Dawn Damon: Hey, everybody. Welcome to the BraveHearted Woman Podcast! Here we are with yet another power-packed episode, and today is no different. You're going to learn so much. So get pen and paper ready because I'm gonna be sharing with you and my guest some really incredible points of health and wellness. My guest today is the founder of the Strength and Vitality Wellness Center near Baltimore, Maryland, and with over 20 years of experience in health and wellness, nutritional counseling, and personal training, she empowers women to reclaim their mental and physical wellness. You know, we need that, and she does it through sustainable self-care practices. She also advocates eliminating the struggle of guilt and all the feelings that you have around self-care, making it accessible to you. Busy midlife women, so with a mission to help women live with strength and vitality and enjoy every day. Please welcome my guest today, Cara Michelle-Nether.

Cara Michele-Nether: Hello, Dawn. Thank you so much for this opportunity. I've been a fan of your podcast for a little while now, and so I'm super excited to be a member of the group of your esteemed guests.

Dawn Damon: Thank you.

Yeah. The brave hearts that we are midlife women, saying, Hey, you know what, we're not done. We're not gonna quit. We gotta stay healthy and well, that's what we're gonna talk about. We've been trying to connect now for a little while, so it's a treat for us, too, to have you on.

So I am curious, as I was reading through your things, you know, you're a powerhouse and being a wellness coach, a personal trainer, and a nutritional coach. What led you into all of this? Was there a cataclysmic moment or just a passion?

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah. You know, thanks for the question. I've just always felt like it's important to follow the gifts that have been given to us, and I've always been a person who's interested in helping others, acknowledging their potential. I wanna see the greatest potential in myself, and I think that that's what most people want. So, that's always been my gift, and my offering to the world is to help reflect back what I'm seeing in folks and help them see themselves in a better light.

Dawn Damon: I love that because I am of that mindset as well. I always say that the purpose of my life is to help other women find the purpose of their lives, however, we can do that. And so I believe there's a calling there, Cara, I, not everybody feels the way that you do, and I heard that you said you were just kind of trying to push through life's challenges, but you weren't addressing your own well-being, and that pace wasn't sustainable. So, how did you begin to prioritize your wellness? You know, sometimes we have to live it and go through it first before we can teach others to do it.

Cara Michele-Nether: Right? Absolutely. You know, I've always been a go-getter person, and I'm sure that you are the same, and your audience members are the same. You know, meaning that, you know, if there's something out there in the world that I want for myself, I'm just gonna go mm-hmm and make it happen. I'm a hundred percent clear that I've been given a gift to be born to the wonderful parents that I have. And here in the United States, and, you know, you know, when we look around the world, you know, many of us don't recognize the fact that we are in the top, you know, tier. We're in the top 10-20%. You better know it.

Dawn Damon: Yeah.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Explain for our listening audience what some of those symptoms are. Is the hypo, is that where you get, you lose a lot of weight, and you're just racing all the time?

Yeah, so I heard hyper.

Cara Michele-Nether: I had hyper, hyper. So there are two sides: hypo and hyper. So for me, the symptoms showed up as I wasn't able to sleep. Every time I ate. It just ran right through me. I was super tired all the time. My metabolism was running really fast. I was losing weight really fast. My heart was racing. I could hear my heart beating inside my chest all day long. I had tremors that came out of nowhere. So, it was pretty bad for a while there.

Dawn Damon: You know, that is very similar to an experience that I had with anxiety, and I was thinking that it was my thyroid. Turns out it was not my thyroid, but how uncomfortable, I mean, that gets your attention in a quick way for me, having panic attacks, but my heart racing, and I couldn't eat, run right through me, losing weight. And for me, it was trauma. I had to stop. Running and racing and blowing and going and saying, okay, Dawn, you're gonna have to look at some things for you. Was it just that you're just busy, busy, busy running? Is it a genetic thing that got your attention quickly?

Cara Michele-Nether: Yes. It really did. Yeah. You know, to this day, we don't really know exactly why, you know, this happened to me. When the doctors look at my history, how I've been taking care of myself, they're not really clear. But, you know, stress can be a really big push for thyroid or metabolic diseases. So, I think that COVID was one of the big pushes that just kind of sent me over the edge and plus, you know, I wanna be honest that I have been living or, you know, life to the fullest and pushing and trying to create and help and support and trying to be a better person myself in so many different ways. So I was pretty busy for a long time.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Okay. So you already had a passion for that, but then you have this moment that brings you even deeper into it. You do a lot of work with food. Like when I was going through anxiety, I was just like, gimme medication. Just do something to stop this. But after I got through kind of the crisis of it. I wanted to look at what I am eating or what I am doing. Of course, mindset and all that. How is food important? You say you're a nutritional coach. What's that look like in your healing and others?

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah, absolutely. You know, I wanna first stop and say, you know, good for you for choosing medication to get things settled down. You know, a lot of times when the women that I'm working with really struggle. They want to go a natural route, and yet the symptoms are so severe that they're really having trouble.

You know, it's always an individual choice. Like, you know, it's okay to use pharmaceuticals in order to get your symptoms to settle down so you can get your feet back on the ground and start to feel mentally and physically a bit stronger. Then you can look at some of the more natural approaches, if that's the way that you want to go.

So, I just wanna say, you know, good for you. For making a choice that was right for you and not being so much in your head that you're really struggling, and you let your symptoms get worse because you're not doing the thing that feels best for you.

Dawn Damon: Yes. Thank you for that, and that's true because, you know, as a woman of faith, I thought, well, I don't have enough faith, or am I not believing God, or am I taking matters into my own hands? But really I felt like even though it wasn't life-threatening in terms of my heart wasn't gonna stop or something, it could have been life-threatening because of the darkness, then of the depression that came and swept over me.

And so, you know, every day was a battle for a long season of time. While I say long, it was, you know, five or six months that it lasted, not years. Thank God, but yes. So we have to pay attention to that. And you're exactly right, Cara. After I got my feet back on the ground and my hair wasn't, you know, static and crazy and wild, and I was calm, then I was able to kind of unravel it and go, okay, what do we do here? So, but back to the point, you do use food, though. There are those that are not, you know, up in the rafters, they can make small baby steps or incremental changes. How does that look?

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah, thank you again. I've been practicing in women's health for 20 years now, and I've just learned that there are some basics to health and wellness that we just have to acknowledge and then get, have some rhythm with those basics in our lives. I call them the seven foundations, and nutrition is one of those, you know, when we go into perimenopause, and menopause, all of a sudden our bodies are just not operating the same as they used to.

I was telling I'm a martial artist and I was telling a younger student. A female student recently said that it's a really big shock. You know, when I was in my twenties and my thirties, or even my early forties, I could, you know, drop five or 10 pounds just by, you know, exercising a little bit more, shifting my diet a little bit, and things would change automatically for me.

Cara Michele-Nether: But that's not really the case for me now, and I know that that's not the case for many women in midlife. So nutrition is probably at the top of the list of those seven foundations. And what we have to do is just acknowledge that self-care. We can also call it cellular care, right? We have 30 trillion cells that make up everything in our body, hair, skin, digestive system, hormones, and heart. The actual muscles and heart are made of these trillions themselves, and if they don't have the environment they need. In order to operate at optimal levels, we're just not gonna feel good. Period. Drop the mic.

Dawn Damon: That is a mic drop.

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah. That is just the truth of how our physiology works. And so nutrition is one of those key factors that create an appropriate environment for all of our cells. Intellectually, we know that we need vitamins and minerals, right? So we take, we hear about this all the time, vitamin B, vitamin C, vitamin D, all of these things. But somehow that intellectual information gets lost in how we actually live our lives, and nutrition is the way that's the original way for us to be able to get those nutrients into our body so that we can feed ourselves and give them an appropriate environment.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, you're so right, and thank you now for sharing that. When you experience menopause, it is like, Will somebody please give me the new roadmap? Because what I used to do and the way I used to feel and things that used to happen to my body, it's not going that way anymore. So I really feel like it is a rediscovery time, and hey, midlife women, we have to take a moment and start to really tune in, listen to our bodies.

Cara. It's also a time when sometimes women stop moving. They let their bodies rust. You know, we're not intentional about it. What, what would you say about, you know, the midlife woman who says, oh, I'm just gonna coast from here on out. It's too late for me.

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah, well, number one, I wanna say absolutely it's not too late.

So lemme say it this way. I was listening to one of your episodes that you put out maybe a couple of weeks ago. I actually wrote down the title here: How to Improve Yourself Today. So, if anybody hasn't gotten a chance to listen to that one, it was really great, and you started off that conversation talking about having a vision for yourself. And I referenced that as your you and for whom. Right. And so, what is the vision that you have for yourself? Science is technology. Science is all about helping us to live longer, but what quality of life we want to have is the question.

Dawn Damon: Absolutely. Keep talking. That's so Right on.

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah. So, you know, for myself, I hear at 56, I am not interested. I'm pretty sure that unless I get hit by a bus or you know, God has a different plan for me, we don't always know what that is. I am gonna probably live to be in my late eighties or nineties, right? So I've got another 30-some years, 40 years, here on this planet. So, what do I want my quality of life to be like?

I know for sure what I don't want it to be. I don't want it to be limited. I don't want to be able to travel. Travel is very important to me. I like to feel comfortable and confident that my mind and my body, I can trust them when I'm in new environments, meeting new people, trying new things, right?

I'm a martial artist. I'd love to be able to do that later in life as well. I want to be able to be supportive of my parents. My parents are in their early eighties, and they are primo, right? Their mind and body are perfect. So that means for me that it could be another 10 years before they really need a lot of support from me. What's my mental and physical state gonna be like 10 years from now? So I think it's really useful to get clear on what it is we're really trying to do for ourselves.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, the vision is so critically important, and I often talk about having a relationship with the future. You probably say something along those line too, like, love yourself in the future right now.

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah. You're gonna be 70, should the Lord, you're gonna be 80. You know, like you said, except for some crazy thing, which we're not even gonna. Believe four, but so how do you want to look at 70? How do you want to look at 80? That can be some of our most significant seasons of life, and it should be because we're the wisest, most sage woman possible at that time.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, so. All you listening, I just heard Cara say, you know, pain and sleepless nights and low energy, that does not have to be permanent, right?

Cara Michele-Nether: Absolutely. One of the visuals that I try to offer to my clients is that whatever we're doing today is going to determine how we feel six months a year from now. And the same is the case when we go backwards in time. Mm-hmm. Whatever you were doing six months ago, a year ago, two years ago, that determines how you are feeling now.

So we have the opportunity to make those shifts and changes. We just have to know that we also have the opportunity to feel even worse if we don't make those shifts and changes. Like we have a lot more say over our health and wellness than we want to give ourselves credit for. We don't have to turn our mental strength and our physical strength over to the doctors as much as we think that we do. Of course, we need their support, but we get to say a lot and it's always. The small steps that we take each and every day, that stack on top of each other that make the biggest difference in how we feel in the future.

Dawn Damon: Yeah, totally. Stacking is so important, as you just mentioned. So if there's someone listening today, and there is, and she's feeling some imbalance in her life, she's exactly. Identifying with some of the things, you know, lack of energy, maybe fatigue, and maybe her digestive system is just kind of wacky. What are some small, actionable steps that a midlife woman and beyond could take? Could they start today?

Cara Michele-Nether: Absolutely. Yeah. You know, I've taken the time to kinda lay out a framework that has been super helpful to so many hundreds of women over the years, and so I'd like to just walk through that and maybe there'll be some information in there that women can start off with. But before I start, I just want to reiterate what we both said here is that we have to choose to take small steps. With one of the biggest mindset shifts that really helps women get to become more consistent with their self-care practices. And that's, you know, really what my platform is about. That's really the message that I want to hammer home. It's that, it's not the big things that we do, it's the small things that we do regularly. So it's never that women don't know what to do for themselves. It's actually participating in those steps. Those practices are regular. That's the gap in the middle, there is the consistency. And so that's really what I want to help teach women to kind of start to look for and figure out how to put that into their everyday practices so that they get off of what I call the health and wellness rollercoaster. The consistency with small steps. That's what's gonna get us where we want to go.

Dawn Damon: Yeah. Okay. So we're gonna hear the seven steps. I'm totally with you. I write in my book, The BraveHearted Woman. It's not quantum leaps, ladies. It's a baby step, consistent over time, incrementally. Jeff Olson wrote the book, The Slight Edge, right? So we're going up pretty soon, you know, we're hitting the marks. All right, so give us the framework.

Cara Michele-Nether: Yeah, sure, here. So this is the framework to become more consistent with the practices that you already have under your belt. Number one, back to that vision. We want to know the you are and for whom. Because when we have a sense of why we need to be different with our water, why we want to be different with our food, or our exercise, it makes it a lot easier to get over those hurdles. Change is never easy, so we already know that and we already know that there's gonna be some bumps in the road.

So having that compelling vision of the person I wanna be, as well as who deserves the best version of me. Right, because it's really all about relationships, then we can use those visions to help us get over the hurdles that are out there until we become more consistent with the practices that we know are gonna help us increase our mental and physical energy. So that's number one is get clear on our vision, that I would like to be, and who needs me to be my best.

Number two is that we really want to choose the easier route. There are a lot of mindset states that women find themselves in that make starting being more consistent, being able to continue taking care of ourselves, to the mindset of putting ourselves first, you know, that get in the way; these mindsets get in the way. And one of those is that we just make it too complicated. Sometimes we just think that if it's not a lot, if we're not pulling a bunch of levers and pushing a bunch of buttons, that we're not doing enough. And I wanna insist that self-care does not need to be complicated, and it doesn't need to be hard, actually, I think that we're doing it wrong if it becomes complicated and hard. So that's number two, is that we really wanna make sure that we're choosing the easy path. We wanna feel good. Remember, we said that we really want to try to be consistent with what we already know, and the only way to do that is if we're enjoying the process. Nobody wants to struggle or have the idea that they're gonna have to struggle from now until eternity. Right.

Dawn Damon: I agree. Yeah, we won't be, it's not sustainable. If we hate what we're doing, we're gonna find all kinds of reasons not to do it.

Cara Michele-Nether: Absolutely.

So, number three is that we want to focus only on proven strategies. What do I mean by this? You know, there's all kinds of information out there, and one of the things that I always want to remind women in this age group is that most of the information that you're gonna find out there on health and wellness, they're not talking to you. You know, a lot of this information is meant for younger people or for men. You look at these exercises, people are jumping on boxes and lifting their body weight overhead. I'm not saying that those are not useful things to be able to do, but they're only useful if they take you towards the vision that you have for yourself.

Yes, and so a lot of the women that I'm working with, what they want to be is to be functionally healthy, right? They want to be able to pick up their grandkids. They want to be able to travel. They want to be able to get on up and down, off the floor with no fear, climb the stairs, step up on a step ladder, all of those kinds of things. Get out and play some golf or play some tennis with your friends. They're not really after being able to jump up on a two-foot box. Right. And so we have to make sure that we're, we're only focusing, putting our limited time and energy on the activities that are actually gonna take us where we want to go, and not just picking the latest fad or exotic new process that we're just, we're spending our time and en energy on.

Dawn Damon: Very good. Yes. Keep going.

Cara Michele-Nether: Number four is that we wanna make sure that we're creating a mental and physical environment that helps us be more consistent. What do I mean here? Is that if we are trying to trim down a little bit, trying to lose a few pounds, or we're trying to eat healthier, but yet we have the chips and the HO in the house all the time, it's gonna make it harder for us to stay consistent with what we really want in our hearts.

So we wanna create a physical environment. If you're trying to exercise more, put out your shoes and your clothes so you know exactly where they are. Pick your exercise routine the day before so that you're not flipping through, trying to find it, and eating up the time, the window of time that you have to do your exercise. If you're trying to eat better, make sure you know what restaurants you're gonna go to and what you're gonna pick when you get there. Right, so we can kind of take a proactive stance and then lay things out for ourselves so that we have fewer decisions to make ourselves. Because decision fatigue is a real thing, and it can really get in the way far from us being able to show up as the person that we really want to be in the world.

And lastly, don't go out on your own. Don't try to do all of this by yourself. It's so much easier and more enjoyable when you're in a community of like-minded women who are trying to do the same things that you are doing. And that's not every woman that we're bumping into. I mean, we've all had the experience of starting a new health and wellness plan with a buddy, with a friend from work, and then that person falls off in a couple of weeks just 'cause they say they're too busy or whatever it is. Maybe they are busy, but you know what, we all are busy.

Yeah. Maybe it's just not the right time for them. So it's better to connect with women who have the clarity of mind and have made the decision that now is the time for me. So I'm going to go over the hurdles, make the decisions that need to be made. So you wanna pair yourself up with folks like that, and also work with coaches that understand the journey that midlife women are on. Not every coach understands what menopause is about. Not every coach understands how busy our lives are at this stage in our lives with, you know, partners and spouses and work and elderly parents, and still having children needing your support and community activities. There's a lot going on. So, having some community that really understands you and works with women who are really ready to make the changes that you're ready to make.

So those are the five things that I've noticed over the year that are necessary for women to be more consistent with the self-care practices that they know they need for themselves.

Dawn Damon: Such wisdom that you're sharing with us. And if we do those five things, we're literally setting ourselves up for success. How can we not succeed? And you know, sometimes we think, oh, I have such a long journey, but every journey starts. Everybody has a day one to start somewhere. I mean, the best time to start was yesterday, of course.

But go ahead and get started. Or at least plan, put those five things into practice, and then just take baby steps. You know? I know sometimes in the AAS group or whatever, they'll say, just for today. Like they can't picture committing to something long-term. So today I'm making this choice, but tomorrow I'll feel that much better. So they make the choice again. And that's what I've noticed in any of my health or fitness routines that I'm like, I can't imagine not doing this. I feel so good. And yet there are times where I still do relapse, and I'm then I'm back into the sugar and the Twinkies.

Cara Michele-Nether: But well, you know, Dawn, that is absolutely in my book. That's absolutely okay. One of the things that we have to recognize is that perfection is not needed in self-care. We don't need that. That's one of the mindsets that gets in the way. A lot of women throw their hands up because they were doing so great with their nutrition, and then they had a luncheon with the girls, and that turned into a few cocktails and some extra chips in guacamole. Oh yeah. And now they feel like they've blown it. And so why keep going? We do not need to be perfect. We, in my communities, run with the 85% rule. So that gives us 15% grace because we wanna enjoy life. We want to go on vacations, we want to try new restaurants, we wanna, you know, have fun with the kids or whatever that might be, family functions. There's always gonna be comfort food there. Sometimes we just want the comfort food. And so if you give yourself a little bit of wiggle room there, you never have to feel like you've, you've failed.

Dawn Damon: Yes, that's so important. Give yourself 15% grace when you're on this journey. Stop the shaming and the judging and the self-loathing, and the punishment and the scolding, and allow yourself to just flow with the rhythms of life.

But if you have a plan, and you have a roadmap. As I said earlier, you can deviate a little bit, but you know how to get right back on track. Is that one of the myths that you wanna debunk, or is there one other special thing you wanna say, Hey ladies, you've been told this, but here's the truth.

Cara Michele-Nether: Absolutely.

You know, one of the things that I want to impress upon our audience today is that self-care in and of itself is not important. It is a tool that helps us feel good, and how you feel is the most important thing that we need to focus on. Because when we feel good, that's when we're able to be patient and thoughtful and playful and understanding, and we can think outside the box. That's what the people that we care about, the organizations that we care about, the missions that we wanna push forward. I. That's what they really need from us. They need us to feel our best so that we can interact with each other and move projects forward. Knowing that being thoughtful, patient, and understanding are the attributes that are really important.

So how you feel is the most important thing to focus on. And so if we're trying to starve ourselves, if we're trying to exercise way too much, if we're pushing and shoving ourselves into self-care practices that are too much for our current state. We're not gonna feel good. So, and then, you know, then things are gonna be bumpy. We're gonna be grumpy, we're gonna be frustrated, we're gonna be hard on ourselves, which means we're gonna be hard on other people. We're not gonna be as communicative and joyful. So, you know, really don't worry.

What the message I wanna let leave is, as long as you feel your best, you're doing well. Whatever practices you have on in your play, in play right now, that's okay. If you're feeling the way that you want to feel, if you're wanting to feel a little bit more ease, you want to have a little bit more energy, you want to have your brain operate a little bit easier, then you start to make these small tweaks, but you can only do them at the level. That allows you to feel better and doesn't push us over into the other side, where we're struggling. That place of struggle is not the place where we're gonna feel our best, and that's the most important thing is how you feel.

Dawn Damon: Cara Michelle, you are a very wise woman, and I can tell that you have 20-plus years of experience. Your words to us today are so valuable. Thank you so much. You are the founder of Strength and Vitality Wellness Center in Baltimore, Maryland. And how can our listeners find you? I will have all your links, but just give us the best one.

Cara Michele-Nether: Sure, going to the website is probably the best place to go. That is strengthvitalitywellness.com.

Dawn Damon: strengthvitalitywellness.com. Thank you for being on The BraveHearted Woman Podcast. Thank you for being a bravehearted woman, and thank you for taking your time today to share with all of our listeners.

Hey ladies, this is your moment. This is an opportunity. You might be struggling with something that you said today is exactly what I needed to hear. I'm ready to get started. I wanna just take that baby step. I'm not making the huge full commitment. But I'm gonna start small and see where it takes me. You're on your way.

This is Dawn Damon, your BraveHeart mentor, leaving you like I always do. It’s time for you to find your brave and live your dreams!