Katalina Dawson (00:11)
Hello and welcome back to another episode of Career Path. I am your host Katalina. Today we're discussing the Importance of Health and Wellness in Your Career. And I have an extremely special guest with me today. She is actually the second guest who is not in our industry and she is my first guest that is coming to us internationally. She is in Spain right now filming with me, which is so incredible. This is Christine LoVopa who is a chief Health and Wellness Officer and just an incredible person all around. She is also somebody who speaks on health and wellness internationally. She's done a Ted Talk. She is a wealth of knowledge and I'm so excited to have her on today. Christine, it is such a pleasure. Thank you so much for joining me.

Christine LaVopa (00:53)
Oh my gosh, thank you so much. That was such a title. You make me sound so good. I appreciate you. It's a pleasure being here. Yes, I mean, it's great when you do it, but when you hear it come out on the other side, it feels even better. So one of the aspects of health and wellness. But yes, I appreciate you and thank you so much. And I am here in Rota, Spain. So yeah, we're international, which is kind of

Katalina Dawson (00:59)
You are. You are. Yes, you are and please own it.

Christine LaVopa (01:23)
and a fun thing to do.

Katalina Dawson (01:25)
It's amazing what technology allows us to do today. The fact that you and I can FaceTime, we can film, the interconnectivity of the world is incredible. I love it so much. So usually I start this with the same question for everybody, but I'm gonna switch yours up a little bit because you have such a niche background. So I wanna hear how you first got interested in health, in wellness, in fitness.

Christine LaVopa (01:35)
I may.

Katalina Dawson (01:50)
And when did you realize it was more than a hobby? It was something that you wanted to build a career around.

Christine LaVopa (01:56)
That is a loaded question started when I was 15 years old, I picked up my first dumbbell. I've always been into sports. Softball was my sport. Um, I got my degree in physical education. So I started off with, you know, teaching children how to be healthy and fit and I loved it. I myself was an overweight child. so working out was always something that I loved to do.

I had to make sure that my own health and wellness was in good shape. And now as I moved to country to country, as my husband is a surface warfare officer in the Navy, if I didn't have my health and wellness, then I wouldn't have anything. Because I don't know if you know anything about the military life, it is chaos. But chaos that really pushes the envelope and health and wellness is always at the forefront. And I actually worked with military as well.

Katalina Dawson (02:41)
Well, first off, thank you so much for your service, being a military wife and being part of a family like that. And thank you, of course, to your husband. So appreciative of everything you guys do. But it's very interesting that you've both worked with military. And then I know when you were forming your own business, you focused in on high performing individuals and professionals specifically. So what prompted you to focus on those kind of individuals?

Christine LaVopa (03:04)
Well, I myself, I'm a high performer. I'm a type A person. I love hitting the mark. I love hitting goals. know, KPI, seeing numbers, seeing results, you know, the storyline of A plus B equals C. But at the same time, when you're working with people, high performers, usually it's that mindset, that black and white thinking that creates the glass ceiling because we have these storylines of I can't do X because of Y. that's really, when it comes to your health and wellness, there are no glass ceilings. You can do whatever you want. Just because you do CrossFit doesn't mean you can't do yoga. Just because you paleo doesn't mean that vegetarian too. It's just kind of like, well, mean, vegetarian is different, but It's really one of those things where you create your own home and you make sure that you have a ground, a steady foundation and health and wellness is definitely those building blocks that do it.

Katalina Dawson (03:56)
So you mentioned quite a bit about mindset in there. I would love to dive more into that and how mindset plays such an enormous role in your health and wellness.

Christine LaVopa (04:05)
Oh, absolutely. I always say 110 % that your mindset sets the stage. So it's not, you know, my body does this. Your body always follows your mind. It's not the chicken without the egg. Every action begins with a if you're telling yourself, I can't, your body won't. So there has to be some, and what I do with high performers is I really help them rewire their brain, but also set a different way, set a different tone.

Christine LaVopa (04:33)
create a new storyline, write a new story for themselves when it comes to health, especially women because there's a lot of different storylines and societal pressures that we have to fit in this box when it comes to our health and that's it's crap. So for lack of better words, yeah.

Katalina Dawson (04:48)
Yeah. Yeah. And you bring up such a great point and I love doing quotes on this show. I know you haven't seen many episodes, but I talk about quotes all the time and I don't even always know who they're by, but I'm sure you're familiar with this quote, the, you think you can or you think you can't, you're right. And my gosh, the longer I live, the more I feel like that is such an inherent truth in everything we do in life. It's wildly powerful.

Christine LaVopa (05:04)
Exactly. Yes, and we as humans love to make associations and go off past experiences because that's how we understand the world. But when it comes to your health and wellness, when a roadblock presents itself, that is an opportunity for growth, not for giving So if you look at it, it's a universal message. If you put the work in and consistency beats motivation any day of the week. If you're searching for that feeling and you're telling your brain, have to be motivated to do this.

Katalina Dawson (05:25)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (05:37)
that's not going to get you to your goal because you're just working off motivation. Same thing about, you know, I'm making a New Year's resolution to lose 10 pounds or 20 pounds, whatever that is. The second Friday in every January is called Quitters Day on purpose for this reason. You have to have a set smart goals, right? Specific time measurement, attainable, realistic. Like they have to be these goals, same KPIs that you work in your business, you translate them to your health and wellness. And that's what I help. know, teams and women do, high performers. 'Cause if you could see the tangible evidence, then it becomes more real.

Katalina Dawson (06:08)
Yeah! Yes, and it's an investment in yourself. Very much so. And I want to share a little bit of a personal story here, which I know I shared with you one on one before. idea that so many people put it off, I feel like they put their health, their wellness, whether it's the nutrition, whether it's working out. For me, one of the things that I need to do regularly and it is a maintenance for me is I get massages like every other week.

Christine LaVopa (06:15)
Absolutely. Yeah. Peace. Yeah.

Katalina Dawson (06:37)
And a lot of people when they hear that think, ooh, how hoity-toity, how like fancy and like luxurious. For me, it's not. So when I was 16, first of all, I'm a horseback rider. I love horses. I've ridden almost my whole life. And when I was 16, I had a very serious accident from horseback riding where I almost broke my back. My back has never been the same since. I have some really bad problems with it. It's in my lower back.

And on average, I throw out my back about every four to six months. And it can be minor where I'm like not doing too good for a couple of days, or it can be major where I am like out of commission for four months, where it is excruciating to even breathe, where my spine looks like there's a curve in it. I've been rushed back to, you know, emergency clinics to have x-rays because they're like, no, your back doesn't look right. And they're like, somehow it's still together, but you're not okay. And I'm like, yeah. It hurts to breathe and I can't move well and I can't sit in a chair well and it is a massive problem. So for me, massage therapy keeps my back in order so that I don't slip it out nearly as often. When I am regular with it, I might slip my back out every eight to 10 months instead of every four to six. And keeping that sort of stuff in mind, buying a better mattress.

Making sure I take care of my back is such an investment in my overall wellbeing. Because when my back goes out, I'm not performing at work well. I'm not performing at home well. I can't cook meals like I used to. I can't do anything. And it's like, you always once you hit that point where you're like, I should have, but we shouldn't think of it that way. We shouldn't have been like, I should have taken care of my back ahead of time putting that investment in in the first place is so important to prevent burnout, to prevent your back throwing out whatever it is. And I feel like a lot of people, especially high-performance professionals, were always thinking, well, but I gotta get this done or I don't have time. And it's like, but if you don't put your health first, it's gonna be so much worse later on. Like when I throw my back out and suddenly I'm like, I can't travel to work.

Christine LaVopa (08:27)
Okay.

Katalina Dawson (08:52)
and I'm missing one of the biggest conferences of the year because my back is thrown out or something like that. So it is so important.

Christine LaVopa (08:59)
It's so important. I love that you named all the things that are non-negotiables for you. So a non-negotiable is a thing that you have to hold on to. And if you're not protecting your own boundaries with your own health and wellness, nobody's going to do that for you. This is not something that you can Amazon Prime or that you can just snap your fingers and it's going to happen. There has to be consistent effort. And it doesn't mean to make these big things. You know, I was very sick at one point in my life and I started from ground zero.

And it wasn't the two hour workouts and the perfect meal plan that got me from here to there. It was five minute habits. you you look, you tell a high performer five minute habit and they kind of scoff at you like five minutes. But I'm telling you the, when you're trying to build your own home, these are the building blocks that create the concrete. You can't build your own beautiful home on sand. You have to have building blocks that stay.

So when you build on top of these five minute habits, your non-negotiables, they come all the way into play and being proactive. You know, I recently just had another health scare and I'm telling you that every single doctor called me a medical anomaly. And they say, I don't understand how you are walking out of the hospital right now. Because I took care of my health. think of your health and wellness as a high yield savings account, right? And you're going to keep putting in this high yield savings it gains interest over time and compounds. You might not use it right now, but I'm telling you, I'm 44 years old and there's no way that I, if I didn't have my health and wellness I would have been able to walk out of that hospital with no long-term side effects. So think of this as just the account that you keep dipping into because you can't draw from an empty account.

Katalina Dawson (10:32)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (10:39)
So even five minutes, if you can't get that 30 or 45 minute workout in, five minutes will add up. And then here's a great thing right now. And I hope people that are watching this, this is something that you can do right this second. Open up your phone and look at your calendar. Where do you have health wellness anywhere in your calendar? And most of the time, I'm going to say 85 % of the time people, they don't have it in their calendar. And you know, as a high performer, if it's on your calendar, it's not happening. You have clients, you have...

Katalina Dawson (11:07)
So true.

Christine LaVopa (11:08)
kids stuff going on, you have spouse work, your partner, whatever it is, friends, but where does your health and wellness fall in there? And then I don't have time is the biggest lie you can ever tell yourself. We always have time. If you have time to meet with your client, you have time, five minutes to ground yourself, to do some alternate nostril breathing, to do chair squats, to, you know, there's so many options that you can put in your actual calendar and I know you and I talked about this because we've done it before and I said at the conference, okay, open this up. Where is your health and wellness and how many people said it's not in there? I'm going to say probably close to 90%. You can just put a buffer time in between your meetings and I get it. Sometimes it doesn't happen, but let's just go with most of the time that consistency, that stuff that's going to be your non-negotiable chair squats, shoulder rolls. you could do wall pushups.

Katalina Dawson (11:50)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (12:03)
All of these things matter because it gets your body moving. gets you focused, but not in a way you get away from your work for five minutes and you reset. And sometimes that reset can get you through that hurdle or maybe that roadblock that you have at work, but it also gets you mentally ground. If you don't take care of you, it's not going to work long-term. And I talked with a financial advisor and we were talking about how much money you spend things on. Guess what the number one thing you spend when you retired? Number one costly thing.

Katalina Dawson (12:23)
It's your health. Yeah. Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (12:33)
your health, right? So if you're not voluntarily paying for it now, you will pay out of pocket later. And that can also mean I don't get to see my grandkids. I don't get to spend time with my spouse. I don't get to because I didn't put in now. And you can do this at any age. I worked with a couple there, the fittest couple I've ever worked with. were in their mid seventies, mid seventies. Yep. And They really wanted me to push them. They were eager to learn. They were students, right? One was a retired surgeon and his wife was a psychologist and a well-known author. And they wanted to learn because they were in a growth mindset. They opened their mind and they realized that I can still learn. I can still get better at 75. You can gain muscle at any age. Muscle is a luxury brand. Expensive to build, expensive to maintain.

Katalina Dawson (13:20)
Yeah. Yes.

Christine LaVopa (13:27)
long lasting quality material. I mean expensive, I mean calories. I mean time, I mean energy, which is a calorie is energy. So when you go home and you think about what you want to look like for 2026, do it now. Don't wait until January. Do it now, start a five minute happen now that you can take into the new year with it'll stick.

Katalina Dawson (13:31)
was recently watching something and it was doctors talking about the survival rates of serious diseases, specifically cancer was one of the ones that they were talking about. And they said that one of the indicators that somebody was going to survive.

Katalina Dawson (14:04)
and do well with the treatments, with recovery, et cetera, was actually how much muscle they had on their body. Muscle for serious diseases, for cancer, the more muscle you had, the better likelihood you had to survive to begin with and to have a better recovery and get back to basically 100 % afterwards. It was the biggest indicator and the biggest...

Christine LaVopa (14:11)
awesome ass.

Katalina Dawson (14:30)
Influence. So it's incredible how much one small thing can make a huge difference. muscle, just having muscle is also one of the best ways to lose weight. So when I learned that, that was interesting because maintaining your muscle burns more calories and just fuels you throughout the day at

Christine LaVopa (14:43)
Yes, absolutely. Yes, it's. Yep. yeah, muscle is a longevity organ. So if you're looking at muscle and also having muscle is great, but moving well without pain is better, right? That is, it's having muscle but moving well without pain. And that's where mobility comes into play because if you were in pain, as we talked about before with your back, that is a great deterrent that every human has. When you're in pain, you do not want to do X, Y, Z.

You're not performing well, you're not thinking clearly, you're thinking I'm in pain. And that is your sole focus of how do I not be in pain, right? Muscle and moving well without pain, this could simply be doing, you your shoulder is the most mobile joint in your body because it can go all the way around, right? Your hips can't do that, your elbows can't do that. It's also the most, the joint that gets injured the most, right? So think about how much we're sitting every day. Our shoulders are hunched forward. We have to retract our shoulders. Also, we get lower back pain.

Christine LaVopa (15:46)
That's a lot to do with not just your core strength, but lack of mobility in your hips, your glutes aren't firing and your hamstrings aren't firing as well. And your hip flexors, those little tighty things, the tight things that are on your quads, they get too short and they get tight. So when your body sits up, it tilts your pelvic forward and then your glutes fire, your hamstrings fire, and then that creates that curve in your lower back. Boom, lower back pain.

Christine LaVopa (16:10)
So when you're sitting for too long, that also lowers your mortality rate. I Harvard Medical says that people who sit the longest have a 24 % increased risk of death, 18 % higher risk of heart disease, 13 % higher risk of cancer, and 90 % higher risk of diabetes, 90%. And also we live in a world where sitting is part of our norm now. So we have to be that salmon flowing upstream and stop the cycle. We have to

Katalina Dawson (16:27)
my gosh. Wild.

Christine LaVopa (16:38)
And just five minutes going for a walk after a meal, that is an ultimate superpower because it lowers your blood sugar. And we can talk about blood sugars. I know we talked about it a lot. I'm a full believer of balancing your blood sugar, but walking in sunlight also decreases your risk of stress and then also helps your circadian rhythm, which your sleep wake cycle. So you have about five benefits in one habit called that a power.

Katalina Dawson (16:38)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (17:06)
habit. So you knock out and you talk high performer. If I can knock out one thing, five things with one sign me up. Right? Yeah.

Katalina Dawson (17:11)
Absolutely. Yeah. And you, you talked about one of the things that balances your blood sugar is like walking right after eating. So when it wasn't, ⁓ 10 degrees outside, like it is now, I started, yeah, I started implementing. I could, yeah. ⁓ but I had started implementing after I would eat my lunch, I would take a quick 10 minute break and I would go outside and I would just like walk around the neighborhood, walk through the park real quick.

Christine LaVopa (17:19)
Yeah. You could get a walking test with treadmill, whatever. But yes, yes, I know. Yeah.

Katalina Dawson (17:39)
cause you said that was balancing the blood sugar, but you had also mentioned that going outside, that being in the sunlight. So I was like, check, check, check, get a couple of them off at the same time. Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (17:48)
start feeling more grounded. Yeah. And you can also do, play this game with my kids all the time too, but it works really well with adults. And basically it's called the five senses game while you're going on a walk. So this way you're going to be inundated by things that you're overthinking about. But what if you can find five things that you notice seeing right now, you can pick four things that you hear three things that you can smell two things that you can fear tastes is kind of weird. So maybe that coffee that you had, but like you could just also But that helps you get grounded and also gets you more present with your outside environment. And if you're looking for things outside of what your thoughts are, it takes you away from that anxiety. So it puts you in that parasympathetic nervous system. Without getting too sciency, it's your rest and digest. As high performers, we love being in our sympathetic nervous system. We love the drive, but you cannot play your greatest hits 24 seven all hours a day. It's like running a marathon with no sneakers. Eventually around mile five, you're going to burn out.

Katalina Dawson (18:28)
Yeah. Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (18:45)
So we have to make sure that one, we're taking in an adequate nutrition. And usually this comes with women who diet for too long. People that have high stress jobs, our gut doesn't work as well because our gut is our second brain and is linked to that parasympathetic or that vagus nerve. So when you are stressed for too long, that means your body's not absorbing the right type of minerals to help your body move. So think of it as a car. I always go to the car analogy, right? You have this, what is your favorite car, Katalina?

Katalina Dawson (19:13)
I'm not a car person. ⁓ I'll tell you what car I have. I have a Ford C-Max Hybrid. There you go.

Christine LaVopa (19:15)
If you're like, yes, love your car, it's so beautiful. Yeah. Okay, great. So you put your fuel in your car, is your, your macro nutrients versus protein fat, five, sorry, protein fat and carbohydrates, right? Those things all require calories, which is energy. So you put that in your car, then you wash your car, you do the inside of your car and you're ready to go. get in the driver's seat, but you can't even turn it on. that's what the micronutrients do. They help your body function. And when you're overly stressed and you're not eating enough, your body doesn't have enough fuel or the right type of fuel to turn your body on. So micronutrients don't exactly have calories, but they help your body function. And as women, especially women, we need that. So it's very important that you're getting in the right micronutrients and macronutrients that help your lifestyle.

Katalina Dawson (20:01)
Yeah. And it's actually really funny that we just use my own car as an example, because exactly what you said would happen with my car for a while. And you know what we realized the issue was? The battery, which sounds like micronutrients. And when we made that fix, we got the battery fixed. It no longer spontaneously doesn't start like it used to. So, wow, what an interesting fortuitous analogy right there.

Christine LaVopa (20:12)
turns on. I always say music car analogy because explaining macros and micros and blood sugar sometimes can really turn people off because they want to know the science, but more is it, why is it for me? So you give them the science behind it to understand it, but the why is it for me is that you paint the picture of why. And I think we've all come to a place, especially as a high performer, where we don't know how to pace ourselves.

Burnout doesn't look like, I'm laid out on the floor. Burnout can also mean that you're operating at 60 % when you can be operating at 90, right? So everybody looks a little bit different. And that's when also you become more snappy, more dysregulated, your emotional regulation. And we were talking about this before offline that when you are emotionally regulated, you win the room, right?

Katalina Dawson (21:06)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (21:20)
and you can calm your emotions from anybody that's or any environmental stimulation that comes your way and you stay calm under the pressure, under whatever's going on, you win. You cannot control other people's reactions. You can control what you can react to, right? And when you can control your reactions and come from a calm and grounded place, which is everything we just talked about, then your leadership wins the room, right? And

Katalina Dawson (21:46)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (21:47)
That is so important when you are a high performer. And when you say high perform like winning to a high performer, like, yes, sign me up. But it's not just about like winning or losing. It's for yourself and your health and your home well-being. when I look at clients or teams, I don't look at just their health and nutrition. It's a whole body approach. You have to look at the stress management. You have to look at the sleep. You have to look at, you know, what their lifestyle is like. I'm not going to tell a mother of four that is a COO to get a two hour workout in.

That is 0.0 % helpful, right? And honestly, if you tell a high performer they're at the like, see ya, then they fail before they even start because they don't even start because they don't want to fail. So we have to start with those small building blocks. And sometimes, you know, we have to work backwards. We see a goal and like, okay, let's step it down. Let's work backwards with our health because you have to make it realistic and attainable. So it all matters and you don't have to wait to start to 2026. You can start today.

Katalina Dawson (22:17)
Yeah. Well, and I want to also share a little bit about how we met because there's one of my favorite tips you gave that I implemented in my everyday came from the first time we met. And I'll put that in quotes, met because it was Women in Consumer Finance. They had a webinar and they brought you on and it was fabulous. I mean, you were such a wealth of knowledge and you walked us through a bunch of different things that we could do at our desk right here because you were talking about how terrible sitting is. I guarantee you almost everybody in this industry, we are sitting most of our day. We're at desks, we're looking at computer screens. So to give us things that we could do right here at our desks was enormously helpful. And one of the tips you gave was in between meetings, cause I'll be like meeting, meeting, meeting, back to back to back to back. You said when you have the one minute, 30 seconds, or even if you're lucky enough to get something like three minutes between meetings, just stretching, just moving a little bit, getting your back moving, stand up for a second, bend over, just stretch your body between each meeting was so incredibly like changing for my body. Cause I noticed when I started implementing that, when I would get up from the workday, I don't feel as stiff. I don't feel as tired. which is interesting because I didn't think that just small stretching bits would change like my energy level for the day when I finished my work day. And then after I met you on that webinar, I had the absolute pleasure of meeting you in person when Women in Consumer Finance had their in-person event. And I was super, super lucky that you were part of my team where

Christine LaVopa (24:05)
The other key.

Katalina Dawson (24:30)
You shared so many incredible snippets of information and another one that I picked up on that I was doing every day and I almost guarantee you at least 50 % of our entire industry is doing it is do not grab your coffee and just drink coffee first thing in the day. And I'll let you take away to explain it,

Christine LaVopa (24:46)
Yes. Yeah, so biologically speaking, we wake up and our body wakes us up with cortisol. So somewhere around 8 a.m., your body is spiking cortisol, right? So if you're not eating and you're just looking at your phone and you're going and checking emails before you even start your coffee and then you don't have anything to eat, you don't even have water, you're just dumping black coffee or whatever type of coffee, maybe it's a sugary coffee into your system, your blood sugar goes way, way up and insulin dumps in, so that helps bring that blood sugar down. But that's not just the issue because insulin does its job, but it makes you hypoglycemic. So it brings it down so much that you want to peak again. So you're going to grab more sugar probably one to two hours later. And that creates that roller coaster effect. You want to have something in your system preferably before you have that coffee. And that will help mitigate the cortisol spike and also set you up for success throughout the day. with even blood sugar balance. That can be protein. Sometimes I just, know, I'm not so hungry in the morning. I'm not a big breakfast person, but it could be maybe some eggs. can be, and always, you know, I always tell the people this, don't eat your carbs naked. And I know that sounds kind of crazy, but eat your fiber and your protein first, carbohydrates last. Why? It's one of those 1 % type of advantages, right? So it helps mitigate that blood sugar spike. So it's not so high. So again, your blood sugar is going to go like this all day long. you just don't want the peaks and the valleys. That's when we have the problems. And then you have so many peaks and valleys for so many years. And when you get into your forties, you become insulin resistant. So that's a big fancy word just saying the insulin doesn't work the same way, right? And then when we don't, so when you have muscles going to tie this all back together, the more muscle we have, it's a highest metabolic currency. So when you have muscle, your muscle works by storing glycogen. What is glycogen? For lack of better words, it's carbohydrates. So the more muscle you have, the more glycogen you can store and it doesn't go into your visceral fat around your midsection. And that's the problems, the visceral fat around your midsection, around your organs that create problems later on in life. So the more muscle you have, the more calories you burn at rest, and it's not just calorie burn, but you're at rest, you're requiring more energy, and it's also better to store those carbohydrates. So carbs are not the enemy, they are energy. We just have to make sure we strategize throughout the day in how we use them.

Katalina Dawson (27:11)
Yeah. Okay, so action steps for anybody listening who's in this industry to kind of sum it up. We have don't drink your coffee first thing in the day, make sure you're having some proteins and things and to piggyback off that. Never have your naked carbs, dress your carbs with the protein, with the fiber. No naked carbs anyone. movement snacks, moving throughout the day, stretch between every meeting.

Christine LaVopa (27:12)
That was a lot of Yes. Yes. We're getting good cards. Yes.

Katalina Dawson (27:36)
right after your lunch break. Take a five minute walk if you can. If it's not, you know, 10 degrees outside, maybe. Go take a little walk, do the movement snacks, stretch, chair squats, which is basically if you haven't heard of chair squats before, Christine will tell you, stand up, sit down. up, sit down.

Christine LaVopa (27:42)
Yes, for sure. Yes. So you stand up. I don't know if you can see, but you then you sit down and then you stand back up. But also remember to doing calf raises are very important as well because your calf is actually your second heart. So what they mean by that is that it helps pump blood back up into your body. So if you're sitting stagnant for too long, you lose the circulation. That also feels more drained. So when you stand up, you can do some calf raises to make sure that extra that heart's pumping it back up to your body.

Katalina Dawson (28:04)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (28:23)
So, ⁓ calf raises is really simple. Yeah, it's very, we complicate things, right? As high performers, like, it has to have this complex, super cool system for it to work. no, stick with the basics. Figure out the basics. The human body was designed to move. know, figure out a squat, hip hinge, push, pull, gate, carry. Like all of those things matter. Doing a handstand on your pinky may cool on Instagram, but it's not very functional for life.

Katalina Dawson (28:23)
Perfect. So add calf phrases.Yeah? No.

Christine LaVopa (28:52)
So think about how your body can move and move at any age. know, the body is supposed to move and it helps many different ways.

Katalina Dawson (28:59)
Yeah. focusing on that building that muscle for that longevity, that what did you call it? A health savings account almost that you're building by building that muscle. Yes.

Christine LaVopa (29:09)
Yes, high yield health savings account. Yep. And every little bit counts.

Katalina Dawson (29:15)
And there was one other thing you had mentioned. ⁓ and making sure that you keep your health and wellness at the front of your mind. Because if you don't have your health, you're gonna fail in other aspects with professional, your business, your family. Making sure you're healthy is so important. Christine, before we go, are there any other last minute like. Quick tidbits or action items that people should be doing every day that we didn't cover.

Christine LaVopa (29:43)
Sleep is so important. If you look at muscle as a whole, it's not just the fitness, it's not just nutrition. You also need recovery and rest and our body needs recovery and rest. I know when I sleep well, I feel more empowered and positive. Sleep is the number one thing, especially also for men. For men, if you're waking up at three or four o'clock in the morning, you can be lowering your testosterone at a heavy amount. We can go into the science of that anyway, but.

For women, we need sleep for our estrogen and progesterone. Typically, women need more sleep than men do as well. So we need to make sure that we protect our sleep. And as we get older, that's the one thing we kind of like, we're in our 20s. Like, we'll sleep when we're dead. Like, that is not a thing. You will die faster if you don't protect your sleep, that's for sure. And it's just linked to so many things and also having that high stress job. So if you were to, you know, go

Katalina Dawson (30:30)
Yeah.

Christine LaVopa (30:38)
Here's a quick tip to go to sleep. If you have trouble falling asleep, you could do something called yoga nidra. I know it sounds kind of like a little bit woo woo. But what it does is I call it meditation for the type A brain. And you can just Google this. You can put this in your in YouTube and just look up yoga nidra for 10 minutes and you habit stack it. So anchor it with something you're already doing. When you get into bed, you get into bed every day. You can lay down. put your ear pods in or put out your speaker on and just listen to a voice telling you to focus on different body parts. You're going to think of other things. This is not to extinguish all of the thoughts, but you're going to think of something and then bring your mind back to that body part. So it creates that mind body connection again, that goes back into that parasympathetic nervous system. So you get to feel more calm and relaxed. So they are doing studies now that yoga nidra has been around forever. And I learned this when I started working with military.

They help with veterans that have PTSD and veterans that have people that have high stress jobs, right? And it helps them like make those connections again from their brain to their body and helps them feel more grounded and less anxious and then helps them sleep better. So yoga nidra and progressive muscle relaxation. Those are two things I always tell my clients and you can seriously just YouTube progress PMR or yoga nidra and they can help you relax. And PMR is like what I would say, whatever thought is going in your head, what you can do, I do this in traffic, you just tense up really, you're re-gripping the steering wheel, right? One, two, three, one, two, three, and you go through every body part. Tense up, let it go. Tense up, let it go. And that helps you also with your getting into that parasympathetic nervous system, but gets you out of that thought process, right? You have to break the cycle. You need a pattern disruption. So that helps you.

Katalina Dawson (32:11)
Hey.

Christine LaVopa (32:22)
It helps, it doesn't extinguish the thought altogether, but you help slowly break it down. And that also helps with your health and wellness and feeling your whole overall wellbeing.

Katalina Dawson (32:31)
That's incredible. my God. you always see what I love about you too is you don't just have a suggestion. You'll explain everything behind it. And you were just like, I've called other people a wealth of knowledge before, but I don't know if anybody goes to your level of how in depth you are with everything. It is incredible. And unfortunately we're out of time today, but I want to thank you so much. yeah. I knew I was like, we're going to go over on time. Christine's so amazing.

Christine LaVopa (32:33)
Yeah, it's cool. No, I know. I knew that was gonna happen. Thank you so much. Yes, for sure.

Katalina Dawson (33:01)
But thank you so much for being here.

Christine LaVopa (33:02)
I knew it because I'm like, oh, 30 minutes? Ooh, that's a lot of time. But thank you so much for having me on. Yeah, it's fabulous. I always love telling people, you know, I've come from a place where I've lost everything. And when you come from that place of being stripped, you have a choice. You can stay at the bottom or you can work your way back up. And

Katalina Dawson (33:07)
No!

Christine LaVopa (33:23)
No one cares about how you fell, it's how you get back up. and your health and wellness will, it will never fail you if you, know, things will happen, but you can always work it around your life. And I think that's really important to hold that. And I'm 44, you know, so I'm coming from a place where if not, then I'm, you know, just out of school or, you know, some people are like, you're in your twenties, you don't know what's going on. And I wouldn't quite say that either. It's just a different type of position in your life. And my 40s are the best, I have to say the best chapter

Katalina Dawson (33:52)
and more to come. More great things to

Christine LaVopa (33:54)
More to come, that's for sure.

Katalina Dawson (33:55)
Yeah, so anybody who isn't connected with Christine, mean, you absolutely should get connected. You can find her on LinkedIn. She has her own website. If you're interested in her coaching, highly recommend it. I'm sure you can tell how incredible she is just by this. I absolutely love you, Christine. You are amazing. Also, her TED Talk is coming out soon, so keep an eye out for that.

Christine LaVopa (34:09)
Yeah.

Katalina Dawson (34:18)
So like, what a wealth of knowledge. What an incredible human being with an amazing story to tell. Christine, you are fabulous. Thank you again so much. And to any of our listeners, my pleasure, truly. And to any of our listeners, if you have any questions, comments or topics that you would like to see,

Christine LaVopa (34:26)
Thank you so much.

Katalina Dawson (34:36)
Please leave them in the comments below. We will do our best to get to all of them. But thank you all so much and we'll see you in the next episode. Bye.

Christine LaVopa (34:44)
Thank you so much. Bye.