This is a full transcript of the Nirvana Sisters podcast Episode 99

Editor’s Note: Please know that this podcast transcript is automatically generated and may contain minor errors such as typos and word switches. For more information, be sure to listen to the podcast here.

[00:07] Amy Sherman: Welcome to Nirvana Sisters podcast, where we take the intimidation out of well being and beauty to help you achieve your highest state, your nirvana. We are Sisters in law and your hosts. I'm Amy Sherman.

[00:18] Katie Chandler: And I'm Katie Chandler. So let's get into some real conversation.

[00:24] Andrea Marcellus: You. Um.

[00:27] Amy Sherman: Welcome back to the show. Nirvana Sisters Family. We are back with Andrea Marcellus for part two. If you didn't listen to last week's episode, make sure you listen to part one. It was really helpful. This week. We go through many different things, but one of the things we talk about are tips and strategies for eating, especially eating out, eating during the holidays. Andrea has some great techniques that she shared with us. We also talk about why accountability is key and a lot of exercising is a mental game. We talk about different tips for exercising for your age group, and we also get into what heavy weight means. I know for me, I hear lifting with heavy weights all the time, but I don't necessarily know what that means. So she gets into that as well, as well as a few other quick weight routines. Enjoy the episode and thanks for listening.

[01:18] Katie Chandler: I love that.

[01:19] Amy Sherman: Yeah, that's very freeing.

[01:20] Katie Chandler: Yeah, absolutely. So I want to know some quick and easy you've mentioned strategy. Strategy, strategy. And I know you have so many great little tips and strategies and things to use when you're dining out, and maybe just hit us with a couple of your favorites that tend to be really helpful for people.

[01:44] Andrea Marcellus: Well, I can give you dining out. Strategy and holiday strategy are sort of the same thing. I measure food in hand portions because we're getting away from calorie counting or anything like that, and we figure out what's an energy appropriate portion of food for you. So when you approach holidays or you approach, just say, eating out, just try to think in terms of the total portion. How many hands are you going to try to eat at this meal? Like, probably two, three hands. Something in there, right? So I think of it that way. So I definitely sit down, I order a glass of wine. I get bread and butter because I love bread and butter. Oh, my God, wine and bread. I know. I'm everybody's best people. Like, my clients would be like, the first time I would go out to eat with a client for it and everybody's trying to eat right in front of me. I'm like, oh, my God, I'm ordering the pizza.

[02:44] Amy Sherman: Oh, my God, I love it.

[02:46] Andrea Marcellus: I know, but I didn't. I came from the other place. But anyway, so then you start to think about especially if you've been horse and controlling for a while, your stomach's smaller, so you have to think about it. So if, like, appetizers come out, I go, okay, I'm going to have three bites because there's other things I want. If a salad comes, I'm going to eat half the salad because I'm saving room for dinner and dessert. Dinners that come at a restaurant are always at least two food, maybe three. And you can go, okay, and this is my lunch for tomorrow. Like, I'm having this and then you know, I'm going to have this awesome, delicious lunch. That's amazing. And then you have some bites of dessert. But by thinking of it beforehand in terms of, okay, how many hands of food am I going to eat rather than like, trying to I didn't mention at all what I was eating except for bread and butter. Right. It doesn't matter what you eat. If you're portion controlling your social meals, it truly doesn't matter. And if you're optimizing the meals you don't share to be highly nutritious, boy, are you living a good life and you're setting yourself up for great health. Yeah. You're not skip the broccoli and eat all the things you can't get except for that holiday. Just portion control.

[04:04] Amy Sherman: It so about portion control and about the hand idea, I love that I guess it's dependent on the person, but generally speaking, right. How many hands should you have? Because I think we've completely like as a society have no idea because the portions in America are so big that we're all overeating because it's just there, right? Yeah. So what's a good maybe thing to think about?

[04:30] Andrea Marcellus: So in my app I have a chart that's a starter chart. And please keep in mind I literally made this up from a vision. This is literally just a guidepost. I've been doing this particular thing with people for over 15 years and it's literally just a guide to help you figure out what's best for you. And the goal is to be satisfied and have energy to take you just from meal to meal. Nobody here is a farmer. Basically, like, we don't have to eat a big breakfast so that we can get on with the day. And I already established that eating to maintain a workout lifestyle is only going to work if you are a professional athlete or if you are somebody with a very specific physical goal. You're training for an event or you're a bodybuilder. So if you're any of those people, don't listen to me right now. For the rest of us who are just busy working people and want to be able to go out and drink wine and eat bread, start with a breakfast within an hour of waking up or trying to eat one hand of food, or maybe two if you're one of those people. And then that's when the clock starts the day and you eat every two to 4 hours and you're trying to eat for snacks or small meals, you're eating one hand. For lunch or dinner, you're eating two hands. And see how that does for you. And notice I'm not telling you what a hand means. You figure it out for yourself. And I mean, I help people through this, obviously, this is what I do, but that's a guideline I could give you to kind of try to start yourself. The key is with all of these things is accountability. So we all have best intentions. And this is why I'm very happy to offer out my habits or my strategies, because I've been doing this a really long time. The missing piece of all this is when people are making a shift in life and they realize they need to make a change. Accountability helps so much. And there was one study I read where accountability increases your chance of success by 85%.

[06:45] Amy Sherman: Wow.

[06:46] Andrea Marcellus: 85%. And so it's really important to either have the help of a coach or to do things with someone else or in a group or whatever. I can't encourage that enough. And this is coming from someone who never asks for help. I just don't I'm just learning to do that. I think last year, so maybe at 49, I'm getting better. I'm 50 now. I've been doing it for about a year and a half. No, but asking for help changes your life and two, doing things in groups. I've been this lone wolf my whole life in so many ways, and only in the last little bit do I have some groups of like I have a CEO group, I have mentors, I have my bestie girlfriends that I've had forever. But sometimes I'll just get bogged down at work and not rely on that so much. Or I don't want to waste the time telling them stuff that's wrong. Well, I've learned that, wow, groups help, and I can't encourage that enough. So if you decide, look, I'm ready to make a change in my life and I want it to be a real one and a lasting one, you got to go slow and steady. You have to respect yourself and really define who you are before you even start. And then you get help. You get people to keep you accountable, you get people to keep you positive, and you make sure you tell those people your purpose. Motivation comes from purpose. And when you say your purpose out loud to people, it ends up being like in stone. And you can change your purpose, but it really, really helps. It's like dropping a flag, implanting a flag of, this is who I am and this is where I'm headed, and everybody just watch me and please cheer me on.

[08:37] Katie Chandler: I love that. That's great. That is so true. Especially the accountability piece. I mean, I think Amy and I can speak for that just because we've doing this. We have been each other's accountability partner, and I think we're like, approaching 100 episodes, so it says a lot about having somebody to cheer you on and to help you out.

[08:59] Amy Sherman: Yeah, it's so true because there's so many times and also just like, just what you were talking about for exercise groups. Like, I have friends in the neighborhood, and we'll make a plan to do a walk on the weekend. And sometimes you're like, I don't feel like going. But then you're accountable. You're like, you know what? I'm not going to bail on this person. And then you go and you feel so much better. But if you had not made that plan, you would never do it yourself because it's just too hard to motivate yourself sometimes 100%.

[09:23] Andrea Marcellus: It's a mental game. Again, a mental game. I put a feature in my app, literally, just because of this. I made up this thing where so these custom workouts, you can dial up like, you know, I have regular classes, but it's another feature, like, and you can dial up like, there's, I don't know, 30 options in there. You can even say, like, I don't want to mess up my hair. I'm at my desk. I don't want to mess up my hair. I got to zoom. I have ten minutes. Let's do something. But what's cool is you can invite other people to do the workout, live with you on your phone. It's a silent feature. So this was like I was thinking about, why do people come to me? It's to have someone to talk to or to have an appointment time. We're going to do this so you could make up a workout and then text it to your friend and be like, hey, let's meet and do this. And it's really cool, and it's a way of creating that accountability around workouts so that you actually show up for them, because you are more likely to show up for yourself when it involves someone else. Just look at your to do list today. When you look at what actually got to done, it's the things that involved somebody else, and the stuff that was just for you is like, kicked down the list, and maybe you'll get a couple of those things done, but everything for somebody else got done first.

[10:40] Amy Sherman: So true.

[10:41] Katie Chandler: Well, speaking of exercise, a couple of tips to get some exercise in. And also I saw on your TikTok page recently you were suggesting low intensity steady state for a certain age group and high intensity interval training for a different age group. Walk us through that because I'm just so curious as to why.

[11:04] Andrea Marcellus: Okay, that's a great question. All right, so both of them will burn fat and burn calories. People want to say that high intensity intervals burn way more fat or calories. Like, well, no. A recent study showed for all things kept equal, this one group lost three and a half pounds, where the other group lost two and a half pounds. Doing steady state, like, it's not a massive amount, so everybody take a breath. But here's the difference. Steady state, the low intensity steady state workouts, they are gentler, they're easier. People get into them. You kind of zone out for some people that's easier to stay consistent with. They train your stamina and especially if you're younger exercise. What we want to be training in life is stamina at that point, right? And they increase Vo two max. The volume of oxygen your lungs can push out to your heart with every single breath. The amount of oxygen your heart can push out with every single beat to get your muscles going. So that's important. The thing is that they have to be longer workouts and you risk overuse injuries. So that is something people that hang out on the treadmill all day, it's like imagine it's repetitive motion activities or runners, things like that. So just a couple of considerations there high intensity interval are really important, particularly for perimenopausal or menopausal women, for two reasons. Because they increase insulin sensitivity, your body's ability to respond well to smaller and smaller amounts of insulin. So as opposed to insulin resistance, which packs pounds on your body, okay? And we already have more Cortisol floating around your body at that time. We already have a hormonal disadvantage going on. So we definitely want to improve our insulin sensitivity. And the other thing about it is that you get this thing called epoch. It's post exercise oxygen consumption. So what happens during hip workouts are two things. One, you have stored glycogen in your muscle, that's your muscle sugar. And hip workouts are so demanding that they use up those glycogen stores very quickly. You feel that you can't go very long. They also deplete the oxygen you have available. So your body is rushing to kind of restore those glycogen stores. And in that process it requires insulin. So your body gets very responsive to insulin again, it improves that if it was not happening for you. And at that stage of life, we get a little insulin resistant. Also, when your body is restoring the oxygen levels to where they need to be, that takes hours. And so that's where after hit workouts, you get this increased metabolism, this increased fat burn for hours. And in perimenopausal and menopausal, women, there is a tendency to put on belly fat and for the body to be depositing fat. So anything that keeps us in a state where our metabolism is lifted a bit for a while is going to be helpful. So that's what that's about. They're good for everybody all the time. But a particular recommendation for, say, my age group and I talk about this all the time. I love hanging out on my Stairclimber and I do travel reservations and my text and I answer people, all the people that message me on TikTok, I'm probably on an elliptical machine or something messaging you back. But actually it works against me at this point and can increase stress. So I actually have to dial it down myself right now.

[14:56] Katie Chandler: So there is a really important piece, though, that you mentioned on the piece of content that I saw about doing hit and how some people are doing it wrong because they're not actually bringing the heart rate all the way back down. And so when you don't bring it all the way back down, I imagine that's when it starts to raise cortisol levels and become a little bit more problematic. So is that the key? You get the heart rate up and.

[15:20] Andrea Marcellus: Then yeah, it's huge. I'm so glad you brought this up because, boy, if I want to give anybody a tip, it's like, gosh, this is taught improperly everywhere, all the time. More is not more. So when you're in the Spinning class, you're doing your Peloton, you're doing your Orange Theory, you're doing whatever, like the entire concept of Orange Theory where it's like this leaderboard and it's about calorie burn. It's like, oh, my goodness gracious, those people on that board have nothing to do with you. And by the way, if you're tired, your heart's going to be faster. If you're dehydrated again, remember, I said whole humanity. These things are so arbitrary and artificial. So what they do is they're pushing people to push themselves, but not with a purpose, not with a goal. The goal isn't who can burn the most calories. The goal isn't how high can you keep your heart rate up for so long? The benefit to your body comes in the zero to 60, right? It's in the acceleration. Stay in there for a second and bring it back down. Those are the intervals. That's where it happens. So if you don't bring it all the way back down to what I call a four out of ten, then you are not getting the full benefit of that, and you are just burning out muscle sugar. And then what happens there is you feel funky afterwards. And then what do you do? You start going to eat things or drink things to try to feel normal again. And guess what? You ingested more calories than you even burned during that workout. And I know this personally. This is what happened to me over exercising as an instructor and for myself, and I'm a Spinning instructor as well. I'm telling you, when I started to really understand the science of what was going on and I changed, and it's to being gentler, where you come all the way down, then you go back up again. For us, it feels like you're slacking. It feels like and it's like, no, that's the way to do it. It's so funny. Less is a great reminder.

[17:34] Amy Sherman: That is a good reminder because I haven't done a hit workout in a while. I've been doing more low impacts, but I don't even know in my hip workouts, if I get to a point where I'm a four out of ten, I feel like they're exhausting. It's probably why I haven't done them in a while. I'm going to remember that super demotivating.

[17:50] Andrea Marcellus: But here's the thing I like to say like you're asking me for tips. I'm big on desk workouts. I don't think anybody has more. I do plain clothes desk workouts all the time. And what's awesome is you can do a hit workout between a zoom. You can sit there and it can be 90 seconds of squats, anything. And boy, not only are you going to give yourself a little metabolism boost and you're going to reframe your brain, you're oxygenating your entire body. Most importantly, you're oxygenating your brain. You're going to be able to focus on whatever's coming next in your day. And the best part, just do that for 90 seconds and tell me that you want, like, chocolate or potato chips. You don't. All you want is water. So if you're having these snack cravings in the afternoon, just doing any 60 to 90 seconds of any exercise, you know, that gets your heart rate up, boom. You're not going to want anything. It's going to get you through that moment.

[18:45] Amy Sherman: That's so great. I wanted to ask you two things. Firstly, if hit, let's say, is recommended for someone who's Perry, right? Mid 40s, mid 50s, right. Does that mean you should only do that or does that mean you should do it a certain amount a week? Or can you combine it with lower? Like, what do you recommend there?

[19:06] Andrea Marcellus: Fantastic question. No, we definitely don't want to do hits two days in a row. You have to give your body rest. And again, we are always trying not to have stress and we certainly don't want to increase stress on the body. So you want to keep these sessions shorter? I don't do it ever for more than 20 minutes or so. It's always part of something. And the workout bar in general keeps shorter and just activate your life. More of a standing and walking. You'll be doing much better, but definitely skipping a day, so maybe three days a week or something like that. And yeah, the same with your heavy weight workouts. You want to be very careful about that. Like, you have to have rest. That is one of the biggest mistakes people make. They're pushing, they want results fast. And it's hard to believe that just strategized and gentle is going to get you there.

[20:01] Amy Sherman: Let me ask you, you just said about the heavyweight workouts, and that's what I really wanted to hone in on because I don't really know what that means. What is a heavy weight? Is it £10, is it £20? And how much of that you should be doing? I used to have a trainer years ago and I did a lot of weights and it was good, but it was a little too intense. And now I'm like, I really need to get back into this strength training. Katie has been really into it lately, but it just feels like I don't know where to start. I don't know how long, et cetera, et cetera. If you could give our audience some little tips and strategies there. We'd love it.

[20:37] Andrea Marcellus: Sure. It doesn't have to be super long. It has to exhaust you and just muscle, exhaustion of the muscle you're trying to work. So that amount of time is going to be different for every person. So what you need to do is make sure that you're lifting heavy enough so that your form starts to suffer at the 9th or 10th repetition. That's kind of what the definition of a heavy weight. So whatever the exercise is, that's where you want to be. I tend to, on heavy weight days, go with a we're doing them, what, three days a week, something like that, because you're leaving a day in between. And then I might do lighter weights on other days and all sorts of things and body weight workouts. But what you really kind of want to stick to a more traditional weight training protocol for the best results with your heavy weights because also your joints are going to be aligned properly so that you avoid injury. So that's not a great place for choreography. As much as I love it, you want to kind of just really watch your form and three sets of ten. It's a good way to go. And the best thing is that it's a no brainer. Put the weights at your desk, do your three sets of ten.

[21:59] Amy Sherman: Sorry to be like so specific, but is it just three sets of ten of something or is it like several exercises? Three sets of.

[22:09] Andrea Marcellus: But I can't make you a workout here on a podcast.

[22:13] Amy Sherman: Why not?

[22:16] Andrea Marcellus: But I mean, if we wanted to break it down to the least, like your body has to work in opposites. If you're doing a bicep curl, you must do a tricep. If you're doing your shoulders I would say for the people listening here, if we wanted to really no brainer this, you're going to do a bicep curl, you're going to go a tricep kickback, you're going to do some kind of overhead press and you can call it a day. If you're really a good super achiever, you're going to do some desk push ups or some regular push ups. I'm a fan of regular push ups and getting yourself to be able to do those. And I have a great video on how to work yourself up to plank push ups, which you change as a person mentally once you can start doing those. And then you would do some bent over rows and then you would go chest back, bicep, tricep, deltoid, bam, back on my I love it.

[23:11] Amy Sherman: What's funny, you have a piece of content that I haven't bookmarked and I use it all the time. It was like for busy people, it was like the arm one where you're like, do you have this lab or whatever? I've literally done that video so many times. And it's great because you said earlier where you stand on 1ft and you do the breathing. But in this one, it was standing on 1ft and putting the foot behind and doing I think it was like bicep curls or something like that. And I love that video for our listeners on her TikTok. She's got all these fun. It's your point of like, you have five minutes in between a call. Just go on a TikTok, watch one of your videos, do one of those things, and there you go. There's like one set down for the day. I have a feeling it's really great.

[23:51] Katie Chandler: All of this is on your app probably, as well. You probably have so many resources on your app as well.

[23:57] Amy Sherman: Yeah.

[24:00] Andrea Marcellus: Like this, too. I mean, yeah, there's regular workouts, but there are workouts where I literally wore plain clothes to shoot them. I wore what I wear to work so that it's clear you are not required to change your clothes to think about fitness. And I think that's my big thing. I'm trying to change the way America thinks about fitness and fitting it into your life. Not that it's like this separate piece you have to make time for nobody. We can't do that, but we absolutely can show up for ourselves in small bites. And the fact is, the results are better. And there was just a study, again, about this that just came I love it when there's a study that comes out that kind of validates the way I've been doing things with people that I just find actually works for them, for their lifestyle. But a study just came out this week that the benefits for your heart of working out between eleven and five are higher than if you work out in the morning or the evening. So these little bits I'm telling people to do during the day. I guess your heart likes it.

[25:12] Katie Chandler: Great. It's very interesting.

[25:14] Amy Sherman: Before we get into our wrap session, where can everybody find you? Because I know everyone's going to be clamoring for all these. Your content and your app and your website. Give us all the deets to do.

[25:25] Andrea Marcellus: Is go to andlife.com and like, Andrea lifelikeyourlifeandlife.com. And you can see my one on one program. You can see group programs if you want me to come to your company. And then you can also see my app, my book. There's so many tools to help people. I really have tried to make it so that it is not about cost, that it doesn't matter what your budget is, it doesn't matter what's going on in your life, that I have some way to help you show up for yourself and feel better now. And that's really what it is.

[26:05] Katie Chandler: That's fantastic.

[26:06] Andrea Marcellus: And then, of course, I'm on Instagram at Andrew Marcellus. I'm on TikTok. I think it's Andrew Marcellus. Official. I'm on YouTube. I'm like, I have stuff everywhere.

[26:15] Amy Sherman: And you do virtual coaching. If anyone's interested in doing one on one, that's what I do.

[26:20] Andrea Marcellus: My programs are all and we have really clever ways that I fit into your busy life. And it's pretty cool. The results are insane when you sign up for a call with me because I have to do a call with people and really understand where you're coming from, make sure it's a fit because nobody fails. And I go all in on people. Nobody fails. It's pretty cool. And you get sent a thing with just videos of real people going, oh, my goodness, it's so easy. It's so much easier than what people thought. So I'm just so proud and happy of what we've been able to accomplish and just watching people level up when they've just been struggling with this for so long. And making this a non conversation so that our lives can be about more important, more exciting, more fun things and helping people bring joy and a great relationship with food, which connects us to each other. It's so gratifying. Really cool.

[27:17] Katie Chandler: Yeah, it's really wonderful. We absolutely love what you're doing. All right, so let's get into our.

[27:22] Andrea Marcellus: I'm So Glad wrap session.

[27:24] Katie Chandler: Our first question is for you, Andrea. What is your favorite wellness or beauty hack?

[27:29] Andrea Marcellus: Oh, my gosh. Well, my favorite wellness hack in general is my brain reframe I do when I'm making my courage coffee. I talk to people about strategizing, like making rituals in your day. And it's one place where I just practice focus, and I know it takes about 90 seconds for my courage to make it. So I don't allow myself to do anything but focus on the sounds of that and that's activating brain centers that would shut off the amygdala. That's my stress reframe in the day. So that's one of my favorite wellness hacks. Like that you find a little thing you already do. I also plant whatever it is, but you just give yourself something and it becomes your ritual. And then as soon as you go to do that thing every day and if you just focus on it, your brain starts to know that's a safe harbor for you and immediately goes into that state of relaxation. It's pretty rad. And then my beauty hack is anastasia has this thing called Italian Summer, and it's a palette, a contouring palette and a blush, whatever. This is all I use because you can use it for your eyes or your face. I have no time. I am all about what is the easiest one product I can use, and I have to say I'm a huge fan.

[28:47] Amy Sherman: Oh, I haven't heard of that. I got to check that out. Very cool.

[28:51] Andrea Marcellus: Yeah. A contour, a blush, a highlighter. Perfect my eyes.

[28:56] Amy Sherman: And how do you maintain your daily nirvana?

[29:01] Andrea Marcellus: Oh, my gosh. This is such a good question. How do I maintain? I live according to a code, and I have built just a little life of little habits that are easy to maintain and where. I end up showing up for myself in small ways throughout the day, every day. And so it doesn't matter what comes flying at me in a day. I always have something that I'm doing that lifts me up, and literally, it shoots out dopamine. And I know that, but that's what I try to help people do, is create for themselves. I call it a self care scaffolding, but that's how I maintain my nirvana. I love what I do. It doesn't mean it's all always going right, but boy, do I love what I do. And I have ways that I lift myself all day long. I love it. I know.

[29:57] Katie Chandler: It is inspiring. It's very inspiring. All right, well, Andrea, thank you so much for being with us today. We were so excited to talk to you. And like we said earlier, we both feel like we know you because we watch everything you do on TikTok, but.

[30:12] Andrea Marcellus: You I love it. That's so amazing.

[30:15] Katie Chandler: For sure. I want to thank you all over.

[30:19] Andrea Marcellus: Your work is helping people. This is a wonderful, wonderful space you've created. And the conversations you're having are important and vital and really meaningful. And so I'm honored to be here and I appreciate it so much. I'm so glad.

[30:32] Katie Chandler: Thank you.

[30:33] Amy Sherman: Thanks for listening to Nirvana Sisters. For more information on this episode, check out the show notes. Please subscribe and leave us a review. Also, find us on Instagram at Nirvana Sisters. If you loved what you just listened to or know someone that would, please share it and tag us. Tune in next week for a fresh new episode of Nirvana Sisters. We'll continue to watch out for all things wellness so you don't have to. Bye.