Creative Mountain Mama
Welcome to the Creative Mountain Mama podcast - for those that resonate with seeking a connection to the land, family, and a simpler way of life. We're talking about faith, motherhood, and slow country living. If you're up for real talk, genuine experiences, and finding inspiration in some of the most extraordinary places, this is for you!
Grab a metaphorical campfire seat and let's dig into the good stuff.
Creative Mountain Mama
From Competitive Athlete to Wellness Warrior
Join Evgenia and me for a conversation about her evolution from athlete to the homeschooling mama's wellness warrior. Our conversation covers her approach to well-being, which includes fitness, mental health, nutrition, and good habit formation. As moms, the battle against burnout is real, and Evgenia offers a lifeline with practical advice for those managing the triple duties of parenting, teaching, and homemaking. Her story isn't just inspiring; it's a testament to the resilience and adaptability of motherhood.
Navigating life with kids in tow requires more than just a one-size-fits-all fitness plan. This chat with Evgenia takes a deep look at her personalized wellness strategies that compliment each individual's family routine. From establishing a less-stressful routine at home to strategizing elements to "focus on" rather than setting goals, she customizes a healthy routine to suit each individual's needs. We also talk about the critical, yet often over-looked subject of postpartum care, emphasizing the core for a lifetime of health.
We cover the importance of sleep and nourishment for our overall well-being and we also talk about the importance of maintaining a consistent, healthy lifestyle that promises more than results in the short-term —it ensures the joy of engaging with our future generations. Find Evgenia in Instagram at @at.nourished.motherhood or via email at hello@nourishedmotherhood.com where she shares her wealth of knowledge for those seeking to nourish their lives and better their motherhood experience.
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Stay tuned for more episodes exploring the connection between faith, motherhood, and slow country living.
Welcome everyone to another episode of the Creative Mountain Mama podcast. I am joined by Evgenia. Today she can be found at Nourished Motherhood and she talks about maintaining a healthy lifestyle, not getting burnt out while homeschooling, and nutrition.
Speaker 2:Thank you for joining me, evgenia, thank you. Thank you for having me.
Speaker 1:Can you tell me a little bit about your mission?
Speaker 2:Oh yes, of course. My mission is to provide education and guidance for homeschooling moms and sometimes it's not necessarily homeschooling moms, but regular moms which their kids are in school to basically feel nourished in their lifestyle, to feel great, to be able to keep up with their kids, to run after their kids and be able to catch them to play active games. And we do it through movement, through working out, through great nutrition and through habits.
Speaker 1:Beautiful mission. She shares a lot of what she does at dot nourished dot motherhood on social media and I understand this is your business. Can you tell me a little bit about your background?
Speaker 2:Yes, my background is very interesting because I was a competitive athlete in Russia. I was not nourished myself at all. And then I moved to Canada. I was still working out, doing crazy things, thinking only about how my body looks, but deep inside I never felt really happy. And then my son was born and the birth of him brought up all the things from the inside out out and I did not feel happy. I did not feel good about my motherhood, my own journey, my fitness, my wife's journey, my family.
Speaker 2:And then I thought, well, wait a minute, how is it possible that I am working out? I'm eating pretty healthy. That's what I thought at this time and I still cannot kind of find this balance in between mental and physical health. I would gain a little bit. Then I would look in the mirror and I will be like, oh, you just have to work out more. And that's how my personal journey started. I realized that fitness is not just an answer. Just the fitness is not the answer. It's great to work out, it's great to wait, lift, but it's not the only thing I have to do. I have to cover in order to be healthy.
Speaker 2:And then I started to read, I started to educate myself more. I've had two master's degrees in journalism and physical education in Russia. Then I went to Canada. I had college diploma here as a fitness professional. But all of this was not enough for me to kind of figure out what's happening to my own health.
Speaker 2:And then I started to research. I started to dig deeper into mental health, into physical health, into habits, and then I realized that actually there are so many great things which I was not doing, but they're also very simple things and I could totally implement them. And then I started implementing them. It took me about one and a half to two years to slowly stack on different habits, different routines, and then everything kind of aligned. I felt way better physically. I felt nourished. I could not even keep up with my son because at that time he was two years old. Of course I could keep up with him, but I did have more patience towards my son, more patience towards my husband, of course, because I think that early motherhood years is very hard. If some work, deep work, wasn't done before and definitely it wasn't my case and then I realized that probably I could help women to do so.
Speaker 2:And at the same time pandemic happened and we were all locked down at home and I thought, well, maybe I will start some Instagram account and I had my personal account, but it wasn't really any educational stuff there, so I started and then I started working with moms and then I started realizing that there is no really connection in between me and moms whose kids are in regular school, in just regular public school or Catholic school, Because it's not that I'm good at their bed or opposite, it's just very little bit different people. And I realized that because I always wanted to homeschool and my son was about three and a half years old at this time already. I realized that maybe I should focus my attention on homeschooling moms, because it's really hard to be with a child all the time at home, or six or seven kids most of my clients have five or six kids and it's your stretched out to the limits, right. And it's really hard to be a homemaker at the same time baking sourdough bread and doing all the cooking and cleaning and thinking how to do more for the kids. Because I know that the difference in between homeschooling moms is that we don't want to send our kids to school because we are accepted that they're going to be with us until certain age, of course, when they maybe decide to go to some kind of different education institution. But while they're with us, we have to make sure that we are nourishing ourselves in order to show up for them better, because it's really really hard to manage the house, to manage the kids, to be the support your husband needs.
Speaker 2:When you don't feel great or at least good okay, or feel okay, at least feel okay right. And when you feel great or you feel good or at least you don't feel really bad, it's so much easier to show up for our loved ones. It's so much easier to have more patience. It's so much easier to treat everyone with respect and manage kids fights right, kids fights are really hard to manage because you love all of them. But it's like another kind of area of life when it's hard to do. It's hard to do this right.
Speaker 2:And then I realized that what if I could help them to feel better and to manage their lifestyle better? And that's what I did and it worked so well, just because the connection was there already and I could understand what it is to be a homeschool mom, because at that time I was already starting homeschooling and it's been great, because I personally love it. I had nine back to back to back calls, 30 minutes calls, and even though it's, you know, you think that you're a fitness coach or you're a fitness or lifestyle trainer or coach, whatever the name it is. You're supposed to be moving, but my work is by computer, most of the time. Right, and my work is not necessarily only teaching women how to eat and how to exercise, but most of it is overcoming the obstacles of why we are actually not eating, why we're not exercising properly and why we know how to do things.
Speaker 2:Everyone knows in this world, exercising is great for you, eating whole foods is great, but for some reason we're not becoming healthier. Every year we're becoming less healthy and less healthy, and I find that mental obstacles like not having time or not believing that it's possible, or just sometimes overwhelmed and burnout feelings that is the most what is preventing us from doing things which we know that we need to do. So my work is mostly about talking about why is it happening and how we can make it work, and what I find is uniting us as moms is that everyone wants to be perfect and unfortunately, I have to let everyone know that perfectionism does not exist. We're not meant to be perfect. We're humans. The only one who is perfect, he lives there right, and his name is the Lord. So we cannot be perfect, but we can aim to be better every single day and to align our life with, or our goals with, our actions, and that's what my business is about.
Speaker 1:If I were a stressed out mom let's say I have five kids, which I don't Could you walk me through what that session might look like?
Speaker 2:Well, it always depends on what you will come to the session with. What would you have in your mind? For example, today I had a client. She has three kids and she is feeling very overwhelmed because she is battling some health issues not related to her fitness. And then I ask her let me know what is the stress in your life? Because we need to figure out how to reduce the stress, because all the inflammation in the body and everything else is related to stress and of course, it's related to many other things. But we're already exercising, we're already eating pretty healthy, and I ask her to send me her weekly routine with her kids, what she is doing. And then when she sent me that list, I was like, okay, I will just recommend you as your friend not even as your coach or anything to look at this and make sure that you reduce all the activities at least twice, because it's three kids, different ages and she runs with all of them to about four or five different activities per week and they're different times because it's different groups because of the age.
Speaker 2:And I looked at one day and she's basically running in between some soccer gymnastics, some ninja karate the whole day from 11 to 7pm and then she is a singer and she creates music for church. She sings in church, so she has her own band and she of course needs to practice with her band, right, and then she goes there and I understand that this is, of course, her kind of nourishing activity, when she can recharge her batteries and be slightly so sometime away from her kids for one hour, which is great, I think, especially in this case. But I said, look, you're just running from one spot to another and you have no rest. Of course you will be overwhelmed and what I found myself on my personal experience is that when I am running with my son in between different experiences or different classes, I am stressed and he is stressed because for kids, especially kids who are younger than eight or seven or six years old, it's very stressful to do millions of things a day because they thrive on calm and peaceful routine. They cannot really run, run, run from one to another activity and what it creates, all the stress in the family, just not in the mom, but in the family, and we talked today that I recommended to decrease this. She said that she sees this now because I asked her to write this routine down. She sees it now, now when it's on the paper that it's way too much and she said she's going to decrease it, cancel at least two.
Speaker 2:That's not related to fitness or healthy eating, right, but that's what we discussed, because that's what she particularly needed today and that's why my program is a personalized and customized approach, because there is no one way to help different clients, because we're so different and we have a different number of kids, we live in different places, the weather is different. Someone lives in California and they can walk more because it's very beautiful and great weather, and someone who lives where I live, it's I mean, usually, for some reason, right now it's not snowing, but usually it's like minus million degrees here right, and not everyone will be okay with walking. I used to walk like this, with the weather like this, but not everyone is comfortable and we will find the way how to make them move and that's why everyone needs different approach. There is no one or one way to help everyone.
Speaker 1:It sounds like I might be able to come to you with goals, right, and you'll give a path to achieve that goal, but it'll be different for each person.
Speaker 2:Yes, 100% yes. And in my program we try to lean towards the word focus rather than goals, because I find that the word goals is stressful. It's the stressful word Because we have so many things already to focus on and when we say goals, when they don't achieve something, they just very discouraged. But focus is a little bit less stressing word Because when we focus on something it doesn't mean that we have to reach it, it means that we're walking towards it. But when it's the word goal, it's kind of like oh, I didn't reach my goal, that's it, I'm a loser. I hear it all the time, this word, and then I have to address the problem with negative self-talk. Right then. And then it's not about fitness again.
Speaker 1:On all overcoach. So I know you talk a lot about homeschooling and fatigue specifically, but you also did your pre and postnatal training. What was your takeaway from that training?
Speaker 2:Well, my takeaway is that once you postpartum, you're always postpartum and you not necessarily will have to do kegels or different things for the rest of your life, but you need to have some routine which will work, particularly for you to work on your pelvic floor, because we all have different deliveries. Someone delivered normal ways I mean there is no really normal or normal way but someone delivered vaginally and someone delivered through C-section. Someone had twins and someone had just one child and six kids. Six pregnancies and two pregnancies would make the body not only look different from the outside but from the inside. Right the stomach or stomach muscles are stretched out more and this potentially will need more work. Or, for example, if someone had pregnancies back to back, I had some clients who had five or six kids and four of them under three. So this is great, that's amazing. I'm so happy and I wish I did start earlier so I could have the same number of kids, because kids are joy.
Speaker 2:But on the body it's pretty hard because the body, the female's body, takes time to heal and when we don't give the body this time the next pregnancy will have will affect the body and stress the body a little bit more. Right. It doesn't mean that it's bad and it's impossible to fix or to help. It just means it needs more work Because fascia and muscles, when they stretched out, they will be healing a little bit differently than when it's healed and then the pregnancy happened. So it's very, very important, especially when you start exercising, because you cannot load weight and we work on weightlifting a lot you can't really weight, load weight on the body and especially core and pelvic floor. Weak body because core is called core because it's protecting us, basically from our shoulders to our hips. Everything is core. And without strong core, strong foundation, because core is foundation, we can't even stand upright. We will be falling Right, and I'm saying it with a little bit too much weight, but of course. Of course everyone is able to stand straight. But if someone's core is absolutely not working, that person would be falling or folding into half in the hips area. And that's why, before working out with weights or just working out, and especially postpartum, we need to make sure that the core is addressed.
Speaker 2:The pelvic floor is addressed because every time we lift weight, the diaphragm and pelvic floor, just even without lifting weight, the diaphragm and the pelvic floor work synergetically. When we breathe, when we inhale, diaphragm goes up, pelvic floor relaxes and goes down, and when we exhale, it kind of moves towards each other. So when we lift weight it has to be the same way, because if we lift weight and our pelvic floor is not supported and kind of activated, the pressure from the diaphragm will be pushing it down and this is not good at all because it's creating urinary incontinence, different types of prolapses and different issues which we want to address Because unfortunately, we are getting older year by year. But what it means? It means that we have to take better care of our body so when we are older we don't have things like prolapse, for example, because we took care of this prior, so getting older, and because when we're getting older our hormones are working differently. So the prolapse is kind of it could happen even if we work before we're aging or before we're getting like 270 or 80, just because the muscles are not that strong anymore and this is absolutely normal we are losing the muscle mass, the bone mass, especially women year after year. We are getting weaker year after year. But it doesn't mean that we should not work on these things to maybe lose just 10% of our strength rather than 50%. And then all of this is influencing the way how we will be living when we are older and the way how much of independence we will have.
Speaker 2:I want to live my life very long as long as I am capable of staying independent and also capable to help my kids and grandkids, hopefully with even babysitting and babysitting babies is not that simple, especially when they're two or three, when they want to run. I want to go to hikes with my kids, with my grandkids and kids. Of course, I want to do all the things up to my last day and hopefully that's what I will do and that's what I want women to understand that, yes, we can't avoid everything and whatever will happen will happen. However, we can try to prevent and we can try to help our bodies to handle it a little bit better, step by step. And that's when I teach my clients to stop focusing on being perfect, because when they're focusing on being perfect, eventually, if one workout doesn't happen, then they think it's okay, this week is so bad, I'm just going to start on Monday. So, instead of missing one workout, they're just missing two or three workouts. Right, and it's not. It doesn't do anything good for them.
Speaker 1:I think for me being, you know, a younger mom not a younger mom, but young in my momhood to think about my grandkids is kind of mind blowing. You want to start now so you're able to pick up that grandbaby at three years old, when you're at that stage in life.
Speaker 2:Yes, or maybe grandkids Great grandkids.
Speaker 1:That's just crazy to think about. But it is important to start now so you're building incrementally and then you don't have to do so much later. You can achieve balance. Like you said, yes For the mama that is in that newborn age. Do you have any advice?
Speaker 2:Yes, sleep it's. It's funny I know everyone says the same thing, but from my perspective, why sleep is important? Because even if you cover everything working out, eating, healthy water and supplements and being outside if you don't sleep it doesn't matter, because sleep is so fundamental and foundational. It's not even a goal of focus, it's such a basic need. And then we sleep very cover.
Speaker 2:When we sleep, our hormones hormones are getting into balance. When we sleep, our cells are, I don't know getting better. Right. When we sleep, our muscles recovering, everything is recovering. Then there is lack of sleep. Most likely it's stress over eating, it's feeling depressed. Sleep is influencing mental health. When I sleep and I used to sleep for four hours that is the worst time of my life I thought I don't want to live like this. If this is life, I don't want life like this, right, literally, sleep is everything and this is the most important. So I would recommend sleep and focusing on learning and bonding with the baby and delegating as much as possible when it comes to cleaning, when it comes to cooking, as much as possible if there are people who can help.
Speaker 1:Is there a better time to reach out to your prenatal, postnatal, or is any time a good time?
Speaker 2:Just in general, I would not even work with someone who is less than three to four months postpartum. I know that North America is kind of like the assassin six or eight weeks, depending on the method of delivery and they say, oh yeah, you cleared by just talking to the person. I always recommend, if possible, to see a pelvic floor therapy specialist. It's the best investment a postpartum mama can do for herself. However, even better is to start even before getting pregnant, because healthy pregnancy is in order to have a healthy pregnancy and, again, nothing is guaranteed at life, right, some people are extremely healthy and then when they get pregnant, they have something that prevents them from exercising or even getting up from work.
Speaker 2:However, it doesn't mean that we should not try to be healthy prior to getting pregnant. But if you're already pregnant, don't be afraid of moving. Don't be afraid of walking, don't be afraid of having specific to pregnancy workouts, lifting weights, even if you were not active before. You can start tomorrow by finding a person who can work with you, by finding a person who is familiar with the pre and postnatal workouts right, and by not fearing it because your body and listen. You need to listen to your body because when you have this intuition and you connect it to your body, you will know what's good and what's bad for you.
Speaker 2:So I would say that physical activity, having enough water a day and focusing on whole foods is the main thing. And if you have some cakes, sometimes you have some cravings for some sweets or not sweets, it doesn't matter, because if you're, 80% or 90% of your food is whole foods, not even necessarily always organic. Not everyone is able to always eat organic, or when we go to a restaurant it's not always organic, right. But if you're eating veggies and protein and then fruits 80 to 90 or 70, even or even 60% of the time you will be good, because that matters a lot.
Speaker 1:I appreciate you saying that about well, your name is Nourished Motherhood and that nourishment does play such a big role. Nutrition and what you offer. What are ways that people can get in contact with you to learn more?
Speaker 2:Yes, so my Instagram is, as you said, atnourishedmotherhood, and they can send me a DM. It's myself and only me. I don't have a team yet. I'm probably not going to have it because I don't want my business to be anything crazy, right? Because when it's personalized approach, you unfortunately cannot stretch out to 100 people, especially if you're homeschooling, right, and I want to homeschool and I want to spend time with my son and I also want to move, and today for six or seven hours I was sitting and it was really hard to sit by computer all the time.
Speaker 2:But it's nourished mother at nourished motherhood, with the dots in between words on Instagram and then my website no dots, just one word at nourishedmotherhoodcom it's in the process of building. I probably think by the end of February it's going to be done, and person who is building my website is seven months pregnant, so it should be done, right, because she probably doesn't want to kind of keep going into her postpartum period with my website. But that are two, basically two ways of reaching me out or you can email me. Hello at nourishedmotherhoodcom. So it's a sign at and then it's a word at.
Speaker 1:Wonderful. We'll include that in the show notes as well.
Speaker 2:Thank you so much, eugenia, thank you, thank you. I do really appreciate you giving me a possibility to share my message with women and moms.
