Loading...

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

07:56

Episode 667: Are You Lonely or Just Under-Connected?

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/22

Loneliness and under-connection are not the same thing. And if you are treating them as the same problem, you may be reaching for the wrong remedy entirely. In this episode I draw a clear distinction between loneliness, a feeling state, and under-connection, a behavioral condition, and explain why the solution to one is emotional and the solution to the other is practical. I use the analogy of thirst versus dehydration: you can feel one without having the other, and treating them identically misses

en

06:53

Episode 666: You Probably Don't Need a Better Morning...

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/21

The wellness world has sold us a very elaborate lie about mornings. That the quality of your day depends on a precise sequence of activities completed before most people are awake. Cold plunge. Journaling. Meditation. Gratitude practice. Exercise. Hydration. In this episode I offer something much simpler and honestly much more useful: stop starting your day in reaction mode. When you wake up and immediately hand your morning to your phone, to other people's urgency, to news and email and demands,

en

11:02

Episode 665: The Health Benefits of Being Bad at...

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/20

When was the last time you did something you were genuinely not good at? Not working toward being good at it. Just doing it, badly, for the pure experience of doing it? In this episode I make the case for the category of things you do purely for love, with no ambition toward mastery, no monetization, no performance for an audience. This category is worth protecting. Maybe even expanding. Because the hobby you are bad at gives you something the rest of your life cannot: the experience of showing up

en

07:29

Episode 664: The Art of Doing One Thing at a Time

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/19

We pride ourselves on multitasking. But the research on this is unambiguous: what we call multitasking is actually task-switching. And we do everything worse when our attention is divided. In this episode I make the case for the radical, countercultural act of doing one thing at a time. Not as a productivity strategy but as a quality-of-life one. Because when your attention is split, you are never fully anywhere. You are doing everything halfway. Food tastes different when you are not also reading

en

06:54

Episode 663: Simplicity Is a Health Practice

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/18

The women who tend to their health most consistently are not always the most informed. They are often the ones who have simplified enough to actually follow through. In this episode I make the case that the answer to most health consistency problems is not more structure. It is less complexity. Because a simpler approach that actually happens is infinitely more valuable than an optimized one that never quite gets started. By the time many women reach the moment of choosing whether to exercise or

en

07:21

Episode 662: A Love Letter to Walking

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/17

Back in July I made the research case for walking. Today I want to do something different. I want to tell you what walking has actually given me. In this episode I share how my nine-month-old Great Dane Tilly has made me one of the most consistent walkers of my adult life, and what those daily 45-minute morning walks have produced that no step count study can quite capture: a creative brain that comes online in the first ten minutes, problems that loosen, ideas that arrive, real conversations with

en

07:17

Episode 661: Your Life Needs More Awe

Grace & Grit Podcast ·

2026/09/16

Rachel Carson wrote that those who dwell among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. I have been thinking about that sentence a lot lately. In this episode I explore what awe actually is, drawing on Dacher Keltner's definition: the feeling of being in the presence of something vast that transcends your current understanding of the world. And I make the case that awe does not require a mountaintop. It can arrive in an ordinary afternoon, which I illustrate with a

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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

en

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,

en

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

en

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

en

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,

en

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

en

688 results

Similar Podcasts

Доктор Тройняшкин

Доктор Тройняшкин

Healthy Chat

DR ALI BANIHAMOUR

Dingue ‐ RTS

RTS - Radio Télévision Suisse

Optimal Health Daily - Fitness and Nutrition

Optimal Living Daily | Dr. Neal Malik

Muscles by Brussels Radio

Dani Taylor