Truth with Katie

Things I hear all the time when I start talking about movement with my clients are:
“I can’t exercise because I’ve hurt my knee.” “I’ve got arthritis.” “I can’t go to the gym.” etc etc.

I think sometimes we hear the word movement and immediately picture going to the gym, running, doing a workout or whatever we’ve seen someone doing online.
What I actually want you to think about first is simply, how can you spend less time being sedentary?
That could be walking the dog, pottering around the garden, walking around while you’re on the phone dancing in the kitchen or even getting up and down from your chair a few times while you’re watching TV.
It might not feel like exercise, but your body doesn’t care what you call it. You’re using your muscles and you’re not sitting still.

This is really important when we’re talking about metabolic health. Our muscles play a huge role in taking glucose out of the blood, and regular movement helps improve our sensitivity to insulin.
If you’ve been sedentary for a long time, going from that to trying to copy someone doing workouts on Instagram is probably going to feel pretty overwhelming and the chances are you’ll decide exercise isn’t for you before you’ve really even started.

So start with what you know your body can do. Because as you move more and start trusting your body more, then you can look at adding other things focusing on cardiovascular exercise and resistance training.

What you choose to do doesn’t need to look like anyone else’s version of exercise.
Sometimes the best place to start is just moving a little more than you did yesterday because all movement counts.

When I first started learning about health and nutrition, I thought being healthy meant eating perfectly.

I thought I needed to avoid anything processed, buy organic where I could, do gut resets and basically follow all the advice I was seeing online. I thought that's what healthy people did.

The more I've studied, the more I've coached people with insulin resistance, prediabetes and type 2 diabetes, and the more I've understood my own insulin resistance, the more I've realised health doesn't actually look like that.
In fact, I think social media has made it far more complicated than it needs to be.

Most of us are just trying to get through the week. We've got work, families, long days, food shopping to think about and bills to pay. Sometimes dinner is whatever's at the bottom of the freezer because you haven't had time to get to the supermarket.

Sometimes you've forgotten your lunch and end up grabbing something while you're out. Sometimes you simply can't afford to fill your trolley with organic food and every seed social media tells you that you need.

I don't think that means you can't improve your health.
For me, it's much more about understanding your body than trying to eat a perfect diet. Once you understand why protein and fibre is important, why building muscle helps and why sleep and stress affect your metabolic health, you start making different choices naturally.

Not because someone has given you another list of foods to avoid (which then raises stress) but because you actually understand what's going on.
That's the bit I love teaching. I don't want people leaving me with another set of rules. I want them to leave thinking, "I finally understand why my body does what it does.". I like to give you, your power back 💪