In this second of two holiday bonus episodes, we again get a bit more personal with season one expert guests whose own experiences have inspired and informed their professional pursuits – “My Expert Odyssey” times four.

First off, Dr. Mark Stoutenberg of Temple University’s Department of Kinesiology. As a kid in Canada, his long-held dream was to become a college football player and coach – and yes, that’s American football. But he readily gave up that dream after discovering the science behind exercise physiology and the need for better public accessibility to exercise facilities and programs.

Second, Dr. Michael Riddell, whose path to become a world-renowned authority on diabetes and exercise at York University (Toronto) began as a frustrated fifteen year old with type one diabetes. Dr. Riddell’s basketball teammates and opponents didn’t need to worry about the metabolic ups and downs he struggled with.

“And that's made me dig deep into the literature and then eventually take… a PhD in physiology and pharmacology,” explains Dr. Riddell, “always just hungry for learning more about why someone with type one diabetes has both low blood sugars and high blood sugars around exercise and nutrition.”

In a similar trajectory, our third expert, Dr. Shosh Bennett, began a groundbreaking career in maternal behavioral health after experiencing two severe cases of postpartum depression herself in the 1980s – a time when the condition was neither widely recognized nor treated.

And finally, Dr. Kathryn Schmitz, a widely respected researcher at the University of Pittsburgh, had the all too personal experience of implementing exercise oncology when her own life partner developed cancer.

“Prior to that, I saw the evidence base and it said people should be doing 150 minutes a week of aerobic activity and twice weekly strength training, and this is what we should do,” Dr. Schmitz recalls. “And after the experience of Sarah's cancer, it was more, okay, so what are you dealing with right now? And more movement is better, and let's see what you can withstand.”

Tune in for the personal sagas of My Body Odyssey’s (MBO) medical experts in this second of two holiday bonus episodes.

MBO is a Fluent Knowledge production; original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.

What's your body odyssey? Let us know.

Robert Pease (co-host)
This season, we shared the stories of cyclists, rowers, triathletes, and yogis on My Body Odyssey, a show about the rewards and challenges of active lifestyle. I’m Robert Pease, and this the second of two bonus episodes featuring our expert medical guests.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
I’m Valerie Wencis, excited to share this more personal side from our expert guests since, in many cases, these personal experiences shape and inform their professional careers. Such as Dr. Mark Stoutenberg, a kinesiologist at Temple University
Dr. Mark Stoutenberg
Anything we do in life to the extreme, we're gonna pay the price for, you know? If you played 15 years of basketball in your life, you're probably gonna have knee pain later in life. You know, if you played professional football, there's a good chance you're gonna suffer joint pain and replacements and different things.
Robert Pease (co-host)
And Dr. Stoutenberg knows first-hand about athletic injuries.
Dr. Mark Stoutenberg
I actually started out, my dream when I was young was to coach football. I grew up in Canada. I came to the United States with the goal of, you know, I played college football, but I was gonna be a college football or a professional coach. And I worked at the University of Miami and had the great honor of being part of some football teams there. But at the same time, I was taking classes in the discipline of exercise physiology. And I just loved it so much that I actually left my dream to start a new pathway.
Robert Pease (co-host)
But Dr. Stoutenberg’s college football days stayed with him in another way as he grew older – and that was in the form of intense back pain.
Dr. Mark Stoutenberg
I took my MRI of my low back to three different surgeons. One said, there's nothing wrong. Another said, you need lumbar fusion. And the third one said, you're gonna have pain for the rest of your life. And there's no surgery needed. Three completely different diagnoses from the same MRI.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
Fortunately, though, he was able to find a fairly conservative approach for his back pain.
Dr. Mark Stoutenberg
Well, I actually found a physical therapist who understood low back pain really well, and was able to work with me. And I'm essentially low back pain free now, and I just think back to if I had listened to the one who had said I needed surgery, I mean, he wanted to book me the next week. It would've ruined my life.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Which gave him such an interesting perspective on our first protagonist, Ultimate Mark, who’s young, fit, athletic, and frequently injured.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
Ultimate Mark competes with great intensity through those injuries in his favorite sport of ultimate disc, formerly known as ultimate frisbee, despite having had severe scoliosis and major spinal surgery at a young age.
Mark
So after my freshman year of college, when I was 18, I got a spinal fusion from vertebrae T1, which is basically the top of your back, right before you hit your neck, all the way down to L3, which is almost to the base of your back, where your back touches your butt. I think there's like 14 or 15 screws in there now fully fused.Iit was a six to eight month recovery. I, being the total masochist apparently that I am, after two months I begged my parents to drive me to the high school track nearby. And I tried running and I went maybe 20 feet and then collapsed on the track in pain.
Robert Pease (co-host)
We introduced Dr. Stoutenberg to Ultimate Mark through a series of interview clips. But he was already familiar with this dilemma from his research, his days as a football coach and player, and his own experience with back issues.
Dr. Mark Stoutenberg
You know, 18 years old, massive spinal fusion, I just hope people at that point would say, you know what, I gotta change my lifestyle. Get in the pool, do low impact exercises, find other ways and understand that our path in life is changed. And we have to adjust to that. And it's hard to do, really hard to do.
Robert Pease (co-host)
In our second episode, we profiled Ironwoman Diane, an accomplished amateur triathlete with type one diabetes.
Diane
I've done three full ironman races. My race plan consisted of a two page spreadsheet that was nothing but how I was going to manage my blood sugars.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
And to better understand the incredible challenge of completing a 12 or 13 hour Ironman competition with diabetes, we reached out to Dr. Michael Riddell from York University in Toronto. He’s a leading authority on diabetes and exercise. But for Dr. Riddell, that research is also quite personal.
Dr. Michael Riddell
Soon after diagnosis, I was allowed to resume playing basketball and tennis and biking, all the things that I loved to do at the age of 15, but I was really having problems with low blood sugar. So I was given a pretty restrictive diet of maybe 1500 calories a day. But my energy expenditure far exceeded that because of the amount of exercise I was doing. And they never really instructed me on how to dose insulin for being physically active. I didn't realize that I had to take a lot less insulin on active days and I needed to eat differently. And I got really frustrated, quite frankly, because all of my friends on the basketball team weren't having problems with low blood sugar or high blood sugar. And that made me dig deep into the literature and then eventually take an undergraduate program in kinesiology and then a master's and then a PhD in physiology, pharmacology, always just hungry for learning more about why someone with type one diabetes has both low blood sugars and high blood sugars around exercise and nutrition.
Robert Pease (co-host)
You have worked with some sprint athletes, like the swimmer Gary Hall, Jr. What are the challenges for someone like that preparing for just an intense burst of energy with so much on the line?
Dr. Michael Riddell
Well, I had learned about Gary Hall. Jr.'s experience as a sprint swimmer from a colleague of mine, Dr. Anne Peters, who is an endocrinologist, and Anne and I have worked together over the years to learn more about why these very short burst stressful competitive events cause high blood sugar. For an athlete like Gary, there is so much adrenaline that is released just before that Olympic swim or that gold medal swim in Sydney that he had, that the adrenaline pushes up the blood sugar. It acts on the liver to squeeze out glucose. That's stored in the liver, in the form of glycogen. And boy, it shoots the glucose up. His blood sugar went up over 300 milligrams per deciliter in the span of around 15 seconds during a gold medal sprint swim. And so we've learned a lot from athletes like Gary who have the complete opposite problem. They have high blood sugar when they're under intense competition and there are others too.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Yeah. Well, do you feel like we're hearing enough about athletes with diabetes, because honestly, I had never heard that Gary Hall, Jr. was a diabetic, and he's obviously a very famous swimmer. Do you think there should be more public service announcements or endorsements or whatever, that bring out that fact?
Dr. Michael Riddell
Yeah, I think that'd be lovely. There are so many exceptional amateur and pro athletes that I've met over years that are so inspiring with type one, they really would do a lot for the rest of us to keep us motivated, to make us feel like we're part of a team of trying to accomplish almost the insurmountable, being in competition with this additional factor of blood sugar regulation. It's certainly not easy.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
We encountered a similar bit of serendipity between protagonist and expert when we moved on from the topic of diabetes to postpartum depression.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Our protagonist Erin, a high school chemistry teacher, took up regular running as a strategy for managing postpartum.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
She’d experienced a difficult pregnancy with a lot of hormonal issues and weight gain, on top of the challenges of raising two young children and maintaining a full time job.
Robert Pease (co-host)
We met Erin at the finish line of her first marathon, the culmination of over a year and a half of training, including some frosty 4am winter runs in her hometown of Buffalo, New York.
Erin
So as hard as it can be, and as much as you might struggle to get out there at the end of it, when you're done and you have that rush of adrenaline and serotonin or whatever, you feel wonderful, you feel great. Like right now I feel great. I definitely need a shower. I'm sure I'm stinky. I apologize to everybody. I'm probably gonna be hurting a little bit tomorrow, but yeah. You know, you feel like you took over the world and you feel like you did something with your day. Like, you know, it's noon-ish. And I can say I ran 26.2 miles this morning. Wow.
Robert Pease (co-host)
One of our experts on that episode, Dr. Shosh Bennett, a clinical psychologist, had not one but two serious cases of postpartum with her own pregnancies three decades ago. That set her on a mission to help others understand and treat the issue.
Dr. Shosh Bennett
I had trauma from the labor and delivery, which was never addressed. It wasn't a thing back then that was identified. And really my daughter was two and a half when my hair started to curl again, what was left of it had gone straight. So hormonally, it took about two and a half years to come back. And I started to feel like my old self and thought, maybe I can be a mother, but my baby and I did have attachment issues. She did develop an attachment disorder, which can happen if mama is not given proper help. And that's why I do this work again. I've been doing this work for 34 years. And a lot of it has to do with making sure babies are okay as well. If mommy is given help, that relationship is going to be fine.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
We asked Dr. Shosh if she had been prescribed any help with her two cases of postpartum.
Dr. Shosh Bennett
No, no, I wasn't. Therapists were not trained at all. And actually to this date, there isn't a full comprehensive training program in graduate schools. We’re getting closer, but not yet. So the therapists I went to, actually, I felt more crazy when I left their office than when I walked in. It's not their fault, they weren't trained, but they were asking me completely irrelevant types of things.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Dr. Shosh also helped us understand the prevalence of postpartum and how it differs from normal mood swings.
Dr. Shosh Bennett
You know, the baby blues are very normal. Most new moms experience those mild ups and downs. Baby blues should be gone by about two weeks following delivery. We can differentiate the two by the length of time it's lasting. For instance, if just a mild baby blues continues past two, I'd say at the outset three weeks, we call it a mild postpartum depression now, and the woman does need some extra help. It can also happen immediately. The onset can be immediately after, following delivery or any time up to about the first year postpartum. But we're talking about 15-20%, about one in seven, will experience something more severe than the normal baby blues.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
As well as the surprising fact that many mothers, Dr. Shosh included, begin to experience postpartum symptoms during pregnancy.
Dr. Shosh Bennett
Whatever can happen postpartum can happen during pregnancy. So those wellness checks should be happening by the OBGYN at least every trimester to make sure she's okay. And there are wonderful screening methods that we have now to help prevent. I'm all about prevention whenever possible. Again, I plummeted in 1987 with the birth of the second child, and about a year into that I realized there was a name for what I had been going through. And that's what launched me – still very depressed – but launched me into as much research as I could get my hands on. And I was one of the few pioneers of maternal mental health in the United States. And it just blossomed from there.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Serendipity struck a little differently in our episode profiling Howie, an avid cyclist. He’s ridden through six bouts of lymphoma and logged something like 100,000 miles, or 4 times around the planet, in his decades-long love affair with cycling.
Howie
Because of all the riding I do, they can hit me harder with chemo, with radiation when they have to do it.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Dr. Kathryn Schmitz, a noted expert on cancer and exercise at the University of Pittsburgh, provided commentary on Howie’s odyssey. Her initial path into exercise oncology did not arise from her own experience. But then, unfortunately, cancer did creep into her personal life.
Dr. Kathryn Schmitz
I will say that my experience in the field of exercise oncology changed dramatically in 2016 when the woman who is now my wife was diagnosed with stage three squamous cell carcinoma in her right nostril and had to undergo what is technically called a complete rhinectomy and what you and I would call total removal of the nose and radiation and chemotherapy. My understanding of cancer and what it is to go through cancer shifted dramatically as a result of that. And that has influenced the shape of my professional endeavors since.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
Wow. Well, I'm sorry that you and your wife went through that, and I'm sure that's a continuing process. When you say it influenced, you mean like the patient experience part of it, or how it impacts families?
Dr. Kathryn Schmitz
I think prior to that I saw the evidence base and it said people should be doing 150 minutes a week of aerobic activity and twice weekly strength training, and this is what we should do, and you should do that. And after the experience of Sarah's cancer, it was more: okay, so what are you dealing with right now? And what are you capable of doing? And more movement is better, and let's see what you can withstand. And you know, it was less about meeting the guidelines than meeting people where they are, if that makes sense. In addition to the recognition that – and this was really quite something for me – the caregiver goes through something too. And It was a very, very difficult time for Sarah to go through cancer. And it was surprising to me how few people understood that I was dealing with something too. I gained 20 pounds, I stopped exercising. It was a dramatic change for my physical health for Sarah to go through cancer. By the way, she's fine.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
Good, I'm glad.
Dr. Kathryn Schmitz
Five years out, I'm fine. So most important news. But the caregiver, recognizing that the caregiver is experiencing something as well, I think, was brand new news to me.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
So did it broaden your research?
Dr. Kathryn Schmitz
It broadened my understanding of how to talk to people. I think it also shaped the kind of research that I thought was really important to do. So I still think that it is important to do research to understand the physiological underpinnings by which exercise will have benefits for people living with and beyond cancer. But I think that – I thought this before Sarah's cancer, and I think it really strongly now – that we know enough and we need to make this happen in the lives of patients and caregivers. And so to me it is a crucial question, a crucial and central question to ask, how do we make it a standard of care? How do we shift this so that people see this as being as important as their chemotherapy?
Robert Pease (co-host)
Again, that’s Dr. Kathryn Schmitz of the University of Pittsburgh. One of several medical experts who’ve informed My Body Odyssey episodes from personal experience.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
And looking back on what seemed like coincidence: Dr. Stoutenberg having confronted a possible spinal fusion…
Robert Pease (co-host)
Dr. Riddell, with type one diabetes becoming a world class authority on diabetes and exercise…
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
And Dr. Bennett, a pioneer on postpartum depression, after two serious battles of her own.
Robert Pease (co-host)
So maybe this is not really so coincidental.
Valerie Wencis (co-host)
Personal experience can light the way towards professional expertise. And makes these experts fully understand the considerable challenges involved. You’ll be hearing from more experts like these in season two of My Body Odyssey.
Robert Pease (co-host)
Meantime, Happy New Year to all our listeners from the Fluent Knowledge team. We’re moving into production of season two launching late winter of 2023. So stay tuned and stay active.
My Body Odyssey is a Fluent Knowledge Production. Original music by Ryan Adair Rooney.

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My Expert Odyssey Part 2: Scoliosis, Pre-Diabetes, Postpartum, & Cancer

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My Expert Odyssey Part 2: Scoliosis, Pre-Diabetes, Postpartum, & Cancer

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My Expert Odyssey Part 1: Depression, Diabetes & Trauma (Bonus Episode)

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