SPEAKER_00 0:01

Welcome to the Askful Skinny Podcast with a guest. I'm proud to present Jeannie Ferris. Jean, welcome to the show. Please tell us more about yourself. What is your story?

SPEAKER_01 0:13

Hi, Peter. Thank you so much. I'm happy to be here. So, you know, I spent my career as a CPA. And when about seven years ago, I was diagnosed with uh acute like myeloid leukemia. And um, but I'd always been a strength trainer. And I when I got diagnosed, I was actually working on a master's in nutrition because I thought, you know, I really always liked that. I liked healthy living, and I thought that would be my next career. Uh, unfortunately, nature had a a different uh different plan for me. Um, so in any event, spoiler alert, seven years later, I'm I'm still here. So uh my my cure for the cancer uh worked. And um and after that, I remembered something my doctor said when I said, How did I get cancer? I am the healthiest person I know. And he said, Well, we don't know where leukemia comes from. Um, you know, it's it's a very uh heterogeneous disease, meaning everyone's leukemia is a little uh gene mutations you have, and everyone's a little bit different. Um but he said, because you're in such good shape, because you haven't, you know, you're not overweight, you don't have high blood pressure, you know, you don't have a lot of things that creep up on us in midlife, that you are a candidate for a better outcome. And that really stuck with me because I thought, you know, women in midlife are going through a lot, right? Menopause and perimenopause and all these hormonal changes. And in this country, anyway, menopause is treated like a disease, and it's not. And, you know, it's it's a it's a natural progression that I believe that we can manage. Um, so in any event, I, you know, I wrote a book uh on strength training for women in midlife, and uh then things just kind of grew from there. I started coaching, people started asking me questions, and so then I had so many people asking me questions that I set up a course and um and yeah, I'm just kind of just kind of going with it. But uh, you know, part of that is I I've recently was involved in a book that has gone number one international bestseller. It's called the Gratitude Project. And I wrote one of the chapters in there around my story. And I really believe that when you live a life of gratitude, that it really solves so many things. And I know that um we had talked about, you know, burnout in midlife. And I think that if, you know, with with so much that happens, especially for women in midlife, I mean that's that's who I generally work with and study is, you know, we we may have a career, um, or maybe we just left a stressful career, you know, we may have a partner or not, we may have children still home or children in college, caring for aging parents. There's so much going on as long as well as all of these hormonal changes, right? And I really think that with all the health and wellness things that we can do, living a life of gratitude is really sort of uh a baseline for managing anything that comes at you, if that makes any sense.

SPEAKER_00 3:35

Yes, and I would like to ask you something, and that is our society has become a bunch of entitled individuals, and it's really hard to be grateful because we are entitled to everything. And if it doesn't happen here and now, and as we want it, then we have something to talk about and to we we have a right to be miserable because not everything has happened according to our wishes and desires. And gratitude is something that is hard to learn. And I would like to ask you how you see this depth of uh gratitude, because I see on uh on a most superficial level uh gratitude is just uh saying thank you and saying uh I'm grateful for and writing down what we are grateful for, but um on a deeper level we can feel that we are grateful. And I I believe that we have to feel that we are grateful with our whole body and not just um saying thank you and uh do all these uh superficial things. So I would like to ask you how should we become grateful and not be just super superficial? Because we are living in a time of stress, and uh we are living in a time when uh grinding is the most important thing, and all this grinding and all this stress is pushing us in being more and more superficial because we are practically living in survival mode, and uh without stopping, it's hard to be grateful or deeply grateful. What's your take on that?

SPEAKER_01 5:46

So it is a uh uh I believe a lifetime practice, and it is difficult because you know it almost sounds a little bit like a buzzword, right? You know, thank you for this, thank you for that, I'm grateful for this, I'm grateful for that. And and how I started to deepen it for me was you don't just say, Um, I'm grateful for you know, uh my my my happy marriage. It's I'm grateful for my happy marriage because. And that word because takes you out of a little bit of a superficial, you know, write down three things at night before you go to bed that you're grateful for, and then you realize, okay, I'm grateful for the same three things every night, and it really doesn't mean anything to me. Um, and then you take it when when you've when you think about it from this perspective of because, and you then have to think about it deeper. Well, why am I grateful for my marriage? What does that bring to me? It takes you a level deeper. And then, you know, there's a lot of different ways to practice gratitude. One of the ways I do it is I look for generosity in the world, and I saw that so much when I was in the hospital. Um, because you know, uh, my younger brother is a pharmacist, and he researched and found an experimental drug that wasn't approved for me. And he worked with my oncologist to get it to get my insurance company to pay for it as uh as a treatment. And, you know, just to me, that's an extreme generosity. Um, I had to have a stem cell transplant, and my older brother was a uh I hadn't spoken to him in four years. And I found him when I had my sister tested and my brother tested, and nobody was a match, I found him and I said, Hey, well, you know, long time no talk, but would you be tested to see if you're a um a match? And he said, Of course I would. You didn't even have to ask. And when you stop and you look for these kinds, I mean, these are huge, I think, examples of generosity. But when you stop and look for in your daily life the little miracles that happen, and you take a breath in all of that stuff you're talking about, and in all of the fluster that's in our lives, everybody has this level of stress, and it's usually up to here. If you just take a breath and see how I can turn that around, and it does take practice, it takes daily practice. Um, I had a client the other day, and she's like, I don't feel like getting out of bed and going to the gym. And I said, try this tomorrow morning when you wake up. Say, I'm so grateful that I have legs so that I can get out of bed and go to the gym. And when you boil it down to this, it's a lot easier to step away from um the constant push in our lives, you know, the constant frustrations. And I mean, I'm I'm grateful to say that I've practiced this so much that it's very automatic for me. But it wasn't easy. And it was a practice of stopping. Every time something irritated me, I would stop, take a breath, and say, and it's, you know, not how do I put a positive spin on it? Because I think that's, you know, kind of an overdone trope as well. But what can I be grateful for here? And I was recently um in Europe and I was all packed on my way to the airport, and I got an email that said my flight had been canceled. And as quickly as I was like, crap, what am I gonna do now? As quickly as that happened, immediately my brain went to, I just spent two weeks in France. I'm so grateful. And who cares if it takes me an extra 10 hours to get home? Um I'm so grateful to have been able to have that experience. And I'm not saying this is easy. I mean, it has taken me, you know, years of breathing and thinking and studying gratitude. Uh, but I do really believe that if you're looking for happiness, if you are looking for a way to overcome stress, um that path, I believe, is through gratitude. And it's available to all of us. And it's just a matter of being able to stop and take a breath. And that's really what I try to teach, you know, all my clients is you know, start from a place of gratitude. Yeah, you want to lose, you know, 30 pounds, but you know, let's be grateful that that is what your issue is, and finding clean water isn't, you know, that there's putting ourselves in perspective and realizing that I mean, so many of our problems or what we define as our problems are really, you know, what I call a first world problem, right? You know, there are so many people that wish that was the worst thing they had to worry about. And not that I want anyone to shame themselves or think, oh, well, you know, I've so much better, I have it so much better. I mean, our problems, our problems, our feelings, our feelings, and they are extremely valid. But the fact that you have a tool at your disposal to change your mindset. And, you know, what does changing your mindset do? It makes you happier. Am I happier that I thought about what a great two weeks I had in France? Or would I have been happier being very unhappy that my plane had been uh you know delayed or and and I was not going to be able to leave for you know another 10 hours? Which one of those is better for my my stress level, for my health, for the feelings that I have around, you know, frustration in my life? Well, I mean, I I choose the first one because you know, being putting yourself in a position where you want to, you know, ruminate on the crappy stuff is like taking poison and hoping somebody else is gonna die, right? You know, it you're you're hurting yourself. You're hurting yourself physiologically, you're hurting yourself mentally. So just stop and take a breath. I mean, it sounds simple, but it works. And it's not something that you learn and then you don't have to keep doing. It's like exercise, right? You don't learn how to exercise or lift weights, and then you do it three times, you're like, okay, I know how to do that. It's a lifetime practice.

SPEAKER_00 12:56

Amazing. I will ask you um my one of my favorite questions, and that is for example, you mentioned gratitude, and I already announced this uh question, so it should be easy for you. Uh, should we start with a book? Should we start with a free video like uh the one that uh we are recording now? Uh should we go to a seminar for a workshop or uh should we just hire a coach? What's your take on that? And is there any difference in depth? Is there time for certain uh kind of approaching to our problem? Uh, where do you stand at that?

SPEAKER_01 13:37

Um, I think like most things, it's a progression and it kind of depends on you know what's available to you. Um, certainly if you know money is an issue, start with a book. Um, if you're not sure, you know, if you're hearing me talk about gratitude and you're like, huh, I haven't really, you know, thought about this much before, yeah, grab a book or two, learn what a few people are saying about it, find a podcast that talks about it. You know, um, there's so much information available to us so that you can, once you get to a point where you're like, yeah, I think this could work for me, and I'd really like a deeper understanding, a deeper way that would be personalized to me, how I integrate this into my life, you know, then it's worth it to find, you know, if you if you like group learning, you know, a workshop, um, you know, even a lot of yoga studios will have, you know, classes or breathing exercises around gratitude and that sort of thing. If you don't like being with a bunch of people and you, you know, would really just sort of like to, you know, I'm busy, I have money, I just want to know what I need to do. And and then then a coach is a great option for you. Um, you know, because then you can get someone that's gonna talk to you about your specific, you know, concerns and your specific things that are going on in your life. Because, you know, again, all of us are coming from a different perspective and we all see the world through our own lens. And the things that stress you aren't necessarily the things that are gonna stress me. Um, but a good coach can help you figure out uh, you know, what where to start, where to start with a practice. And the important thing about, you know, any changes that you want to make like this is it has to be a change that fits into the life you have. Um, you know, you can't say, okay, I'm gonna start meditating for an hour every morning and write in my journal for 45 minutes, and then I'm gonna go through and think about all the things I'm grateful for and I'm gonna write it down. And now you've spent three hours of a life, you know, three hours of a day where you can barely find, you know, time to get a cup of coffee and breathe. So it's like learning how to do it in snippets. And I think that's where a coach is very helpful because the coach helps you figure out how do we fit this into your life with your certain, you know, concerns or I don't want to call them problems because I feel like that exacerbates it when we think about things in our life as problems. I like to think about of them as opportunities, opportunities for change, opportunities for growth. Um, a coach certainly gets you there faster, I think. But any modality that works for you from where you are sitting right now is is okay.

SPEAKER_00 16:26

Amazing. Uh where can where can our listeners and viewers get in touch with you? And uh which book should they uh read first?

SPEAKER_01 16:38

Well, I mean, if you're interested in a gratitude practice, the gratitude project is a great book. Um, it's got 16 different authors. That one is me. Um, and we all wrote a story around how to work gratitude in. Um, you know, my story is mostly around, you know, my cancer journey. Um so if you're certainly dealing with a health crisis right now, um, that's a good place. But there are tons of good books. Um, you know, honestly, just getting a you know, a notebook, uh a spiral brown notebook and writing down, you know, I'm grateful today because, and think of a few things, even if you can only think of one thing. Um, you know, spending, you know, five minutes just journaling every morning, I think really helps because then you start to you start to really get clear on the things that are truly bothering you. Um anyway, so if it's gratitude, you're after. I am uh a health and wellness coach and I do teach women about building habits. You know, everyone says I don't feel like working out. I'm like, we don't care about our feelings. Our feelings come and go. There are feelings, you know, we have to deal with them. What I want people to do is create habits and have habits create momentum. So if you think of yourself as someone who gets up every morning and brushes their teeth, think of yourself as a person that gets up three times a week and goes to the gym. You know, you you just embody that as part of your persona. But I do have a book that is a great beginner's book. So if you've never worked out before, this book is really great. I've sold over 10,000 copies of this book and it gets very good reviews and it and it goes through it, it has you know plenty of illustrations of things to do. It tells you how to assess yourself about where to start. Um, and then when you're a little bit more um, you know, advanced, uh the sister book to that is Eat for Strength, which is all about a protein forward diet. Because if we're going to build muscle, we have to eat properly. And then if um menopause is primarily your issue, you know, this book, Menopause Metabolism Reset, excuse me, um talks about all the hormonal changes are happening and how why that's changing the way we have to work out, the way we have to think about our body and the things we have to do in order to maybe reach our goals. Um, but I would just encourage everybody to sit down and think about really deeply what it is that they want. Um if everything could be exactly the way they wanted it in five years, what would that look like? And then work back from that point, what would it, what would I have to do in three years in order to make that a reality? And what would I have to do in two years to make that a reality? And what would I have to do in a year to make that a reality? And then you get all the way down to what would I have to do this week to make that a reality? So if your overall goal is I want to lose, you know, 50 pounds, well, there's plenty you can do this week to reach that goal. Um, but in any event, anybody that wants to find me can find me uh on my website, which is SageLifestylePress.com.

SPEAKER_00 20:02

Thank you. Thank you for all these insights and thank you for being my guest tonight. Oh, thank you so much.