it's good for you, all of the therapies that are available to us, high dose vitamin C therapy, hyper oxygen, hyperbaric oxygen treatment, cryotherapy, heat therapies, light therapies, all of these complementary therapies that can support our health are great as long as your body is in a state to be able to receive it. And that's why you work with a doctor or practitioner that's knowledgeable in metabolic health and complementary therapies, because they can look at what you're going through and say, Hey, maybe you need to be in ketosis for this therapy to be effective. In high dose IV vitamin C therapy, for instance, there are certain lab markers that must be checked before you do it to make sure it's going to be effective. That is not an inexpensive treatment. So you don't want to go into that treatment without having appropriate labs done, just to throw away three grand right for pumping something into that isn't going to work. For instance, I have a genetic snip that makes the cell receptors less open to receiving that type of vitamin therapy, a vitamin C therapy for me. So for me, increasing my vitamin C would be most effective through taking a liposomal oral form. Liposomal means it's in fat, because vitamin C is water soluble, and so you want it in a liposomal form, so it goes through the stomach, right? We want it to get down into the gut, and then the fat gets digested, into the gut, and then that's where the vitamin C is released, that for me, is a more effective form because of the snips that I have that make me less receptive to IV vitamin C therapy. Totally went off on a tangent there, but I find this stuff fascinating, and I think it's just really important to emphasize just because you think it's natural, just because it's complementary, does not mean that there aren't risk involved, and it's always important to check that okay, safety first 100% of the time. So So most individuals can tolerate cryotherapy, short term exposure to cold. But there are some who should proceed with caution, as I just explained, this is a shocking therapy. It may only last for two minutes, or up to three minutes, but it can be very shocking to the system. So people who have cardiovascular conditions, high blood pressure, heart disease, should be very cautious when considering exposing themselves to cold. They should definitely check with your doctor if you have any of this going on. People who have reynounced disease, which is a condition that causes decreased blood flow, I'm rubbing my fingers together in the tips of our fingers and toes in our extremities, and it decreases that blood flow in response to cold. And it can be very intense and uncomfortable. People who have rained out should avoid cold therapy. So there are also concerns about frostbite. As I said, I wear gloves, earmuffs and shoes when I go into that chamber, so frostbite and cold burns can happen if the therapy is not done correctly. So it's really important that you visit a reputable facility, that you understand what you're doing, that the people who apply it, if you're going to go into one of these chambers, that they know how to treat people safely. And then all. Sometimes people have reported that when they get out of cryotherapy they may feel a dizziness or skin irritation or even fainting in very, very rare cases, I noticed for me, like my skin starts to sting in there, and then when I come out, it's to me, invigorating. It's not uncomfortable or painful. I can just tell, you know, my body's like, we're almost at two minutes right, the skin is stinging, so be really cautious. Take care of yourself. We don't want to cause any harm. We want to love our bodies and support their healing, not beat them up and harm them. So let's talk about different ways that you can experience cryotherapy, because as I said, there's multiple options, and they do not all involve going to a gym and paying to go into a cryotherapy chamber. So whole body cryotherapy. This is the method where most people think of when they hear of cryotherapy, you step into a chamber where the temperatures drop to extreme lows for two to three or four minutes. And this is going to have all the systemic benefits that we talked about, reducing inflammation, boosting metabolism, all the things I just went over, there's localized cryotherapy, which I mentioned. So if you have a specific injury, localized cryotherapy can target that with just this stream of cold air or liquid nitrogen that's just targeted to that area. That's a method that's used pretty commonly for athletic recovery or chronic pain in a specific area, so like a knee, an ankle, shoulder, or something like that. Cryo facials, which is also a part of the program at my gym, and something I've been doing so they take a cryo machine and it's got this little tube on it, and they just apply this stream of cold air directly to your face. And it actually feels pretty good, but it's used to help tighten the skin, reduce puffiness, and to promote collagen production. Because if you think about things that people do, therapies they do to their face to promote collagen production, like the micro needling, right? So these little traumas to the surface of the skin cause the body to respond, and then the body starts to build collagen, that protein to help with the healing, and then that helps with the superficial appearance of skin as well. So now let's talk about things you can do also at home. So there's ice baths. This is a whole if like stepping into a chamber and it's 150 degrees or negative 150 or negative 200 or something is just way too intense for you, ice baths can actually be very beneficial and very affordable. So before cryotherapy, athletes used ice baths for years to aid in recovery, to reduce inflammation, to help with muscle soreness, and the water temperature typically ranges from 50 to 59 degrees, and you can stay in it for like 10 to 15 minutes. So that's kind of what I shared with you after that Avon 49 walk, I could tell I had a lot of inflammation in my legs, and so I just put a couple of bags of ice into a bathtub, and I just soaked in that for a little bit. So that's something that you can do at home, and it's definitely not as extreme as a cryotherapy chamber. You can also do cold showers. So I mentioned to you some of the spas that I've been to where they offer hydrotherapy, which is going back and forth from hot to cold. And so a cold shower is a simple, affordable and less intense form of cryotherapy, and it may not provide the same benefits as extreme temperatures can but it's still going to stimulate circulation. It is going to give you that reaction to help improve mood, and it is going to give your metabolism a little bit of a boost. So even in your morning shower, and I was told to do this for the longest time, I think I've tried it a couple of times, but it's easier for me to be accountable. Where I'm standing in front of someone, they open the door and they're like, get in, right? And I'm gonna get in there. And that's just how my brain works, versus me in a comfortable, warm shower in the morning going, Okay, turn it all the way to cold and freeze yourself. It's just my brain is like, no, don't do that. We're not doing that, right? But if you can do that, that's an effective form of supporting yourself with some hydrotherapy and some cryotherapy. All right, so that's what I have for you today. Cryotherapy can have a whole range of benefits, reducing inflammation, potentially supporting cancer prevention, improving our metabolic health, but it also does have risks that you should be aware of and consult with a health professional before you do especially if you have pre existing conditions. All right, take care of yourself. So whether it's whole body or cryo facials or cold showers, you are the expert on your body. You know what you need, you know what you can tolerate. And it's important that you listen to your unique and amazing body and so that you do the things that are right for you. All right, friends, I'd love to hear what you think if you do cross therapy, if you've tried it, if you love it, if you hate it, if you have questions, come and find me on Facebook or Instagram, send me a DM or join my free Facebook group, the breast cancer recovery. Regroup and let's talk about it. And then if you want to dig even deeper into metabolic health, and your specific metabolic health, understanding your nutrition genome, understanding your labs from a functional perspective, come and find me at the breast cancer recovery coach.com where you can work with me one on one, or in my amazing membership, better than before breast cancer, where everything is on the table and all kinds. There's a huge library of lessons and videos and coaching, and we work together every month, so whatever works for you, private, small group, individual sessions, come and find me, and let's talk. All right, take care of yourself, and I'll talk to you next time
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