Rita Black: Have you ever used kegels? No, not a bagel. I mean, kegel. The very specific movement designed to strengthen your pelvic floor. Well, in today’s Thin Thinking episode, we are gonna learn more about how these little mini mastery movements can make a mighty improvement to life. Let’s learn from the Queen of kegels herself, Alyce Adams. How to eliminate things like sneeze pee and improve things like our sex life? Shall we?

Rita Black: Did you know that our struggle with weight doesn’t start with the food on your plate or get fixed in the gym? 80% of our weight struggle is mental. That’s right. The key to unlocking long-term weight release and management begins in your mind. Hi there, I’m Rita Black. I’m a clinical hypnotherapist weight loss expert, author, and the creator of the Shift Weight Mastery Process. And not only have I helped thousands of people over the past 20 years achieve long-term weight mastery, I am also a former weight struggler, carb addict and binge eater.

Rita Black: And after two decades of failed diets and fad weight loss programs, I lost 40 pounds with the help of hypnosis. Not only did I release all that weight, I have kept it off for 25 years. Enter the Thin Thinking Podcast where you too will learn how to remove the mental roadblocks that keep you struggling. I’ll give you the thin thinking tools, skills, and insights to help you develop the mindset you need, not only to achieve your ideal weight, but to stay there long term and live your best life.

Rita Black: Hello everyone. I hope that you are having an amazing week so far. I just wanna say hello to our new friends who have joined the Thin Thinking Podcast. We are getting many, many, many new listeners. It’s kind of you know, expanding, expanding. We are getting into more countries. So hello to all of our new friends all over the world which is very exciting.

Rita Black: And hello to our new friends who are here in the United States with us and everywhere around. And please, please subscribe so that you can get more than thinking on a weekly basis. And if you can leave a review, please leave a kind review so that more people can find us. The more reviews we have, the more we get promoted and the more Thin Thinking gets promoted in the world. So more people can find us and get served in the Thin Thinking way. And if you do leave a review, please take a photo or copy and paste what you wrote and send it to me Rita, at shift weight mastery.com. That’s rita@shiftweightmastery.com. And I will send you your choice of well, I will send you basically a coupon that allows you to go into the shift store and get a free weight loss download.

Rita Black: So worth the effort, right? And also, if you have any ideas for future episodes, please let me know. There is a link in the show notes to do so. So yeah, you know, we are, we are excited about putting out a whole new year of Thin Thinking next year, and we wanna hear what you wanna hear about, what you like, what we’re doing, and expand upon that. All of that stuff we are super interested in. So I’m excited because we have a very interesting guest who is going to discuss, not weight, but our body down there and how kegel can be a way to work out and build better muscle in this area of our body that, you know, is a very important area of our body. But we, when we think about body, health, and strength, I don’t think we think about that part of our body.

Rita Black: It gets kind of overlooked when we think of working out. So even though we aren’t really discussing weight management, we are discussing our body management, love, and self care. So I know you are gonna love Alyce Adams, the Kegel Queen. Alyce is has been the Kegel Queen since founding kegelqueen.com In 2009. She’s known as the most sought after kegel exercise expert around the world, helping women who suffer with vaginal prolapse or urinary incontinence to avoid dangerous surgery and regain health and control of their body down there. She is famous for creating the Kegel Success in Minutes A Day Program, The only Complete No Devices Safe at Home Kegel Exercise Program, created and tested by an RN. The Kegel Queen program has reached over 3011 women in 27 countries. Alyce has shared her kegel expertise as a guest blogger for the American College of Nurse Midwives, a guest lecturer at Baster University in Seattle, and the University of Rochester in New York. And most recently, she has consulted with the Stanford Biodesign Fellowship at Stanford University in California, and she lives in Rochester, New York, Go Rochester!

Rita Black: So please join me in welcoming the wonderful Alyce Adams. Hello Alyce. And thank you for coming on to the Thin Thinking Podcast. We are so excited to have you here. I’m so excited to have you here today.

Alyce Adams : I’m excited too. Thank you, Rita.

Rita Black: So, you’re the queen of kegel. I love this so much, and I love that title. I cannot tell you how clever that is. And it’s, and it’s so appropriate. It’s – a kegel, it’s a queenly thing. So tell us, us listeners, what exactly a kegel is, because I have a feeling most of us think we know what it is, but I have a feeling we might not exactly know what it is. So tell us, tell us what a kegel is.

Alyce Adams : Yeah, you’re, you’re absolutely correct. And most, most women have it correct in a vague way, that it is muscle exercises down there. That’s, that’s, some women have a little bit more sophisticated understanding that it’s muscle exercises for the pelvic floor, which is a bowl of muscle between your pubic bone and your tailbone basically. It’s like a round bowl of muscle at the pelvic outlet. So it’s not like straight down, but it it, you can think of it as between your tailbone and your pubic bone and then off to the sides there. And in, the important thing about kegels is, it’s not just muscle contractions. It’s muscle, very specific, intentional muscle contraction and relaxation muscles. And in order for kegel to be therapeutically effective, you can move those muscles whenever you like. But in order for kegel exercises to be therapeutically effective for what you want them for, things like incontinence and better sex and pelvic organ prolapse, which we can talk about. So for kegels to be effective therapeutically, they need to be done in a very, very specific way. And not just, like, if I meet people at parties or something, very, very often women will say to me, Oh, I’m doing some right now. Like, now that I’ve just met you, it makes me think of kegels. I’m doing them right now.

Rita Black: Oh, interesting.

Alyce Adams : But if I’m having a conversation while you’re doing kegels, that’s one clue that you’re not doing it right.

Rita Black: That’s funny. I love it. Okay. So it’s a very, very specific set of exercises that you do in order to improve a, a condition. Right. Like, so before we dive more into kegels, because I wanna hear more, how did you get into kegels? Like how did you become the queen of kegels? Like, I’m very fascinated by your story.

Alyce Adams : So all through my twenties I was involved with women’s health. I was a childbirth educator, childbirth doula, which is a woman who supports women through pregnancy and birth in a non-medical way. I was very much involved in those things and as a result to, I took it – then when I turned 30, I took that to the next step. I went to nursing school with the goal of becoming a nurse midwife. I got halfway through my master’s program in midwifery and was delighted to be pregnant at age 34. Well, no, I was 33 and when I conceived, so I dropped out of school because I didn’t wanna do an 80-hour clinical week, get up in the middle of the night and go to births and have a baby at the same time. So I left school and my pregnancy was a little bit of a challenge.

Alyce Adams : My daughter is the best thing that ever happened to me. She’s 18 now and she’s amazing. And she’s been nothing but a blessing the, the whole time. But my pregnancy and the was really not the best thing. It was not the best thing ever happened to my body. I spent months in bed vomiting, like needed an IV kind of amount of vomiting and that really messed up my pelvic floor. This is something we can talk about if you like that. When there’s a lot of pressure from inside the body pushing down and out on the pelvic floor, like from something like vomiting or coughing, one example also and some things that you could choose not to do, such as crunches and sit-ups. But I, after all this vomiting and I started to become even at the very beginning of my pregnancy because I just blew out my pelvic floor.

Alyce Adams : And so after my daughter was born, I had sneeze pee. Had symptoms. I didn’t even know what it was at the time. I had symptoms of bladder prolapse, which means the bladder is not in its proper position anymore. It’s literally fallen outta place. And I had problems with sex and the sex part, the rest of it I just thought, you know, okay, my body changed from having a baby. Like, oh, well I didn’t, I really had no idea at the time. And I didn’t have the attitude that I could recover it.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : But I, oh, this is just what happens. But the fact that sex really, really wasn’t the same and that it turned out it wasn’t the same for my husband, totally freaked me out. And I thought, you know, I’m, I’m in my mid thirties, this is not good enough for me. Not that it would be good enough at any age to lose some vital part of your functioning that way. And I could, you know, sex was working, but it just was like mediocre rather than, and that wasn’t good enough. And I said, I’m gonna get this problem solved. So I started trying to figure out how to do kegel correctly because I’d heard, even though I was in the childbirth world for years, everything was just kind of vague. I started talking to people, I started reading what I could, and it was all still really vague. It was like rumors. It was one paragraph or one sentence of instruction. It’s like one screen on Mayo Clinic website.

Rita Black: Oh, wow.

Alyce Adams : Not enough. And no one seemed to know anything. So I am kind of a researched nerd, and I thought, well, I bet somebody’s studied this. And it turned out they had. So by this time, my daughter was a, a preschooler. She’s three and four years old. And I would drop her off at preschool and walk three blocks down the road to the medical library at the University of Rochester, New York where I live. And I started reading and reading and reading and reading and found out what the research actually works about how you do kegel. I did, I put that all together into a simple program that I could do as a mom, and I did it, and everything changed. I stopped having sneeze pee, I stopped having this saggy, gotta pee feeling prolapse symptoms, and sex all of a sudden was way, way, way better.

Rita Black: Woohoo.

Alyce Adams : Yeah. So really, I mean, it, the the emotional journey of it is really the most significant part that I felt so broken. Particularly about the sex. I felt so not like the woman I wanted to be. And being able to get that back really restored my confidence. It not only restored my confidence because of, you know, the sex was better, but because I had a problem and I went after it and I fixed it. And I put it under my own steam, you know, I didn’t wanna –

Rita Black: Have to go to a doctor or surgeon or

Alyce Adams : Right. I did it. I did it. And at that time, I hadn’t yet discovered working out like for the rest of my body. It was a whole new experience to me to have this like, wow, look at what my muscles can do. And I was so excited about it that it was time to share. So I started teaching and that was in 2009.

Rita Black: Wow. That’s so cool.

Alyce Adams : It’s, it’s incredibly rewarding to, to help women. And my favorite thing is to help women avoid surgery and been able to, to do that many times.

Rita Black: Right. Yeah. So I’m really fascinated by this now. I’m thinking of all the women in our audience, guys, I’m sorry this episode probably isn’t for you unless your wife might have, and you noticed a difference maybe in your you know, sex maybe that this is something that might be helpful for you guys.

Alyce Adams : Or if your mom or your aunt or your –

Rita Black: Of course, that’s true.

Alyce Adams : Help learning about their non-surgical options for some of these conditions, for example.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : They probably stopped listening long ago though. The, the men in your audience.

Rita Black: Probably not. Yes. True. So, so, but I’m thinking about the audience. I’m thinking, you know, we probably have listeners who are hearing different things that might be interesting for them. Like there might be women who have some incontinence issues. That might be it. And that could be across the board, Right? Like, that doesn’t need to be an older woman. That could be a woman who, you know, like you said, who is of childbearing years and just having babies and, and that’s going on for her. Does menopause play a role in prolapse or any sort of this, you know, muscular dysfunction in in that way as well?

Alyce Adams : Yes. Yes. Pelvic floor dysfunction. So yeah. Menopause particularly affects the connective tissue more than the muscles specifically. But so the pelvic floor is made of muscle and connective tissue. And connective tissue is a catch all term for all kinds of different things in the body. But ligaments that attach different body parts to each other, tendons that attach bone to muscle, your skin actually is a lot of connective tissue. And in the same way that your skin starts to become more brittle and less bouncy and plump after menopause, and you start to see more wrinkles, the same thing is happening inside your body.

Rita Black: Damn it!

Alyce Adams : I know! And there’s a lot you do to, to make that process as good as possible. Right. including if you’re listening to this and you’re under 30, eat collagen now. You can only build up your collagen in your body till about age 30. After that, you’re maintaining. Yeah. So feed your kids lots of bone broth. Yeah. That’s another whole thing. But menopause, the, the long story short makes tissues more brittle and that has an effect on everything. But it makes something like pelvic organ prolapse much more likely. So the bladder or the uterus or the rectum or a loop of small intestines, sometimes those can lose some of their support and create a bulge in the vagina or the uterus itself will come down into the vagina because the tissues, both in the pelvic floor and the ligaments that hold those organs up are becoming more brittle.

Alyce Adams : And if you, the same stress that might have been fine when you were 20 is your, your body can’t bounce the same way when you’re 60. So there’s definitely a a lot that changes that menopause that way. And I think the things that could be done to prevent or minimize some of those changes, you know, it’s not as though when you turn 50, your doctor sits down with you and says, All right, here’s what you need to know to be really healthy for the next 50 years. They don’t say that. Basically you know, I wanna check your cholesterol and go have a colonoscopy. They don’t talk about how to be healthy. But by exercising, by eating right, you can optimize what’s going on in your body to keep by sleeping enough, all those things, that basic health stuff can help your tissues more elastic.

Alyce Adams : And something like exercise specifically in the pelvic floor creates better circulation, just like exercise in any other part of the body. And when you build the muscles, you, so there are different ways to exercise, right? You can do like cardio, which doesn’t really build your muscles. Or you can do strength training, which builds your muscles up, increases muscle mass and in the pelvic floor, we really wanna do, we wanna build mass and tone, and that accomplishes many things, including increasing circulation, not just while you are doing a set of kegels, but 24/7, because these have more blood flow to them. And that increases blood flow to the entire genital area and urethra and can help keep everything nourished and functioning as well as it can.

Rita Black: So I guess my main question to you then is if the way you work with people when you teach them, when somebody comes to you for your your course, like the your kegel queen program, are you, like, if I have incontinence, is, is that a different course of action than prolapse? Like, if I went to a personal trainer and I wanted to work on my legs, obviously in my arms, I mean, like, Yeah. So I guess is there a different course of action for every different issue?

Alyce Adams : No. As far, well, yes, there absolutely is, but as, as far as what constitutes therapeutic kegel practice, is the same.

Rita Black: Okay.

Alyce Adams : And then there’s all kinds of other stuff you can do. You know, if you have incontinence, then we can talk about what are you eating and do you need to do some bladder training where you improve the connection between your brain and your bladder. There’s all kinds of stuff. If you are dealing with prolapse, what’s, well incontinence too, really, but especially with prolapse, what’s going on with your body mechanics. Are you interested in avoiding surgery for prolapse? At least interested in exploring nonsurgical options fully before you decide to have surgery. What are those options? You know? What else can be done for your prolapse to create support besides creating optimal natural support with the pelvic floor? So there’s all kinds, there are all kinds of add-ons.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : Actual here’s how to do kegels that work. That’s the same because the goals, the, the pelvic floor changes you can see are the same. You wanna see more tone, you wanna see more strength, you wanna see the pelvic floor become more firm and thick. And the pelvic floor also sits higher in the pelvis when you’re, when you’re doing therapeutic kegels. There are other changes as well. But that’s, those are the main therapeutic benefits that I can explain easily without my pelvis. There’s more.

Rita Black: So, so basically the outcome you’re looking for with doing kegels correctly is to build up the, the pelvic floor. And once that’s in it, you’ve done that, like once you’ve, you know, increased that, the strength, the flow, all of that, then it’s kind of like working out. You need to then maintain that. You have to continue to do the kegel. It’s, so, I get it. It’s like lifting weights. You really must, you know, first of all, engage, repeat, build and then maintain what you’ve created.

Alyce Adams : Essentially. Essentially. Yes. And I will, let’s, let’s frame it a little bit differently too. That what you want is the pelvic floor to be optimized. So that means not only is the pelvic floor more firm, et cetera, as I was describing, and, and that there’s good circulation all that, but also that it’s not tight and clenched. That’s very, very important. We don’t want tight pelvic floor anymore than we want tight shoulders or a tight jaw or anything else to be clenched and tight. A healthy muscle is firm and strong and supple. It’s not rock hard. So we really want the pelvic floor to be optimized for optimal functioning, which is both of those things.

Rita Black: Do women work their kegels into their daily exercise routine?

Alyce Adams : It can. But multitasking, like if you were going to take a walk and do kegels at the same time, or you wanted to do kegels while you were doing squats or something, squats doesn’t even make sense. But that I would, I do not recommend that. Kegels must be hundred percent of your brain.

Rita Black: Focus. Okay. Gotcha. So I am curious about I, I mean, I know we could talk a little bit, it sounds like incontinence is building that floor, but I am interested because I’m sure I, I am curious, like I I don’t know if you have this data, Alyce, but how many women who have given birth have prolapse, you know, and, and how, and does prolapse also, well I’ll ask that a second question, but the, do you know the, the statistics on that?

Alyce Adams : So it can happen to plenty of women after menopause who have not had babies.

Rita Black: Oh, okay. So, so prolapse can happen without giving birth vaginally.

Alyce Adams : Yes.

Rita Black: Okay.

Alyce Adams : Usually not before menopause, unless there’s some kind of a condition, but after menopause, absolutely can happen without having had children. In the, the United States, surgery to correct prolapse or incontinence is performed. Your, your risk of having surgery like that in the United States right now before age 80 is one in five.

Rita Black: Oh, wow. That’s pretty high.

Alyce Adams : It’s really high. And what blows my mind on a pretty much daily basis is, can you think of anything else that’s that prominent and that extreme that no one ever talks about.

Rita Black: That is quite extraordinary.

Alyce Adams : No one talks about it, but it’s everywhere.

Rita Black: Yeah.

Alyce Adams : And that is just crazy. The amount of misinformation and radio silence on this topic is just astonishing.

Rita Black: But, you know, so I told Alyce this, but I, you know, I’ll, I I I was gonna, I said to Alyce, I said, I’m gonna ask you about my own prolapse. But you know, I have been advised, and I’m not like, I’m, so I’m asking as a, as a user as well.

Alyce Adams : Sure.

Rita Black: So, because I had prolapsed with my second vaginal birth many years ago. I’ve lived with my prolapse. And you know, in the beginning it was way worse. I did do some, you know, vaginal floor exercises, whether or not, I mean, I wore a pessary for a while because it was bad at, you know, initially after the birth. But then things kind of pull themselves together and it’s functional. But I am going to probably within the next couple of years, also have a a prophylactic hysterectomy and have my ovaries removed because I have ovarian cancer risk in the family. So I, and what I didn’t know is that with hysterectomies, the chance of prolapse then also escalates greatly, like –

Alyce Adams : Right. Your uterus isn’t there to prolapse anymore, but after a hysterectomy here, it vastly increased with for prolapse bladder.

Rita Black: Exactly. So, and I’ve had friends that this has happened to, and, and the doctors were like, don’t worry about it, it’s fine. And then they have a prolapse, and then they can’t, they have constipation issues. They have like all this mess that nobody told them about and nobody warned them about this. So and then they’ve had corrective surgery, but then the netting went weird and all that kind of stuff. So has, how, how are these surgeries? Are these surgeries not perfect? Right. Like they aren’t necessarily corrective.

Alyce Adams : Yeah. So the, the whole, there’s an entire surgical specialty, urogynecology, U R O gynecology, like urology plus gynecology. Right.

Rita Black: Right. And that’s the specialist I was seeing as somebody who was advising me on that.

Alyce Adams : Yeah. So it’s important if you do opt for this type of surgery, it’s important in my opinion, that you see a urogynecologist rather than a garden variety gyn. Anytime you’re having surgery, you want somebody who lives and breathes whatever procedure you’re going to have that they’ve done it a million times. So the, an interesting point doctor, an obstetrician gynecologist friend of mine pointed out to me just the other day, a little light bulb I hadn’t had before that, this surgery, this, this isn’t the new part, but this, this type of surgery, this whole category of surgery has really, really high complication and failure rates compared to many, many other types of surgery. And what my friend pointed out is she’s a surgeon, Right. She’s a gynecologist, they’re trained as surgeons. And she pointed out that there are lots and lots and lots of different procedures. Like let’s say you had a bladder or prolapse repair procedure, you have a whole menu of options and different doctors do different ones and they change and they evolve. And she said, as a surgeon, her perspective is if there were one procedure that really worked really well, everyone would do that one thing. The fact that there are so many different ones is a clue that none of them really work that well.

Rita Black: Mm. Interesting.

Alyce Adams : Yeah. So for you, one of the things, I don’t know if this is even an option, to meet your goal regarding the cancer prevention, but for someone with maybe fibroids, let’s say, who opts for a hysterectomy, an option that doctors might not even tell you about is to take the uterus, but leave the cervix in place. That allows you to preserve much, much, much more of the structure and support. And that, that’s certainly an option. And, and women who have prolapsed uterus say perhaps instead of hysterectomy, you would consider a procedure where the uterus is supported but intact. Of course, surgery is not, you know, there are things you can do besides surgery for prolapse. For you, if you’re committed to having preventive surgery to avoid cancer, you’d wanna be super, super, super careful about your prolapse risk after that. And be really, I, I think every woman over men after menopause should be extremely cautious about prolapse risk. And obviously you don’t smoke, that’s a huge thing. What’s your risk for prolapse? Maintaining healthy weight? Another one that’s not a problem for you.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : But watching your body mechanics very, very closely. Making sure that anytime you’re doing a workout or lifting something heavy in your life that you’re using impeccable body mechanics. And habits daily. Things like the way you sit and stand and walk, if you make sure that your alignment is attended to and that you’re like one, one of the problems that, that we have in our culture is so much sitting. So we end up weak in certain muscles at height in others. And if you can approach, for example, like making sure that you are exercising and walking in a way that keeps your glutes built up properly, that can help with your whole pelvic alignment and just stack the a little bit more toward not having a problem.

Rita Black: So do you work with women to, like, when you work with prolapse with the kegel, are they able to avoid them? The surgery? Like they are able to build up enough strength and, and lift to avoid the surgery for prolapse?

Alyce Adams : So I wanna reframe that question.

Rita Black: Sure.

Alyce Adams : Again, this a lot, and in fact, I just recently gave a whole presentation about it called, are you asking the wrong question and the wrong question is, will I be able to avoid surgery?

Rita Black: Uhhuh?

Alyce Adams : Because the answer to that is, for prolapse, because the answer to that question is, sure. Just don’t have surgery. You know, it’s not like you, you’re bleeding out and you’re, you don’t have the surgery. You may feel like you’re going to die if you have severe prolapse. But the, the question you’re really asking when you ask that question is, is it possible to make my prolapse go away without surgery? And the answer to that question’s a little bit more complicated including, how about the question, is it possible guarantee that your prolapse will go away if you do have surgery? No, it’s not.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : Is it possible to guarantee that your prolapse will go away without surgery? No, it’s not. Is it possible that you will have improvement with prolapse because of just kegeld? Absolutely. It’s possible. And typically in my program, women see improvement, whether it’s, the prolapse isn’t down as far, it’s not down as often, or the yucky sensations are gone or less, or all three. But, and, and I’ve had women outliers who say, you know, I did everything perfectly and nothing changed. There are other outliers who say, my prolapse is totally gone, the doctor can’t find it.

Rita Black: Wow.

Alyce Adams : Typically though, it’s about improvement and the women who really need with prolapse are the ones who are asking the right question, which is, how can I work with this and what is the combination of things I can do that is going to help me have an active and comfortable life. And that includes kegel, it includes all kinds of other things like a pessary, which some of your listeners might be wondering still from when you said it before, what the –

Rita Black: Oh, yes.

Alyce Adams : But there are a lot of things you can do, and I’m very much favor of doing as many of them as you can layer on. Prolapse is not something that you can wish was gone, and it just goes away. You can’t just kind of wait around or hope or think, well, I’m gonna do this one thing. It really needs a multifaceted approach. And –

Rita Black: Right. Oh, so I’m seeing what what you’re saying is that it is, it’s a, you know, a prolapse is a condition, it’s, it’s kind of a chronic condition, but it can be absolutely improved upon, livable, and you can then enjoy better sex, not leaky bladder. You can, you know, it’s, you know, the thing is, my prolapse is not horrible and awful. I do, it’s bad enough. And, and the the gynecologist, the, the gynecologist did show me they had like a, you know, they do a little scan of your bladder and your whole innards, and she said after the surgery, this is probably what you could expect would happen if we didn’t do some sort of surgical. Right. They had like a, they showed how much further down things would go. So that was my, that was their, this is why you wanna have the surgery. But but what I’m hearing is then this is just a way to build things up and with something like a pessary and, and, and for those of you who, do you wanna tell people what a pessary is?

Alyce Adams : Yeah. So a pessary is a silicone device that you wear inside your vagina to hold up organs that have fallen outta their proper position.

Rita Black: Yeah. And it, and it works fine. It, it’s, it’s, it works just fine. But yeah. So like when you’re exercising your, you know, bladder doesn’t fall out of, you know, you’re, you’re okay. It’s being held up.

Alyce Adams : Now for you, Rita, if you’re going ahead with the hysterectomy while, while you’re on the table because you’re already going to be having surgery, it is entirely reasonable to consider the bladder support.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : At the time, you know. Deciding to go from your house to the OR table. If that decision’s already made, then what happens in there is that’s a, a bit of a lesser decision, you know?

Rita Black: Yeah. Yeah.

Alyce Adams : And I would just, I, and I’m not an expert in surgery. I’m not an expert for different procedures by any means, but I would tend to look more into support using your own tissues rather than foreign bodies like mesh.

Rita Black: Yeah. Yeah. And I think, I mean, yeah. And, and I, I, yeah, I appreciate your opinion on that, but yeah, I mean, I think that could all work, but I think for the women, I just wanna focus back on what kegel can do. It sounds like kegels can be really helpful to help with just long term health. I mean, just with, with support, especially as we age and it, learning how to do them right is incredibly. So, so your program, tell us a little bit about the Kegel Queen program.

Alyce Adams : So, what I, what the need that I’m trying to meet is the need that I had for myself in the beginning, you know? How do you actually do this so that it actually works? And instead of one lousy paragraph, or like the Mayo Clinic, you know, one screening worth of information, which used to be better too, they’ve changed it. So it’s not even like I, I used to say, you know, you don’t want my program, like, at least the Mayo Clinic is accurate. I I don’t even send people there anymore. So we really have to address every single aspect of kegel practice. How are you breathing, how are you positioned, you know, every single thing about timing and also the, the whole habit side of kegel, because as you well know, as a, a behavior expert, doesn’t mean anything. If you can say no to a donut or a cigarette once. It’s when you do it consistently.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : A meaningful change. So incorporating habit science into the Kegel Queen program has been a really, really important piece of it. And I’m, I’m trying to give the simplest, most achievable program that will get results. And then there’s additional stuff too, you know, the women in the program have all these other things going on, you know, so we talk a lot about, and some prolapse and vaginal tissue health, and all kinds of things. But the, I, short of, well, and I see this too, physical therapists who take care of women’s pelvic floor range from really, really excellent to really clueless very little standardization, but short of going to a really, really good PT, face to face, one on one, I’m really not aware of any other kegel program that is based on actual facts and research.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : And provides real detail that you actually need and interactive support, which is a really, really big need, you know?

Rita Black: Oh. For sure.

Alyce Adams : Clearly, because women, the, the learning curve in the beginning, some women already have a connection between their brain and their pelvic floor. If, if, you know, it’s like, okay, can you contract and release your pelvic floor? Some women are like out of the gate shirt, they do that. Other women, this is a month long process to build a brain connection, to just be able to engage those muscles. And sometimes women need some help figuring, you know, it’s, we’re trained from diapers to be cut off from this part of our body.

Rita Black: Yeah. So crazy.

Alyce Adams : Yep.

Rita Black: So crazy. Wow. So, so, yes. So you get the, the knowledge, the, the, the processes and the support with your program. Yes. So I am going to put the link to our Kegel Queen’s information in our show notes so that you can go and check out more about her program or just check out more about, there’ll be some information there for you to explore. I can’t thank you enough for being on here today, Alyce. Is, is there one thing, like one step forward you would say? Like for our listeners, like if they are struggling with incontinence or prolapse, like one step forward, you know, in closing.

Alyce Adams : I think the most single, well, I’m gonna say two. I’m gonna say two. So one, if you feel like I just wanna go do something, the worst thing you can do is go out today and buy some kind of kegel device. Like, do not go kegel devices and go buy something. Because I guarantee you, even if it’s not the kind that can actually hurt you, it’s just gonna be, you know, useless inside of two weeks. You’re not gonna be still using that thing.

Rita Black: Right.

Alyce Adams : And the other thing though, is much more central and regardless of what you choose to do about any health thing, whether it’s your risk of cancer or it’s you know, someone else’s blood pressure or whether it’s pelvic health issue, the most important part of taking care of your health is you really, really understanding that you are in control of health.

Alyce Adams : That whatever you choose to do, or whatever experts you choose to engage, you are the one making the decisions about your health. You’re the one who’s in charge of creating a set of behaviors for yourself that really works for you. You’re hiring the doctor who can help you. You’re the one in charge. And having that real deep feeling of ownership about your body, and even when something is frighteningly wrong with your body, to kind of parent yourself in that moment and say, Okay, you know, this is scaring me, but I’m gonna show up and take care of myself, and I’m the person in the position of power here, even when you’re in a doctor’s office. And it’s kind of set up so that you feel like you’re not the person in a position of power. That’s, that’s the thing that I really want every woman to do.

Rita Black: Wow. That’s powerful. Thank you for that, Alyce. And thank you so much for being on The Thin Thinking Podcast. It was great to have you.

Alyce Adams : Thank you so much for having me! Been great! Fun!

Rita Black: Thank you. All right, everybody, I hope you enjoyed that episode as much as I did. I certainly learned a lot. And I’m sitting here doing kegels as I’m finishing this. Don’t tell Alyce, because she’s, she’s gonna tell me I am not doing it right. No. But just thinking of her makes me go, Mm. Let me contract down there. Okay. Now, Alyce, I hope you really enjoyed her. And please go to the show notes and find out more about all the work that she’s doing. Find out more about how you can, she does have, have some stuff for you, some offerings in there. So go check that out in my show notes to learn more about kegels and how kegels can improve your life and and the wonderful Alyce Adams and all she’s up to. So also just to remind you, leave that review at Rita and, and, and take a picture or send it to me. Don’t just send me the review. You need to post it on your platform. Sometimes people just send me the review. It’s like, no, no, you must post it on the platform that you listen to rita@shiftweightmastery.com and I will send you a choice or, you know, a coupon to go and get a free download out of that shift store. So and any ideas for episodes, please let me know as well. Have an amazing, awesome week. And remember that the key and probably the only key to unlocking the door, the weight struggle is inside you. So keep listening and find it, and I’ll see you next week.

Rita Black: Do you wanna dive deeper into the mindset of long term weight release? Head on over to www shift weight mastery.com. That’s www shift weight mastery.com, where you’ll find numerous tools and resources to help you unlock your mind for permanent weight release tips, strategies, and more. And be sure to check the show notes to learn more about my book From Fat to Thin Thinking. Unlock Your Mind for Permanent Weight Loss.