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PODCAST

Grace & Grit Podcast

Courtney Townley

The Grace and Grit Podcast takes the health fairy tale you"ve heard all your life and turns it upside down and inside out, helping women rebuild their relationship with their body once and for all. Placing the focus on love and respect, rather than the aggressive demands and unrealistic expectations that have become the norm, Courtney Townley is determined to help women mend the fabric of what is driving the female health story.

health & fitness alternative health

All Episodes

08:06

Episode 660: Rest Is Not the Same as Doing Nothing

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/15

Lying on the couch scrolling your phone is inactivity. But it is not rest. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between what restores a human being and what merely passes the time. Genuine rest produces something on the other side: more capacity, quieter mind, a body that has had a chance to repair. Most of what we call rest keeps the nervous system engaged, stimulated, and reacting, which means nothing actually recovers. I share a useful framework for thinking about the different kinds of

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08:28

Episode 659: Where Is Your Third Place?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/14

Sociologist Ray Oldenburg spent his career studying something most of us have never thought to name. He called it the third place. Not home. Not work. The other place. The one where you belong without obligation, where you show up because you want to, where something in you exhales. In this episode I explore Oldenburg's concept and what gets lost when the third place erodes from modern life: not just convenience, but a specific kind of belonging that home and work simply cannot provide. I share my

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08:33

Episode 658: You Are Not What You Consume. You Are...

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/13

The more accurate version of "you are what you eat" is this: you are what you absorb. And the same is true of information. In this episode I explore the difference between being smart and being wise, a distinction my husband and I were wrestling with in a recent conversation that I have not been able to stop thinking about. Smart is about intake. Wisdom is what happens when information actually gets processed, integrated, and applied. When it moves from your head into your choices. Most of us have

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07:36

Episode 657: Muscle Is More Than a Metabolic Organ

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/12

Somewhere between the bodybuilding world and the wellness world, we lost something important in the conversation about strength. It got reduced to metabolism and body composition. In this episode I make the case that building genuine physical strength does something that calorie math cannot explain: it changes your identity. I share my own experience training with Ido Portal and how that period of physical fortification arrived at the same time as one of the most courageous professional pivots of my

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11:15

Episode 656: Boredom Is Not an Emergency

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/11

We have become so uncomfortable with emptiness that we fill every available moment with something. A podcast, a scroll, a task, a distraction. And in doing so, we have cut ourselves off from something the brain genuinely needs. In this episode I make the case for boredom as a doorway rather than a problem. I share my own experience of extended pausing, seasons of deliberately not forcing the next thing, and what arrives in that spaciousness that the busyness had been drowning out. I also explore the

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08:39

Episode 655: When Did Eating Become So Complicated?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/10

We have taken one of the most basic human activities and turned it into an anxiety-producing intellectual exercise. In this episode I hold a nuanced position: I am not dismissing food tracking, macro counting, or structured eating approaches. For many women, especially those who have been eating in ways that have disconnected them from their body's signals for years, some structure genuinely helps. But there is a version of nutritional complexity that has gone too far, where the rules are so

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08:41

Episode 654: Your Attention Is Part of Your Health

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/09

Most of us think carefully about what we put in our bodies. Very few of us think with equal intentionality about what we put in our minds. In this episode I make the case that your attention is a health variable. What it lands on, repeatedly, becomes the environment your nervous system lives in. And that environment is either building your capacity or quietly eroding it. I share the filter I personally use when I notice I am feeling overwhelmed: what have I been consuming? Because so often the

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08:01

Episode 653: Who Can You Call at 2 A.M.?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/08

You can be in a room of ten thousand people and feel completely alone. If no one there actually knows you, the numbers mean nothing. In this episode I explore the difference between being connected and being truly known, and why that distinction may be the most important relational one of your life. I share my own honest reckoning with the limits of surface connection and my growing craving for real depth in my relational world, the kind that does not happen in a comment section or a DM. I also

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06:57

Episode 652: The Case for Morning Light

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/07

This is not a biohacking episode. I am not going to tell you to buy a special lamp or track your lux levels. I just want to make the case for something so simple and so free that we have almost entirely stopped doing it: going outside in the morning and letting daylight reach your eyes. In this episode I share how my nine-month-old Great Dane Tilly accidentally became my most reliable wellness accountability partner, the research on what morning light actually does to your circadian system,

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07:16

Episode 651: What If Fun Is a Health Metric?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/06

What if we tracked laughter and play and genuine enjoyment with even a fraction of the enthusiasm we bring to our step counts and protein grams? In this episode I make the case that fun is not frivolous. It is a sustainability mechanism. And in a long-term health practice, sustainability is everything. I explore the concept of bringing magic to the mundane: what happens when you approach cooking with presence and music instead of efficiency, when you consider the route of your walk or who you move

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08:10

Episode 650: Your Body Loves a Rhythm

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/05

Your body is not asking for a perfect schedule. It is asking for predictability. In this episode I explore how the body's circadian rhythm, the internal clock regulating nearly every physiological process, is set and sustained by consistent external cues: light, meal timing, movement, sleep windows. When those cues are reliable, the body can do its work efficiently. When they are scattered, the system has to constantly recalibrate, and that costs energy. I also share one of the most concrete

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08:01

Episode 649: Do You Have Enough to Look Forward To?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/04

My husband and I were talking recently about how full and heavy midlife feels right now. The parents to care for, the teenager still at home, the business to run, the relationship to tend. And underneath that conversation was something surprising: the weight of it is also what keeps us going. In this episode I make the case that having something to look forward to is not a luxury. It is a health variable. Anticipation activates the brain's dopamine system in ways that genuinely support mood,

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11:31

Episode 648: The Health Cost of Being in a Hurry

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/03

You can eat well, exercise consistently, and sleep seven hours a night. And still spend your entire day physiologically rushing. In this episode I make the case that chronic hurry has a real and measurable health cost that most of us are completely underestimating. When the nervous system is in a constant low-grade state of urgency, it affects digestion, immune function, sleep quality, cognitive performance, and the ability to feel present in your own life. I also explore what I think is the deeper

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08:54

Episode 647: Your Social Life Might Need Progressive...

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/02

In strength training, if you never increase the challenge, you stop getting stronger. The body adapts and then plateaus. The same thing happens in your social life. In this episode I take one of the foundational principles of physical training and apply it to relational health, because a lot of us have been lifting the same relational weight for years. Same people, same conversations, same comfortable equilibrium. And then we wonder why our social lives feel flat or unfulfilling. I explore what

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13:48

Episode 646: Boring Works

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/01

After thirty years in the wellness industry and hundreds of conversations with extraordinary health experts, I keep arriving at the same conclusion. Not a revolutionary one. A remarkably unsexy one. The basics work. In this episode I share the turning point in my own life that proved this to me beyond any doubt, including my experience with a program called Genesis Transformation, where I watched women deep in perimenopause transform their bodies by doing nothing more exotic than drinking water,

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06:44

Episode 645: The Envy You Are Not Admitting To

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/08/31

There is a feeling most of us were taught to be ashamed of. We call it a sin. We hide it. We dress it up as something more acceptable. But what if envy, honestly examined, is actually one of the most useful signals available to you? In this episode I draw the distinction between jealousy, which makes me feel small and defensive, and envy, which points at something I desire. I share my own experience following Misty Tripoli, the founder of the Groove dance movement, and how sitting with what I envy

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07:33

Episode 644: Alone but Not Lonely

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/08/30

I have been alone but not lonely. And I have been surrounded by people and felt profoundly alone. Those are two completely different experiences. And understanding the difference between them might change how you relate to both. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between solitude and loneliness, share my own deep craving for solitude and the permission it took to finally pursue it without guilt, and explore why the loneliness I see most often in the women I work with is not the loneliness of

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07:34

Episode 643: The Art of Receiving

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/08/29

I am very good at giving. I spent a long time being terrible at receiving. And I have come to understand that the inability to receive is not humility. It is a wall. And it keeps love out just as effectively as it keeps pain out. In this episode I share the story of my friend Colleen volunteering at my first retreat and what happened when I finally said yes to being supported. What I discovered completely reframed how I think about receiving. When I refuse it, I am not protecting anyone. I am

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08:35

Episode 642: The Inner Critic at Midlife

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/08/28

There is a voice that most of us know intimately. The one that says you are not doing enough, not being enough, not achieving enough. At midlife, that voice often gets louder. In this episode I share my own evolving relationship with my inner critic, including how I have learned to stop trying to silence her and start turning her questions back around. When she asks why I am not doing more, I have learned to answer: why not me? Why not this version, this season, doing things the way I am doing them

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06:20

Episode 641: How to Make Your Journaling Practice Richer

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/08/27

Journaling is not about filling pages. It is about going somewhere you have not been before. And the quality of where you end up is almost entirely determined by the quality of the question you start with. In this episode I reframe journaling as a practice of radical self-inquiry rather than a diary or a gratitude list. I share a collection of less obvious questions worth sitting with, including what am I pretending not to know, what feeling do I keep avoiding and what is it trying to tell me, and

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