Wellness While Walking

Back to school, back to health! If fall is when you get serious about your health again, a full calendar might be the first challenge you'll run into. Laura Vanderkam shows us where the time actually is and how to fit everything important in, plus: 20-minute dinners, how to set a bedtime you'll keep, and her five o'clock walk!

LET'S TALK THE WALK!

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Is it too late to start getting healthy? We give 5 research-backed reasons the answer is no — including how frail 90-year-olds got measurably stronger in just eight weeks! And a warm, overdue welcome to the men who've been listening along here all along!

This is the last in our Q&A series for National Wellness Month! Next time: back to full-length episodes and the BEEP!

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Newsflash: Long, unbroken stretches of sitting appear to carry health risk beyond the daily total of sitting. But breaking them up can help even when the total hours spent sitting number doesn't budge. A listener asked about NEAT -- the energy burned by the movement of ordinary life that isn't exercise -- and the answer turned out to have little to do with calories and a lot to do with staying strong and mobile...

A listener asked us a question a lot of us may have wondered at some point: do we have to give up bread? Today, we'll look at who might benefit from staying away from bread, what to do if we want to reduce the amount of bread we eat, and then how to enjoy it if we don't want to change much.

Another in our Listener Q&A series in honor of National Wellness Month. It's a focused, shorter e...

Why is it so hard to stick with a habit we actually want to build (a daily walk) or one we want to break (easing off the afternoon sweets) even when it's something that we know would improve our lives? This week we take the pressure off, name the five forces in the gap between knowing and doing (not one is the flaw we've been blaming), and then will build a small system that does the deciding for us on the toug...

The foods that heal us aren't necessarily exotic or expensive — most are already sitting on our grocery shelves. Dr. William Li walks us through the store, aisle by aisle, showing how everyday foods work with our bodies: fighting the fat we don't want, and helping us age the way we hope to. He'll also change how we think about body fat itself, because we can't judge our health by the size of our body &mda...

Dr. Li explains what actually drives midlife weight — the sleep, the stress, the timing of when we eat, the reduction in muscle mass — and he does it without asking us to give up a single dinner we love. In fact, he shows us how a healthy weight and a real love of eating go together, rather than being at odds. We'll come to appreciate what our bodies are already doing overnight, and then the small, ...

Today, the practical half: how to actually loosen sugar's hold. You'll hear where sugar is hiding in foods you'd never think to check. Why cravings often trace back to something other than a lack of discipline — our sleep, our stress, even our gut. What "eating by the plate" looks like in real meals, so we're not counting anything. The two-week fructose reset — what it is and how to make the most of...

We've hit the year's halfway mark this week — which makes it the perfect time to revisit the New Year mindset, minus the pressure. In this BEST OF conversation, fitness hall of famer and four-time NYT bestseller JJ Virgin joins us to unpack the real roadblocks between us and better health: the difference between glucose and fructose, why "a calorie is a calorie" falls apart outside a lab, how satiety and ...

Light runs one clock in your body. Food runs a completely different set of clocks — in our gut, our liver, our metabolism. And when those two signals misalign, we can negatively influence our health.

This episode digs into meal timing through the lens of chrononutrition: the real science behind when we eat, what it does to the gut microbiome, and why a ...

One solid food choice can make the next good one easier, says the science. Today we're getting direct about something we're not being told clearly enough: what's on our plates matters for our health more than most of us realize, and adding more of the right foods might be the most powerful thing we can do to live well and stay out of the doctor's office and hospital. We'll make the case for adding — not s...

Want to be able to eat bigger, more satisfying meals? Today, we dive into a way to increase the volume of what we eat each day, and how to also ensure we're getting all the nutrients our bodies need. This research-backed approach has been tested over time, and can be great news for those of us in midlife who feel like our metabolisms have taken an extended vacation!

LET'S TALK THE WALK!

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The 21-day habit rule is a myth — and the truth is so much more encouraging. Today we're digging into what the research actually says about how long it takes to build a habit that lasts, and why the real timeline should make you feel better, not worse. Plus, we'll chat about how I kicked a very long and intense Diet Coke habit and also 8 tips to make healthy habits easier to form and keep!

LET'S TALK THE WALK!

Join here for s...

In this candid, personal episode, Carolyn shares her real-life challenges navigating the conventional healthcare system—and the realizations she's had about this experience. She discusses what makes the biggest difference in times of stress, and provides her favorite quick and simple mindfulness tool for creating more ease in challenging times. Give it a listen if you need a relatable reminder to keep you...

The instructions most of us receive before a procedure cover fasting, medications, and not much else. But the weeks before surgery — how we're sleeping, what we're eating, whether our vitamin levels are anywhere near where they need to be for healing — are quietly shaping our outcome before we ever walk into that hospital. Dr. Jen Stevane spent over twenty years as a surgeon before founding the Cent...

Your step count goal might be off — and wonderfully, the fix is easier than you'd expect! In Part 2 of this conversation with gait specialist and author Dr. Courtney Conley, we get into the specific step and pace milestones that research actually supports — including the number linked to a 25% reduction in dementia risk that might surprise you. We also get into why a post-meal walk changes your meta...

Walking isn't exercise — it's a biological necessity. Dr. Courtney Conley, gait specialist and author of the new book, Walk*, is back to make the case that walking belongs in the same category as breathing and sleeping, and that most of us are wildly underestimating what we lose when we don't do it enough. If your gait speed, your foot health, and your pain management strategy have never gotten a second t...

Your "I have no time" story doesn't hold up — and the data proves it. Laura Vanderkam, bestselling author of Big Time, joins us to share what thousands of time logs actually reveal, why complexity and chaos are very different things, and how a simple weekly planning habit puts you back in control of your career, your relationships, and yourself. Plus: the hidden hours in your day, how to say yes to the th...