Episode Overview

What if feeling tired, unmotivated, or resistant to pushing forward right now is not a problem to fix, but a signal worth listening to?

In this episode, Laura introduces the concept of evolutionary mismatch and explores how modern expectations often clash with the body’s natural rhythms, especially during winter and especially after breast cancer. This conversation invites a gentler, more compassionate way of understanding your energy, your pace, and your needs.

If you have ever felt pressure to hit the ground running at the start of the year while your body is quietly asking for rest, this episode offers a perspective that may help you soften self judgment and reconnect with trust.

This is not about doing less forever. It is about honoring the season you are in so you can move forward with more clarity and resilience.

Listen to the episode and reflect on one small way you can work with your body instead of against it.

Resources:

💌 Want weekly support, new episodes, and wellness tips in your inbox?

💌 Join my email list and get resources for healing, hope, and living with intention after breast cancer.

💌 Join the Better Than Before Breast Cancer Life Coaching Membership 

👩‍💻 Follow me on Instagram for daily inspiration.

👩‍💻 Follow me on Facebook

🎙 Subscribe & leave a review on Apple Podcasts.

Read the full transcript:

0:00
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 and the insights 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.

0:33
Hey friends, welcome to episode 445

0:37
of better than before breast cancer. I'm your host, Laura Lummer, and I'm going to start off the show with a little bit of a confession. I'm tired, and I'm tired of my days not getting light until seven ish in the morning and getting dark at 430 who's tired, but we still have quite a bit of winter to go through. And I start with sharing that, because I think it's very important to take into consideration the season that we're in, in the context of the new year beginning, and here's why. So in December, I did my annual workshop living with intention, because I do believe it is very important for healing, for our health, for our happiness, for our sense of purpose, for all the things, to be very intentional about the way we live so we feel empowered and we feel like we're really participating in our life. I think that's super important. But over the years, my perspective on goals has changed dramatically, which is why I do the living with intention workshop. If you've ever been to it, then you'll know that it's not about setting a goal and then setting, you know, these smart goals, and being specific and all of that kind of stuff, towards getting a goal. It's much more focused on how you want to feel. Because I know, for me without a doubt, in all the studies and all the training and in my own personal experience of working and supporting to heal my body from stage four breast cancer that listening to yourself and aligning with the cycles of the Earth, the circadian rhythms of this body, I know how important that is to healing Hands down. No question about it. So I start thinking, Well, isn't it interesting that we, in our modern day society, start this year with a big focus and pressure and a sense of urgency on goals that have to be accomplished in the new year. And nothing wrong with that. I love a good goal, and I love big, hairy, audacious goals. I love all of that stuff. But I think that we have to find a balance and integrate that into what our body actually needs and what we actually need. I think that's very important. And if we look at people setting goals at the New Year, you know, I think it's upwards of 60% of people, their goals have fallen by the wayside by the end of February. So something's not working right. And when we stop and we think about how connected our bodies are to this amazing planet we live on, and to the cycles and the seasons and the foods, and how far away we've gotten from that in our modern day society, full of conveniences and lights and electronics, there's a huge gap. And so how do we find that balance? How do we say, well, there are things I want to accomplish and that's important and it's exciting, but I also need to prioritize what this body needs and learn how to distinguish between when I'm being lazy, because, let's all admit, there's days when we wake up and like I'm just lazy I don't want to do it, and versus when we're going waking up and noticing our body and feeling like I need to honor this body. Today, my body is giving me a signal. Like, for example, there's a new class at my gym that sounds really exciting. It's called bar bounce, and so it's a bar practice, which I love, bar exercise, I guess we call it. I love the practice of bar but it's done on these little exercise trampolines, so it's a low impact, but there's bouncing but the last few days, I've had like, this kind of clicky feeling in one of my hips that's had a lot of cancer in it, that's been through radiation. And I thought, You know what, I really do want to do that class, but I feel like even a low impact on this hip may be a little too much right now, right? So there's definitely a difference between checking in with ourselves and saying, Hmm, my body's sending me this signal. Didn't mean that I'm not going to do anything, still went for a general walk, still did some exercise, but just not exercise that was going to have a little more impact than I feel the body's ready for. So I think we're always even with our mind, with our body. We have to really. Really focus on that practice of tuning into ourselves and understanding the difference between what we need, what serves us, and when we're just checking out just because we don't feel like putting energy into it. So some of my training ties into this, my training in Ayurveda, and definitely my training in the metabolic approach to wellness and health ties into this very closely, and I think about it often, especially with Ayurveda. And the focus in Ayurveda, which is the East Indian, East Indian system of medicine, 5000 year old practice, just like traditional Chinese medicine, very, very much, focused on being in sync with the energy of the planet. And so I started thinking about this disconnected that we have between waking up on January 1, thinking I have all of these goals I have to accomplish, and at the same time, it's cold outside, it's dark outside. If we're connected to the earth and the food in the earth, it's definitely not, you know, get up and have cold protein drinks and and cold salads for dinner that just doesn't align with the needs and the energetics of the season and of our body in this season. So I was at a talk with or listening to a talk with Dr nature winters couple weeks ago, and she used this term that really caused my ears to perk up, because it aligns with what I'm talking about here. And she said she whatever was she was speaking about, she said, you know, this is called an evolutionary mismatch. And she said, look up that term. There's a lot of science on it. And I thought, well, that's really interesting. So of course, I did look up the term, and looked up the science, and there wasn't only a lot of science on it, but a lot of books on it, and I found it to be this fascinating topic that I really want to unpack here, because I think when we hear about things like Ayurveda, or maybe even when we're talking about metabolic health, we're talking about circadian rhythms, we're talking about aligning with the energy of the earth, a lot of people are like, that is so hippy dippy. Like, what is up with that? You know, you're going off the rails. And then it isn't until we come back to a Western perspective and start examining through the scientific method, how different energetics of the world impact our bodies, and we start measuring those and putting it into data, that our western minds start to go, oh, okay, maybe I should pay attention. So let's think about this and talk about this from both perspectives. Because I think when we can integrate it, which I think is the key to success, right, we want to integrate our approach to our wellness. And, you know, I'm a big advocate of just the integrative approach to medicine, to life like let's just accept it all and see what good everything has to offer us, and when we can see our life, our health, our body, our decisions through this lens of an integrative approach, I think we understand our body, our stress, our Health, our habits more but with more compassion and more clarity, and God knows, we could all use more compassion for each other and for ourselves. So let's talk about the evolutionary mismatch the concept of this and understand how it helps us move past a really big roadblock that I see with so many of my clients that I have absolutely dealt with and had to process and move through myself, especially as we age and after a serious illness, diagnosis and treatment that messes with your body, and I think that that roadblock is the thought that my body betrayed me, or that my body isn't doing what it's supposed to do. We think that our body is not coming along for the ride. And you know, it's an interesting thing. Here I am, 62, years old. I've been through two cancer diagnoses. I've been I don't even know how many rounds of radiation, but 15 on one hip, five, really powerful on another hip, multiple on my spine. My body is not going to be the same as it was when I was 3035,

9:09
and doing adventure triathlons. Now I loved those, and I would still love to do those, but the truth is, my body is not up for it. So is my body betraying me? No, it's just responding to everything it's been through in life and still trying to heal and still trying to support me. So our genetics, they're just these instructions, right? Our genetics are the instructions. They're the guide for our metabolism, for our stress response, our hormones, our immune system and our genetics, ours as human beings, has been shaped over 10s of 1000s of years. Our genetics have adapted to a world with natural light and darkness. We didn't have air conditioning, we didn't have central heating, we didn't have light bulbs, we didn't sit at desks all day in front of computers. Shooters. Our bodies moved. They moved hard, and they moved regularly because they had to in order for us to survive. Our bodies thrived on real food, food grown from the earth, food fed from the earth, because that's all there was. The health of our bodies, of our mental, spiritual, emotional health, were all dependent on being a part of a tribe. Strong social bonds were very important as we evolved genetically. And yes, there was still stress, but stress usually came in bursts of stress, and then there was recovery, there was connection, there was celebration, there was feasts. But our world has changed very, very fast. Technology has caused our environment to evolve what would basically be considered a blink of an eye with respect to evolutionary time. Right again, I'm 62 years old when I think back to how different the world was when I was a kid and how dramatically technology has changed it. It's really astounding, right? I think back to we joke about when we were kids. I'm one of six children, and we joke about how we were the remote controls, right? When my dad would come home from work and he had the dinner and a cigarette and his cup of coffee, and he'd sit on the couch and we'd be laying on the floor watching whatever was on the television. Because, again, we didn't have choices of 1000s of channels, right? Whatever was on was all we got to see. And of course, when my dad came in and he, you know, enacted imminent domain, and said, Hey, get up and change the channel, right? We were the remote controls, whereas now, I mean, our kids, my grandkids, we just sit there and say, Hey, Alexa, turn this on, turn that on, turn that off. It's amazing how much our world has evolved. And please know I am not saying technology is bad. I love and respect technology. I get to reach so many people with my platform because of technology. I think it's exciting, and there's a lot of great things that can bring us. So the issue here isn't that modern life is a bad thing. It isn't that technology is a bad thing. It isn't that progress is a bad thing. Is that our biology, our human biology, hasn't caught up with the world we're living in. Our bodies are still wired to be connected to the earth, to natural cycles, to what the Earth produces, and now we're living in an environment that just overrides those signals entirely. So this is the central idea in evolutionary medicine, and it's discussed extensively in research and books like the story of the human body by Daniel Lieberman in that book, he explains that most of our genes are still tuned in to hunter gatherer conditions, even though our daily lives look nothing like that. So evolutionary mismatch is this gap between what our bodies expect genetically and what they're experiencing in the real world. So let me go back to the story that I started with. What my body is experiencing in the real world is a lot of darkness, not very much sunlight, a lot of overcast conditions, cold rain. And it responds to those conditions with fatigue, with this urge, this need to withdraw, to stay at home and be warm and cozy, to make soups and stews, right? Not to go out and start conquering the world, but the society that I live in, in the world that I live in, is sending that message of, hey, it's a new year. It's time to go out and get shit done, right? So there's this gap here, and when we look at modern health through that lens, I think a lot of stuff starts to make sense when we look at the statement I shared with you a minute ago on my body betrayed me. We want to stop and think, Well, hold on. Maybe this isn't a personal failure. Maybe my desire in January to get up and stay in my house and purge and clear things out and make space isn't the wrong thing to do. Maybe I'm not avoiding tackling my goals. Maybe I'm preparing for them as genetically we did in the winter time, right? You stored things, you cleared things, and in the springtime you started to renew. And so this part, I think, really matters. Evolutionary mismatch does not mean we're doing something wrong. It doesn't mean we're lacking willpower. It does not mean your body is broken. It means our human bodies are doing the best they can to respond to signals that they were never designed to handle, at least not in the way that those signals show up today. And so when I hear people say to me, my clients say to me, I feel like my body is working against me, or I don't understand, why can't I just push through this? Why can't I feel like I used to? Why can't I get back to normal? From that perspective, it. Really isn't that your body is trying to be difficult or hold you back, is that your body is being very protective and doing the best that it can to align with what it was designed to do versus what you're trying to make it to. So let's put this in some tangible terms. So I've talked about food a little, but let's think about food. Our ancestors evolved in environments where calories were hard to come by, sweets were very rare to come by, and fat was incredibly valuable. So when the body found high energy food, it learned to want more of it, because human survival depended on it. So if we fast forward to today, where we live in a world where hyper, palatable food is everywhere, high calorie, calorie, dense food, sugar, refined carbohydrates. They're not just occasional, they're constant. Food is engineered to override our fullness signals in today's world, that's what food science is all about, right? Well, some food science is great in the culinary world. They're learning how to make delicious food, but food is actually engineered, and so our ancient biology meets modern, abundant food science, and the result is not balance, it's overload. There's another book called Why We get sick, and in that book, the authors explain the traits that once helped humans survive can now become liabilities in our modern environment. So another example is the ability to store fat efficiently and become temporarily insulin resistant was a survival advantage. It helped humans store energy during times of plenty and preserve glucose for the brain during stress and during famine. But in today's environment, there with again, constant food availability and chronic stress conditions, that same trait can contribute to metabolic dysfunction, inflammation and weight gain. It doesn't mean that that trait to store energy, is broken. It means the environment has changed, and these authors talk about inflammation in the same way inflammation evolved as a short term defense system, right? It's there to help us heal wounds, fight infections, recover from injuries, but it was designed to turn on and then turn off. But in modern life, many inflammatory triggers are no longer physical threats because they're things like poor sleep, blood sugar swings, emotional stress, environmental exposures and toxins and constant stimulation. So inflammation doesn't get a chance to resolve it lingers and again, not because your body is malfunctioning, but because it's responding exactly as it was designed to do in an environment that it wasn't designed for. Fascinating thing to think about. So I want to bring in another layer here that I think fits beautifully and gently, because, again, this isn't about judgment, or saying modern life is bad because I love boujee, nice, comfortable, warm things. I don't want to live on a hard ground, going for months, starving or weeks or days, anything like that. So this isn't about judgment. It's about just making sense of things and asking ourselves different questions, like, what are the choices we're making that serve us, and what adjustments can we make? So let me bring back in some teachings from Ayurveda. Ayurveda teaches us to align our food, our movement and our lifestyle with the seasons, and when you look at that through the lens of an evolutionary mismatch, it makes a lot of sense. Nature has rhythms. Our bodies respond to those rhythms. So winter is quiet, it's cold, it's dark, it's windy, it's dry, and it's restorative, restorative in the sense that you stay inside in those kinds of conditions and you rest right. Yet culturally, here we are again, moving into a new year and immediately telling ourselves we got to hit the ground running. We've got to fix everything, set goals, be productive, go hard, even if we're exhausted from the holidays. It's cold outside and it doesn't feel good to be out there. It's dark early, and our bodies are saying, shut off the TV and go to bed. And we're like, I can't go to bed. It's seven o'clock at night. It's too early. So our bodies are asking for rest, and we are resisting from a natural perspective, from a natural rhythm perspective, winter is not a time to push winter is a time to create space, to restore, to let go and to prepare, to prepare for the spring when we blossom right? It's a season where roots deepen underground. We eat root vegetables because plants aren't blooming, and when we ignore that, we create another. Form of mismatch, right? We ask our bodies to perform when they're wired to replenish and especially in the world of what we think of Western good health and healthy nutrition. Here is a time for, like I said a few minutes ago, for soups and stews and delicious, healthy, natural, unctuous foods, sweet potatoes, root vegetables, pickled beets, delicious things like that that really replenish and they have a heaviness. In Ayurveda, again, we balance the body by applying opposite energies. So if we're winter and the season itself is cold and dry. We want to bring in grounding energy with our food into our body. We know our body responds with responds with dryness. I know I need a ton of moisturizer during the winter months, right? So we want to bring in food that is unctuous, oily, healthy fats, root vegetables, they're heavier. They're grounding. And this makes sense from a perspective of Ayurveda, because the energy from that food balances the energy around us, so we don't feel so out of sync. But then again, with our current modern day culture, we're still saying, you know, drink these ice cold protein drinks and smoothies in the morning and then eat cold salads. Think about this also in terms of treatment, right? So I am in ongoing treatment. Those of us who have metastatic breast cancer, we're in ongoing treatment. So once that cancer has gone through our body, systemically, the treatment, the medications and the constant vigilance never really stops, right? It's rare, but possible, and excitingly possible. I have clients now who, even though they have no evidence of disease, which is so freaking exciting, they're still in treatment to maintain that status, and that treatment is very depleting. So we have to think about not only the season that we're in in the world and the earth, but the season our body is in. So if we're taking in things that are very depleting, we've got to support ourselves physically, emotionally and energetically by bringing in things that are nourishing. And I think this also applies to when people finish treatment. If you're out there and you're just finishing treatment from early stage cancer, and you've gone through your radiation and your chemotherapy and your surgeries, and maybe you're starting on aromatase inhibitors, which, again, are going to be depleting, but there's this pressure to get back to life, to get back to work, to be strong, to get back to normal, when your body's just gone through an incredible, incredible amount of stress, and it's got to be screaming for replenishment. You know, I think about this sometimes it's so interesting, like when we have a baby and you're at work, you work pretty much right up until the time when you give birth, and then you get X amount of months or weeks, whatever, time off to restore and to be with that baby. Right? Maternity leave, family leave, whatever it is now, and yet, when we go through something as depleting as breast cancer surgery, we get that time off. And we're expected to have that time off when we go through surgery, when we have radiation, and sometimes not even then, right? We're expected to show up at work and take days off for the treatment, days rather than really devote energy and time and space to our healing and support. And then when that treatment is done, it's like, okay, signed off. That's it. When now we need replenishment. We need nourishment, we need rest, we need space to process right? So let's think of all of the cycles we go through in terms of, it's like my four pillars of breast cancer, recovery, release, renew, regroup, revive, repeat. So whatever season we're in, what do we need to let go of, maybe expectations that we should be running all over the world right now? What do we need to do when it's time to renew, and we think about it in terms like this, what do we need to bring into our life? And how do you bring in anything if you haven't created space for it? So winter time, a lot of things die off, it creates space for lots of new things to grow. So what if the most important and supportive thing you could do right now is to actually slow down. What if honoring seasonal rhythms is part of healing? And that doesn't mean you give up on your goals or your intentions at all. It just means you ask yourself, how are you approaching them? Evolutionary mismatch gives us permission to stop forcing ourselves into timelines that don't respect our biology, so we can accomplish what we want and we don't exhaust ourselves and make ourselves sick. So instead of asking, why can't I do more? I think a great question is, what season Am I in? That question, hopefully can soften so much judgment, right? Why can't I do more? Why can't I get into this? Why am I not motivated so much judgment, rather than to stay in curiosity and be like, what's going on right now? What season Am I in? What is my body telling me interesting that I'm feeling like, mentally, I want to accomplish all these things, and physically, my body's still asking for rest. So again, this is not about living like our ancestors and following rigid rules and not having any lights on in your house. This is not what I'm talking about. I am saying bring attention to reducing that friction between your biology and your environment. And you know, it was something, it's interesting, that I had never thought of before. I have a great friend. She's very into health and fitness. She's in amazing shape, and she lives in Florida, and when I go out there to visit her at the end of her day, she really does dim all the lights in the house, which is how it should be, because the rhythm of her body is starting to slow down. It's time to get ready for rest. It doesn't mean she says, Okay, it's five o'clock, turn the lights off and go to bed. But when we sit in our house in the evening, the lights are more dim, the energy is more calming, and that supports a good, healthy sleep routine, whereas most of us, when the lights go out outside, we turn up all the lights bright inside as well. So this is what I'm talking about. Can we reduce that friction between the needs of biology and our environment? Can we quiet things down in the winter, again, that might look like eating more warm and grounding foods, maybe having earlier nights, or at least shutting down electronics earlier, and doing something that's gentle and softer on the nervous system. Maybe it's about gentler, more nourishing movement to the body, having fewer commitments and just doing some reflection and some releasing and creating space for the things you want to invite in rather than going from zero to 120 right?

27:05
I'm not talking about falling behind. I'm not talking about not doing anything. I'm talking about preparing your body in your life and paying attention to it, just like nature does. So when I think about evolutionary mismatch, I think one of the greatest gifts of leaning into that and understanding that is that it invites us to be really curious about seasonal alignment, about circadian alignment. Instead of fighting our body, it gives us another tool to listen and understand our body. Instead of forcing change, it gives us another opportunity to begin to notice patterns, and especially for women who have been through treatment for cancer, who are going through treatment for cancer, who are living in treatment for cancer, and we're constantly having our bodies measured and analyzed and managed and scanned and blood work, So much going on that when we think about evolutionary mismatch, I hope we can pull back and say my job as the steward of this body is to return to trusting it, listening to it, partnering with it, understanding what It needs to deeply heal. So as we're still all getting our feet into this new year, I want to leave you with this question, when we think about evolutionary mismatch, when we think about what's going on in the world, what's going on our body and what we want with our lives, how do we bring those closer together? If your body evolved for a different world, and this season is asking you for some rest or maybe a little slower pace, what's one small way you could honor that? Just one thing, one small thing you could do to support yourself, not to completely overhaul your life, not to change everything, and not to live like a caveman, right? But to prepare yourself so that when the season does change and the spring does finally land, you will feel the energy and the readiness and the ability to bloom. All right, my friends, I will link to some of the books on evolutionary mismatch in the show notes for this episode, which you can find where you're watching this on YouTube, and if you're watching on YouTube, please hit the subscribe button. If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast app, please hit follow. It always helps to have subscribers and followers. It makes it easier for other people to find this show and get the help that maybe they can get from this podcast. All right, friends, if you want more support, you want coaching, I offer one on one coaching. I have an amazing membership, the better than before breast cancer, metabolic health and mindset membership, and I also offer metabolic health coaching, where we do look at your nutrition genomics, we do look at your labs from a metabolic health perspective. And create a lifestyle plan to support your body, your genetics and you where you are in your life. You can find the details on everything at the breast cancer recovery coach.com All right, take good care of yourself. Stop and think about what you actually need, and then gift that to yourself, and I will see you next week.

30:23
You've tamed the voices in your head. You've put your courage to the test, laid all your doubts to rest. Your mind is clearer than before, your heart is full and wanting more. Your Future's at the door.

30:42
Give it all you got

30:44
no hesitating.

30:47
You've been waiting all your life. This is your

30:53
moment. This is your moment. Anytime.