Mark Bell's Power Project - Why Women Hit a Wall in Their 40s | And How to Fix It (w/ Dr. Mariza Snyder)

Episode Date: November 24, 2025

Dr. Mariza Snyder joins Mark and Nsima for one of the most important conversations we’ve ever had about women’s health. Most people think menopause just “happens” at 50 — but the real transition starts years earlier, and it affects the brain, mood, metabolism, recovery, sleep, stress tolerance, and relationships.FOLLOW:https://www.instagram.com/drmariza/https://drmariza.com/Special perks for our listeners below!🥩 HIGH QUALITY PROTEIN! 🍖 ➢ https://goodlifeproteins.com/ Code POWER to save 20% off site wide, or code POWERPROJECT to save an additional 5% off your Build a Box Subscription!🩸 Get your BLOODWORK Done! 🩸 ➢ https://marekhealth.com/PowerProject to receive 10% off our Panel, Check Up Panel or any custom panel, and use code POWERPROJECT for 10% off any lab!🧠 Methylene Blue: Better Focus, Sleep and Mood 🧠 Use Code POWER10 for 10% off!➢https://troscriptions.com?utm_source=affiliate&ut-m_medium=podcast&ut-m_campaign=MarkBel-I_podcastBest 5 Finger Barefoot Shoes! 👟 ➢ https://Peluva.com/PowerProject Code POWERPROJECT15 to save 15% off Peluva Shoes!Self Explanatory 🍆 ➢ Enlarging Pumps (This really works): https://bit.ly/powerproject1Pumps explained: https://youtu.be/qPG9JXjlhpM?si=JZN09-FakTjoJuaW🚨 The Best Red Light Therapy Devices and Blue Blocking Glasses On The Market! 😎➢https://emr-tek.com/Use code: POWERPROJECT to save 20% off your order!👟 BEST LOOKING AND FUNCTIONING BAREFOOT SHOES 🦶➢https://vivobarefoot.com/powerproject🥶 The Best Cold Plunge Money Can Buy 🥶 ➢ https://thecoldplunge.com/ Code POWERPROJECT to save $150!!

All of vaginas need estrogen. 90-something percent of women are going to experience genital urinary symptoms of menopause. Vaginal dryness, atrophy, UTIs, bladder issues, a painful intercourse. It messes with our intimacy, our relationships. You need to build your life around movement, not build movement around your life. Hormones are affecting the gut microbiome. They're affecting your immune system, muscle protein synthesis, bone remodeling. They are affecting the brain.

We have a through line of patients and providers alike that still believe that HRT was going to cause a heart attack, a stroke, or breast cancer. I believe that women deserve all the tools in the toolbox. And so, yes, please, to lifestyle interventions, lifestyle medicine. All right, Dr. Mariza, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, guys. I'm so happy to be here. Seeing your Instagram, you're talking a lot about walking. And you mentioned many times you mentioned a brain injury.

I guess. What kind of brain injury did you suffer? I suffered two major concussions back to back over the course of two weeks. It was in 2023 in the summer of 2023. I always say these were mom concussions. So the first concussion, you guys want me to go into detail. I was at a park in Laguna Beach. I live in California, where we are. And my son was climbing this metal ladder to get to the second level. He was only two. And I wanted to help him. And at the time, I was doing a lot of box jumps at the gym. I don't know if you guys know where this is going. And so I had a hat on and he gets to the top and he wants me to go down the slide.

And I thought, I'm going to box jump this thing. I don't know that there is a metal. Oh, no. Yes. And I was, I'm talking, I was propelled force box jump into this metal bar. And I fall back down the. the stairs. I don't even make it up. I mean, I end up getting up there because, you know, mom will do what she needs to do. He's still waiting for me. And I'm like seeing stars and, you know,

initially I didn't think, I mean, I obviously know the extent of what can happen when you hit your head pretty hard. But I was like, I can power through this. But then a few weeks later, I was playing and I got with a bunch of kids and one of the kids head butts me. I get my nose broken, black, I'm we're talking black and blue. And I remember like I just, everything got blurry. I had 12 consecutive days of migraines. I started to progressively decline. By that 12th day, I just, I couldn't function at all. So we went to the ER, did a CT scan, and was diagnosed with post-concussion syndrome. And then everything started to spiral out for me. I couldn't drive my car anymore for a minute. I wasn't able to get my son ready for school. And I remember there was a

moment there where I wondered if I was going to recover because I felt like there was a bit of a lull, like where I even went a couple weeks without actually doing much about this. And I also knew with post-concussion syndrome, you really have a 90-day window to shore up that inflammation and oxidative stress. And so I went on a, I worked with actually one of our dear friends, Dr. Gabriel Lyons' team, One of her doctors worked with Navy Seals and he had a concussion protocol that he used on them. I went into that, I used that concussion protocol. I was in a hyperbaric oxygen for every day for pretty much 60 days. And I was on a, I was basically in brain treatments four hours, five hours a day.

In the beginning, I couldn't even get myself there. So my husband had to drive me to these appointments. And I remember right into this, again, one day box jumping, next day, not. anymore and you know I wanted to keep moving I knew movement was such a big part of healing but the thing the only thing I could really do besides like mobility work was walking and for some reason well there's a lot of research that shows that walking helps regulate the nervous system walking walking just helped to calm my nervous system at a time where it really felt like it was on fire and it was also the thing I knew I could do and so it's you know for a lot of women who are

starting a healing journey or they've been you know undergoing maybe it's an autoimmune condition or maybe it's a brain injury or whatever that may be where they have more of a chronic issue you know any movement is the path through but walking seems to be one of those low impact things that can make a really big difference in people's healing journey so that's where I like to start depending on the person and that just seems brutal especially like how it progressed so far and you really feel like the hyperbaric chamber and like that was really beneficial. Did they use any like ketones or was there a specific diet? I was on a ketogenic diet. Yeah, I was on high dose omegas taking 9,000 milligrams. So 9,000, 9 grams a day. I was on high dose. I was on vitamin D, co-kutin, a lot of mitochondrial support. It was a big

supplement stack that I was taking. I did a whole podcast episode kind of detailing out what I was doing. I was in a dark room for a month. I basically didn't really outside of walking. Light and stuff. Yeah, light. I was nauseous. I was. I was nauseous. I still continue to have migraines. I wasn't able to look at screens. I mean a lot of my like my day to day shut down for a little bit a little bit over 30 days. How is that with being somebody that is like a leader, somebody that is helping a lot of, like you're helping a lot of people. You're helping like thousands of people, thousands of women go through with menopause and stuff like that. And I mean, that must have felt terrible to not be able to. That's like your whole life. You're trying to help

people, right? Yeah. I mean, I think the biggest thing that was the most impactful, was not being able to show up like the mom I wanted to be. I just, I had, you know, I, I was, up until that point, I was breastfeeding, but because of all the supplements and everything I had to get on, I had to stop that immediately. So I had to stop that. I was co-sleeping with my son up into that point. We had to move him out of my, out of the room, into his own room with my husband. I had to sleep by myself, you know, we, basically, I became sleep divorced overnight, you know, very quickly. So being a mom, like the standard of which I operated as a mother, like that

was compromised. But then the other thing is my entire, in a lot of ways, I mean, the business was able to run without me. My podcast at the time was doing 350,000 downloads per month, went down. I mean, I just couldn't maintain that number, the number of episodes I was doing. We were doing a lot of replays at the time. That's one of my favorite things to do. All of that had to take a back seat. But I had never known how mission critical it was to be healthy in terms of it impacting every single wheel of my life until that moment where I thought, I don't know, I'm having to negotiate of what I have capacity for. And there were days where I'm like, I have to decide what is the ultimate priority. And it was that, that I've had a lot of healing journeys that I've

had a lot of moments where I've had to step back and say, okay, health is number one. This is my, this is my number one priority. But it wasn't until the, this post-concussion syndrome where I was like, if I don't get this short up now, like immediately, like I don't know what the trajectory of my life is going to look like moving forward in terms of my mission, my passion, motherhood, all of it. And so I, every day, I make decisions for my brain. I sleep for my brain. I eat for my brain. Everything is, because I still feel some sensitivity there. Yeah. You know, I know a high percentage of our listeners are men. We do have some women listeners too, but I want to contextualize because I think some guys might be listening and they're like, okay, well, I don't need to listen

to this podcast, but I think there's a very important line because we all have women in our lives that we want to help or that we, that maybe don't have some of this information, like my mother, right? So you've told a story about your mother and other podcasts and I think is very important for people to hear and learn because maybe they could see, they can see their mother in that and understand that there are things that we're going to be talking about today that can we can pass on to people in our lives that can help shift their health in ways that they would have never expected. So I want to know if you could tell that story of how like how she shifted her health. Absolutely. Well, we all have a mom, right? We wouldn't be here if we didn't have a

mom. And I think we all love our mammas in a lot of ways. And I think watching, making sure and ensuring that the women in our lives are taking care of and that, I mean, I always think about, you know, the mom's the glue that hold it all together. And if they're okay, everyone's okay. And so my mom, you know, she was a single mom. This woman was a freight train. Like she could kick butt take names. There was nothing that could stop her. She was an unstoppable force. I remember growing up and she'd have these heels and she had this walk. You know, she was just, she was going somewhere, you know. That's called the mom walk in my house. That's what that's called. Yeah, the mom walk. My daughter always makes fun of my wife.

She's like, do you have to walk that way? Like, especially around the school and everything. She's like, I'm on a mission. I got a shit to do. Need to let people know. Okay, let them know you're here. And so that was my mom. I can hear the keys, you know, and she was gorgeous woman as well, but also surviving,

but still did it, like was able to do it. She gets into perimenopause. In those first couple of years, again, some low energy, low stress tolerance, very much around the narrative of women suffer, you know, like that maybe life is added. up, motherhood is adding up, and a lot of it was just blown off. Oh, you're working too much and probably true, but too much stress or too much mom's stuff. My sister was going through some pretty big things at the time. And so a lot of those symptoms were gaslit. They were just ignored. And even by us, even by me and my mother, my mom's like, I'm fine, I got this.

You know, it's so much that stoic way of moms, how moms operate in a lot of ways. But then she got into her late 40s and things got significantly worse. We're talking crime scene periods and weight resistance. And this woman had been working out my entire life. She was very much a role model for being physically active. But all of a sudden, I'll never forget, I lived in the Bay Area back in the day in Oakland, California, and there's this race in San Francisco called the Beta Breakers. It's a fun race. It's basically all across all of San Francisco. And I remember I was training with this race for my mom. And I remember training so that I could be at her level for this run. And I was very prideful. And I just knew.

my mom was going to run this race with me, right? And it's up and downhill. San Francisco's hilly, but I was like, we got this. My mom made it through like three miles, and she was already struggling. And I remember significantly judging her. I was like, who is this woman? Like, this isn't my mother. Like, I don't know who this woman is. How could she not do this? Mind you, I was kicking her butt the day before in spin classes. I was having her in the gym the day before that. I've been wearing, I was like, as we were priming up for this race, my poor mom was just, I was dragging her to workouts and everything. So she didn't have a lot in the tank by the time we got to this race. But I was like, who is this woman? Like I could tell, like,

it was, it was, it was wearing on her. But it was the brain-related symptoms. Yeah. The, the, the, the, the low stress tolerance, the low mental energy, the sleep issues, it was adding up. And I'll never forget, she went to her doctor and she asked, is it normal for someone to want to kill people five days out of the month because that's where I'm at. And she would actually not leave the house for a couple of days out of the month because she was afraid she was going to hit somebody with her car. And that's how serious it got. Mind you, HRT wasn't being offered. She did finally find a doctor who was willing to give it to her to give her oral micronized progesterone. She was on it for three months doing great. That doctor went on maternity leave. And another doctor was

assigned to her to take over. And even though my mom was doing great, it's efficacious for those specific symptoms. It's safe. It is available. This doctor didn't believe in it. She's like it's not indicated as far as I'm concerned. And so I do SSRIs. So that that doctor took her off. Off of something that was helping her safely. And so my mom got on SSRIs and it went downhill significantly very quickly from there because it's just not what she needed. Yeah. You know, at the time, She called me, I remember 11 o'clock p.m. at night scared. She was like, I don't know what's happening to me. I feel like I'm losing control of this situation. It was like 49 at the time. And I ended up taking over her care at that point. Within 60 days, she's losing weight. She's got her energy back. She's sleeping. But more so, she felt like herself again. And that was the defining moment where she decided that she gets to live the second half of her life on her terms. I have this picture of her when she was, 58 years old. She's like going to stagecoach in, um, out, out in the desert. She's got Daisy Dukes. She's got long hair. She's got a, she looks like she's 20. Like this woman looks

incredible, amazing and vibrant. She has now ran over 70 half marathons and marathons. She's training for a marathon right now. She's running 20 miles this weekend in prep for that. She competitively plays tennis three to four days a week this woman is a beast she is 64 years old about to be 65 years old maybe by the time this comes out and you said like recently she's uh like not too long ago she took up competitive tennis right yeah no at 50 years old and so she's been playing and here's the thing we know the research is clear that particularly like tennis or if it's pickleball you're talking about extending your lifespan by an extra nine years running i think it's five years but then she's doing both mind you she's also in the gym

She's also lifting weight. She's also building muscle, protecting bones. And her metabolic labs, they're a chef's kiss. She, I mean, it's amazing. I heard somebody once say that you have a lot of problems until you have a health problem. Yeah. Then you only got one problem. You know, like if you had a wish and you say, okay, you know, let me, you can grant, you know, as many wishes as you want.

If you had a health thing, that's, you'd be like, hey, look, I only have one. Sure. I just want to be able to live, you know, like if you're going to, you know, if you're that compromised, right? And that's exactly what that felt like for me when I was recovering from that brain injury. I was like, this is, if I want to be the person that I not only want to be, but I need to be, not only for my son, but for my community, for the work that I do in the world, for all the women that I get to show up and serve, like this is a narrow focus. And I will tell you, in a lot of ways, it's a selfish focus when you're, I mean,

whether it's an injury or it's a health, health issue, because that's the only area that you're able to put your energy in time. And so, you know, from a preventative standpoint, so much of what I talk about, whether it's my books or on social or my programs, like how do we shore up our health? How do we protect our future health outcomes so that we're not spending the majority of our life in all of our income heading to doctors offices? That we're spending it with the people that we want to be spending it with, doing the things that we love. What is happening to women? Like what, you know, it seems like metapause is like a huge thing amongst, you know, my wife and a lot of her. her friends are talking about it and you know my wife seems to be doing fine for now I guess hopefully that continues but a lot of her friends are just like they just it's like they just get like hit by a truck and they're totally fine their their health is normal and these are all women that work out most of them have figured out you know ways to you know make exercise part of their life some of them swim some of them lift weights some of them do a combination of

both. None of them are overweight. They all look great, especially like considering the fact that they're 10 years older than I am, you know, 10 years older than my wife were, my wife's 50. She'll probably not like me saying that, but she's crazy. Late perimenopause. She may not even be in menopause yet. Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, like, yeah, what I guess like. Yeah, what's going on? Yeah, what's going on? And yeah, you know, it's just celebrating all these women that you know that are moving their bodies because I will say that movement is one of the best ways to mitigate symptoms. And I know this is your audience. This is your community right here. So keep at it. Like not that you needed my permission, but just keep moving. Keep moving.

But you have to understand that these hormones, this isn't bikini medicine. Women are not small men, right? And we talk about bikini medicine. We're talking about like, you know, just the boobs and the uterus and the ovaries. Like we're talking about a whole body recalibration. I will never go to a doctor ever again about my general health. All they want to do is put you on pills. Really well said there by Dana White. Couldn't agree with them more. A lot of us are trying to get jacked and tan. A lot of us just want to look good, feel good. And a lot of the symptoms that we might acquire as we get older, some of the things that we might have high cholesterol or these various things, it's amazing to have somebody looking at your blood work as you're going through

the process, as you're trying to become a better athlete, somebody that knows what they're doing. look at your cholesterol, they can look at the various markers that you have, and they can kind of see where you're at, and they can help guide you through that. And there's a few aspects, too, where it's like, yes, I mean, no, no shade to doctors, but a lot of times they do want to just stick you on medication. A lot of times there is supplementation that can help with this. Merrick Health, these patient care coronators are going to also look at the way you're living your lifestyle, because there's a lot of things you might be doing that if you just adjust that, boom, you could be at the right levels, including working with your testosterone. And there's so many

people that I know that are looking for, they're like, hey, should I do that? They're very curious. And they think that testosterone is going to all of a sudden kind of turn them into the Hulk. But that's not really what happens. It can be something that can be really great for your health because you can just basically live your life a little stronger, just like you were maybe in your 20s and 30s. And this is the last thing to keep in mind, guys, when you get your blood work done at a hospital, they're just looking at like these minimum levels. At Merrick Health, they try to bring you up to ideal levels for everything you're working with. Whereas if you go into a hospital and you have 300 nanograms per decilator of test, you're good, bro, even though you're probably

feeling like shit. At Merrick Health, they're going to try to figure out what's like things you can do in terms of your lifestyle. And if you're a candidate, potentially TRT. So these are things to pay attention to to get you to your best self. And what I love about it is a little bit of the back and forth that you get with the patient care coordinator. They're dissecting your blood work. It's not like, You just get this email back and it's just like, hey, try these five things. Somebody's actually on the phone with you going over every step and what you should do. Sometimes it's supplementation. Sometimes it's TRT.

And sometimes it's simply just some lifestyle habit changes. All right, guys, if you want to get your blood work checked and also get professional help from people who are going to be able to get you towards your best levels, heads to Merrickhealth.com and use code power project for 10% off any panel of your choice. Hormones are affecting the gut microbiome. They're affecting your immune system, muscle protein synthesis, bone remodeling. But most importantly, when your hormones begin to go on the fritz, because that's exactly what they're doing, they're erratically declining.

They're not just shifting. They are taking a nose dive. They are neurot steroid hormones. They are affecting the brain. And so when estrogen and progesterone begin to decline, these are hormones that are impacting serotonin, dopamine, GABA, so that motivation center of the brain, the get up and go center the brain, the stress tolerance center, like the amygdala and the hippocampus, and also GABA, which is the breaks, reducing anxiety, getting deep restful sleep. That's progesterone. As

progesterone begins to decline and it's not binding to GABA A receptors, we have a situation where women feel more anxious, more depressed. They feel more overwhelmed and overstimulated, like overtouched. Like everything is just hitting them hard. I always imagine, like how, It's liking it to women are great multitaskers. They can manage the 100 tabs, effortlessly for a long time. And then all of a sudden, they're not able to. That executive function begins to falter. And there's nothing more destabilizing than you going year after year,

handling business, taking care of family, running the to-do list, and all of a sudden, you can't do it. It's like, is this early dementia? Like, what is this? And then add in the mood swings and the low stress tolerance. the load doesn't change but the brain does we're talking about 25% less energy metabolism so the brain is not leveraging glucose the way that he used to white matter gray matter begins to decline that affects cognitive function and neurotransmitters are not getting bound to and created and so we've got mood issues we've got cognitive issues we've got stress issues and yet the load if anything it's higher than it's ever been you know i know where you've tapped on to the things that you can do on your own when it comes to these things. But we're going to definitely get to that,

but I definitely want to understand when one does have to go to a hospital at some point and they have to interact with the doctor like your mother did. Is it still a problem when, is it still difficult for women to go to the doctor to get what they need? And if it is, how do they navigate that so that they can get what they need

and they're not just plopped on some SSRIs or given the typical standard level of care? I love this question because this is, yes, absolutely, they're being dismissed in gaslit. It's easy for us to just say, again, it's just stress, it's just old age, it's just, it's just midlife. It's just how it is. Although even men, it's a different level of care.

Like you come in with kind of symptoms of low testosterone, testosterone therapy, right? We're going to hook you up. It's a $2.4 billion business, I think. It's growing. It's growing, yeah. And, but with HRT, only four to six percent of women in the U.S. are on hormone replacement therapy. Out of the 75 million women, that really could be candidates for it.

So I always tell women, treat that doctor's appointment like it's your most important appointment. Like you are going into a business meeting. Take your papers. Take your, the labs that you want. Take your biggest symptoms. Connect those symptoms to how it's impacting your life. When you can show the doctor that your work is being effective. your relationships are being affected.

You are not able to function the way that you used to. They really have to listen. And have it on paper because so often when you're getting pummeled with questions or they have their own agenda, it can be easy to be thrown off. And then point blank say, hey, do you take care of women

in perimenopause and menopause? Do you feel comfortable, you're taking care of me because I think that's what I'm going through? And if you get an answer of like, oh well, you know, and a lot of doctors don't. They don't have, you know, the only 20, 30% or 31% now, it just got updated, 31% of OB-Gynees have any level of menopausal care. Most doctors in residence will tell you they've had little to know education on menopause

or perimenopausal care. We've just kept missing the boat on how to take care of a very big portion of our population. So that would be with the thing. And also ask, hey, are you prescribing hormone replacement therapy? And if they're not, we've got to find someone who will. And the place to go to is your nearest compounding pharmacist because they're compounding testosterone.

They're compounding estrogen. Now, can you get FDA approved estrogen progesterone? Absolutely. But they're going to know who's prescribing all of it. They're going to be able to give you a list of providers who you can go to and actually get what you need. So you go to a compounding pharmacy. Do you give them your numbers

and they then prescribe you what you specifically need for you? Or do you still have to? You still have to go through the rigum and roll. Yeah, you still got to go through. You got to go back. Yeah. And go to that doctor. Hopefully they're looking at labs. It's complicated a little bit because you can't necessarily just go to a pharmacy. You have to go. In Mexico, you could. Yeah. Right. Right. You have to go to a doctor that will prescribe it. You know, and then you can use a company like Merrick Health or there's other organizations out there that you can go to. And there's telemedic companies right now like My Alloy or Middy Health or Joy Wellness. And these can be a bit more cookie cutter, you know, as you can imagine with telemedicine companies, especially with ones that are churning. So you really do have to advocate for yourself with those, but it's a starting place. You know, often you're going to get the standard kind of lower dose patch. How would you, how would someone know what to avoid?

Because there's a lot of influencers. Oh, gosh, yes. Talking, you know, and they're like, hey, this peptide, that peptide, take this, you know, take copper, take BPC 157. But, you know, it's like, well, shit, man, I don't know. And I'm sure if I don't know, I'm sure other people maybe even know less on some of these topics because it's hard to keep up on the peptide community. So, like, what should people maybe be just really paying attention to?

Do you want them to just go like to, I hate to say regular doctor, but how do they handle this? Because the regular doctor, as you're saying, like a lot of them don't know, right? I would say it's like trying to get milk from a hardware store. Yeah. You know, you're not going to be. Don't get it there. So what I recommend is, I mean, I think like anything, when we're making decisions about our dentist, you know, anytime, I feel like, I don't know, in this day and age, we live in a time of not only bio-observability, but direct consumer labs, you know, where we can really go and do the research. And so my, I mean, do your due diligence.

This is your health on the line. This is your vitality and longevity on the line. Like, go and do your due diligence. Are these menopause specialists? Are these, you know, are these hormone doctors? You know, even within like Middy Health or My Alloy, like see who's on their advisory board. You know, see how well there. What's their reputation?

What are their reviews? Again, there's a lot of companies out there that I think are very reputable, have high integrity and are readily available to a lot of people. Are there any, you know, long time ago. And I think this is still something that is people are realizing it's a myth. People like Dr. Gabriel-Line yourself are talking about the benefits of strain training. It's not going to make you overly bulky or anything like that. But on the HRT side of things, are there any types of beliefs about HRT that you hear women have, like, do they think it's going to make their voice deeper?

You know, are there myths that you can kind of help us figure out? Absolutely. Before, so I want to just highlight the Women's Health Initiative, which was the landmark study, one of the biggest studies ever done in the U.S. on women that kicked off in the mid-90s, halted 2002, the big halt, where estrogen. The big headlines were estrogen caused cancer. Oh, yeah. And right before then, HRT, particularly Premarin, so conjugated equine estrogen, was the number

one prescribed medication in the country. Okay. So I think we about 44 to 45% of women were on HRT leading into that study. And then almost overnight women, I think we dropped down to less than 10%. Yeah. And there's so much that we got wrong about this study. the three major areas. One, these are synthetic hormones. So conjugated equine, estrogen, and then we use a progestin, a synthetic progesterone. And it was actually the synthetic progesterone and

synthetic estrogen arm that was the relative risk of breast cancer. Mind you, it was one in 1,000 cases. It was one extra case in 1,000. That's all it was. When we looked at the absolute risk, it looked like a 25% increase, and it was not. So we got, The headlines blew it up. It was all over the media. Women and doctors alike were like, we have to pull women off of these medications immediately. Mind you, the long-term research, 22 years later,

come to find out it was the progestin that was the issue. It wasn't even in mind. So we learned one, women who were put on these medications, we wanted to look at cardiovascular risk, cancer risk, bone, bone risk. So we had women that were in their 60s and 70s. the average age was like 65 years old. These are women who've been out of menopause for well over a decade. So we kind of missed that window.

Now, mind you, we know that women can get on HRT in their 60s if they've never been on HRT. But I would say the window of intervention is perimenopause. Like, let's roll it back to 40. Like, you start having symptoms in your 40s, we should be having the conversation. We shouldn't be waiting until you're experiencing osteopenia and you've got pretty severe blood markers. So women were diabetic.

They had obesity. They were insulin resistant. So they had a lot of these comorbidities before they were even put on this synthetic HRT medication. The other thing we learned is that oral prescriptions can mess. It's called first pass through the liver and the gut that can also increase clotting factor. So again, there were these things that we learned a lot about with the HR, with the women's health initiative that we were like, okay, lessons learned. Maybe we don't start women with diabetes and cardiovascular disease on synthetic HRT at 70 years old or even, 65 years old. But unfortunately, the prevalence of that study has cost us so much. We went two

decades where providers did not learn how to prescribe hormone replacement therapy. We have a through line of patients and providers alike that still, up until the last three years, believed that HRT was going to cause a heart attack, a stroke, or breast cancer, or some kind of cancer. But when we look at the research, it significantly reduced, you know, mortality risk by like 33%. Osteoporosis risk by something like 33%. And so when we look at the benefits, it was really, it was a win, especially in the estrogen arm only. And I mean, the through line was start women earlier and don't use synthetic hormones. Yeah, I think women have been getting screwed over by the medical community for a while.

I mean, they get prescribed, I know so many women over the years that have been prescribed thyroid hormone, just like, boom, just like a snap of a finger. And there was no, there was no conversation about anything, you know, and I think that that's, I think all medical stuff should start with conversation. And I think it is great that we do have a lot of pharmaceuticals that can help move the needle. But I would also just, you know, ask some people, are you, I'm not saying like that you need to just all of a sudden change your lifestyle out of nowhere, because we know how difficult that can be, right? But are you getting enough sleep? Are you eating, you know, just natural whole foods, you know, just this simple basic stuff. And if somebody could understand like, hey, if you do that for 90 days, that actually could really change your life. It could be really, really powerful.

Maybe it's not exactly what you need because maybe you still need the intervention of. pharmaceuticals because your body's no longer producing estrogen and so forth. And so there's always the possibility that you do need extra. But man, it's like there's some basics out there. Some exercise and some good nutrition that could really help. Mark, it's a yes and. It's a yeah. I believe that women, I believe all of us deserve all the tools in the toolbox. But I'm off. I always say I serve everybody by serving women. And I believe that women deserve all the tools in the toolbox. And so yes, please to lifestyle interventions, lifestyle medicine, lifestyle medicine. And let's have a conversation about the possibility of HRT if it would be supportive,

which for many women it is. You know, I was, we were talking earlier how I said all of vaginas need estrogen. Like 90-something percent of women are going to experience genital urinary symptoms of menopause, vaginal dryness, atrophy, UTIs, bladder issues, a painful intercourse. It messes with our intimacy, our relationships. And so I want these. to be democratized and available to women so that they have the options to do what is best for their bodies with support. And you're right. It's all about the conversation. I'm curious about this. Your husband during that time and during, how did you maybe have to help him understand how to be better during that point in time? Or maybe he was already great, but there are probably

a lot of guys that have a wife or a girlfriend that might be going through this right now and they don't know what the hell's going on and they don't know how to be helpful. So what would your advice be there? I love this question. You know, part of this perimenopause dream for me. Yes. Dun, done, done, done, done. Well, and we have a little, a little person in our, we have a four-year-old, a little boy. And so, and he is the, I mean, gosh, everyone talks about how they would love to come back as Kingston in another life. He's, he's, I saw him helping you open the books and stuff, right? Yeah, he's, he's a big helper. But he's got like, we've got, you know, um, Legoland passes and San Diego Zoo passes. There he is, lifting up. I didn't even tell him to do that right

there. He just, oh, yeah, he's like plugging it for you. Right away, right away, turn it to the camera to do. Yeah, that's great. I was like, oh, we didn't. It was so funny because he wanted to cut the box open. And now I'm like, okay, now he's going to like, we got, we got a box cutter over here. It was a whole thing. But he was really sweet. And so, you know, the through line in terms of us being parents, you know, I have chronic migraines, particularly in perimenopause, and there are a day I wake up with them. And there are days where I'm always like, is this a migraine day? Like, what is it? And so I am always communicating with my husband about where I'm at in my journey, what I've got capacity for. Can you step in, especially like a migraine day. I will have

Alex. I'll ask him, hey, can you take over the rest of the nighttime routine, bath and reading and bedtime and PJs. And so it's really about, I mean, I think we've got to get vulnerable as as women, even as our partners about what we're, what the men are experiencing, or your partners are experiencing vice versa to kind of kind of meet you where you're at. So there's a lot of days where I may have to check out early because I just can't function. And I have to have Alex step on in. And so I've been really grateful. Alex, he will take on a lot of that labor for me. But I don't know if he would have as much if I didn't communicate that I really needed that support. And I'm really, I'm like, hey, could you help me with a laundry?

Could you help me with Kingston's bath time? Can you help me with lay down time? Like, I'm very specific. Like, I got to tap out. Yeah, obviously, it can be very difficult to be in those, be in those situations. What are the main, like when you see someone's blood work and they have menopause, what are some of the main things that you see like a dip in? And obviously the estrogen is going down. Is there, because you were mentioning there's, like, a balance of many different hormones.

Yes. Like I talked about with you earlier, none of these hormones are operating in a silo. So I'm often looking at melatonin levels. I'm looking at estrogen, progesterone. I'm looking at testosterone-free, total sex hormone binding globulin. I want to know, are we binding testosterone up versus, like, are we making enough or not making enough? So there can be nuance.

I want to look at a full thyroid panel. You're talking about thyroid medication. That is a metabolic gas pedal. And a lot of times, low thyroid function looks a lot like perimenopause and menopause. So I want to see what's going on there. But more importantly, I'm interested in your cellular energy, in your cardio metabolic health. So I want to see what's a lipid profile, including more advanced lipids like APOB and lipoprotein little A.

I want to know what your triglyceride to HDL ratio is. Is it close to one or is it moving past two? So I'm looking at what's going to happen, you know, 10, 20 years down the road based on these labs. I want to look at what your inflammatory markers are doing, your blood markers. I want to, in terms of your blood sugar markers. So I'm looking at fasting blood sugar, fasting insulin, hemoglobin A1C, and taking all of that into consideration. So I'm looking at hormones, metabolic labs, ferritin and iron. So looking at your energy from that perspective, because anemia is a big thing in menopause as well.

and I'm also looking at inflammation. So I'm taking all of this into consideration along with your symptoms and what are your goals. That's how I build a protocol. It's a little confusing in some ways because I think many women for many years have been just trying to be skinny, right? I know. And you need like a different strategy when you're in this kind of position, although some women may need to lose weight. Like losing weight might be super beneficial as we talked about when we were doing our workout. just somebody losing 20 pounds, and not in all cases, but in a lot of cases, that could be really

helpful. Again, it gets to be confusing because then you're like, well, do I get on some strict diet? And being on some strict diet where you're not consuming enough calories probably is a horrible place to start when you're talking about having some of these conditions, right? And it's not sustainable. You know, I think it's important, how I think about it again. And I get the weight. Nothing more frustrating than doing the things you've been doing. for 10, 15, 20 years, and they worked. I was, I mean, me too, you know, I would, you know, if I put on a little bit awake, so I was on vacation, I could get back in the gym, hop on that stairmaster, a couple of 30 extra minutes a day, you know, calorie restrict a little bit

and then you back where I was, you know, and so I think, you know, a lot of that, a lot of women like myself in 40s and 50s, this is what we grew up knowing, like, oh, we're just training to be thinner. We're training to lose that weight. And we need a different way of thinking about this, we need a reframe. Because in midlife, or even in our 20s and our 30s, it was never about that. It was about being resilient. Maybe almost more like a recomp, like a bodybuilder. Yeah. Like I want to gain muscle. Yes, and lose fat. So you want to gain, we want strength. We want resilience. I want good optimal cardio metabolic health. I want to keep you away from that heart attack and stroke. Those are the things that I'm going for. But also, I mean,

I get the desire of wanting to lose weight and say, I don't want to gain a bunch of weight in perimenopause and menopause. I have no desire for that. I know it's not healthy for me. I know it's driving inflammation. But also, it's not how I want to feel. And so I think we got to build something that's very sustainable. Protein's got to be number one.

But we also, again, the substrate only goes so far. We need to actually do something with that substrate, which is be in the gym, lift weights, whether it's progressive overload or you're lifting heavy to failure, whatever that looks like for you. you know we need you building that muscle protecting that metabolic sink and if you're trying to train like this and you're trying to eat better if your hormones are out of whack it just makes things harder you know and i know that sometimes there's some people like in our field you know of nutrition and things like that and they'll say oh it's all bullshit like if you're just in a calorie deficit like you're going to lose weight but it does get to be more complicated if you're

trying to recomp you're trying to build muscle somebody's giving you this message hey you got to get in the gym. So you're like, okay, I'm going to start to get to the gym. And you are starting to eat more protein and you're trying to do some of these things. It's just going to be much more difficult. It's going to feel like an uphill battle if your hormones aren't heading, at least in the right direction. Absolutely. And so, yeah, it drives me nuts. When I see, you know, people saying that, oh, it's just you need to be more disciplined. You need to be working out harder. You need to be eating less. And no, hormones are playing a major wall. We know that with estrogen declining, we're going to see muscle loss is happening already.

But with estrogen declining, we're going to see building muscle harder. We're going to be losing muscle or losing bone as well. We lose up to 20% of bone by early menopause. We're talking early 50s. That's playing a role. Also, we know that estrogen is messing with our insulin sensitivity. Insulin resistance is a root cause for weight resistance. And we also know that estrogen is driving body fat, you know, recomposition.

And so where we were more estrogenic, it would be hips, butts, and thighs. Now it's moving to visceral belly fat. That becomes its own danger zone. Right now we're talking about inflammatory fat, very dangerous fat, that drives further insulin resistance. And so, yeah, there's a bigger uphill climb. This is the reason why I say that parimenopause, most importantly, is the metabolic window of opportunity.

Because by the time we get into menopause, and not to say that there isn't things that we can do, absolutely can, but it just gets harder. I first started hearing about transcriptions from Thomas to Lauer. Yep. And, you know, Thomas is somebody, it's an animal with working out. You got a chance to work out with him. I worked out with him. And he's kind of always on the front lines of like,

you know, finding out about these new companies that have cool things. But I didn't really realize that ShroScriptions was the first company to put out Methylene Blue. Now, look at Methylene Blue. It's so popular. It's everywhere. It's one of those things. If you guys listen to this podcast, you know I'm very,

iffy with the supplements that I take. Because there's a lot of shady stuff out there. You've got to be careful. The great thing about transcriptions is that when people want to get methylene blue, usually they'll go on Amazon, they're going on to these other sites. It's not third-party testing. It's not dosed. A lot of people end up with toxicity from the blue that they get because there's no testing

of it. Troscriptions, they have third-party testing for their products. It's a dose so you know easily what exact dose of methylene blue you're getting in each troki. So you're not making some type of mistake. there's not going to be anything in it, it's safe. You can have it dissolve and you can turn your whole world blue if you want, or you can just swallow it.

They have two different types of methylene blue. They have one that is, I believe, dosed at 16 milligrams, and they have another one that's dosed at 50 milligrams. So make sure you check the milligrams. I don't recommend anybody start at 50 milligrams, but the 16, I feel, is very safe. You can also score the trokeys and you can break them up into smaller bits.

Yeah, so I do. And in addition to that, on top of the methylene blue, they have a lot of other great products of stuff as well. They got stuff for sleep. They got stuff for calming down, all kinds of things. I got to say, I use it about two or three times a week. I use it before jiu-jitsu. And the cool thing that I've noticed, and I've paid attention to this over the past few months, is that after sessions, I don't feel as tired. So it's almost like I've become more efficient with my, with just the way I use my body in these hard sessions of grappling.

And it's like, cool, that means that, I mean, I could go for longer if I wanted to, and my recovery is better affected. It's pretty great. I know Dr. Scott, sure, we had him on the podcast, and he talked quite a bit about how he recommends methylene blue to a lot of the athletes that he works with. And they're seeing some profound impacts. And one of the things I've heard about it is that it can enhance red light. So those are you doing red light therapy or those of you that have some opportunities to get out into some good sunlight. It might be a good idea to try some methylene blue. before you go out on your walk or run outside

or whatever activity is that you're gonna do outside. And this stuff is great, but please, like first off, they have stuff for staying calm, they have stuff for sleep. But remember, this stuff isn't a substitution for sleep. This isn't a substitution for taking care of nutrition. This is supposed to be an add-on to all the things that we already should be doing,

and it's gonna make things so much better if you're doing everything else too. And I think this is just a little different too than just adding some magnesium to your diet. I think this is a little different than, you know, treat these things appropriately. Make sure you do some of your own research, but. Oh, if you're taking medications. Yes, SRIs, you better talk to your doctor first. Don't, don't be popping these things. And if you're taking any medications at all, it'd be good to double triple, quadruple check and make sure that

you're safe. Transcriptions has a lot of great things that you need. So go and check out their website when you have the opportunity. Strength is never weakness, weakness, weakness, and catch you guys later. What are the different age ranges for perimenopause, menopause, et cetera? Yeah, absolutely. So I think a lot of us all know about menopause, right? So let's start with that. So the average age of menopause is 51 years old. I think my mom went into menopause at 52. And it's always good to know when your mom went through it.

Because you can kind of reverse engineer a little bit. Usually you'll go in around the same time your mom will. If she didn't have a hysterectomy or something like that heading into menopause, which unfortunately has happened to a lot of women. So you may, your mom may not know. So 51 years old, natural menopause is anywhere between 45 and 55. ideally you want to be on the further end of that scale because that's reproductive longevity then early menopause is between 45 and 40 premature menopause is under the age of 40

the reason why that matters is that there is a better chance of premature death when we go into menopause earlier or we see an increase in chronic conditions like cardiovascular disease diabetes cancer dementia when we are losing hormones sooner than we were supposed to So the standard of care there is always going to be hormone replacement therapy. So that is the scale. So with that, pari menopause is the transition getting to that point where you haven't had a period for one day in time. That's menopause. That's a defining moment.

And that can be a four to ten plus year transition. So that means that it can start as early as our mid to late 30s. And most of my patients over the last 17 years, 42, 43. That's when they come to me. I would say send me a sign and make it impossible for me to miss. They're just like, what the hell? I do not know who I am anymore. I don't recognize myself anymore.

Usually that's 43 years old. The weight's been stacking, the moods are shifting, cycles are getting kind of weird, and they just don't feel like they have the capacity that they used to have. Have you felt like you've gone through it, or have you been able to kind of swerve it because of like reading your blood work or something like that? No, I, so I'm a lot of majority of women, not I would say a majority, but more and more women are having children later, including myself. So I had my son at 41, and I would say postpartum, you know, good two-year journey there

where I was kind of just getting on the other side, sleep, all that, trying to dial back. You know, that's just the thing. You know, any parent will tell you sleep is elusive in those first couple of years. And then I had a five-month stretch. I was training twice a day. I had, my numbers were phenomenal. I felt amazing on top of the world. And there was a part of me that I was like, maybe.

maybe I'm shoving this back like maybe I'm winning the game like I was doing all the things and about five months into this I was 43 years old about 43 and a half I started experiencing symptoms um initially it was it was lower mental energy less workout recovery um I noticed um it wasn't weight per se but less stress tolerance and initially I thought it was my thyroid because I have I take thyroid medication and I have Hajimoto's thyroiditis and I have Hajimoto's thyroiditis and I let my antibodies kind of climb up while I was breastfeeding. I was trying to manage it with food, but I really needed something else to step in, like a low-dose naltrexone. And you can't take that when you're breastfeeding. And so I just decided I would breastfeed instead of taking the

medication to lower those antibodies. So it was safe to assume that a lot of these symptoms were just thyroid issues. Like I was having a hajee's flare when it probably was a yes and. Unfortunately, two months later is when I had the concussions. So I didn't actually know I was in perimenopause until later that fall when I felt like I had gotten over the majority of my more severe brain-related symptoms and I started to experience bouts of rage. I would wake up with this deep sense of dread about day 22 of my cycle and with this intermittent bouts of rage for like six or seven days and it was after tracking this for three months in a row, that's when I knew I was in perimenopause because there's no one test. What's like rage? What does it, what does it feel like? You just

mad frustrated yeah it feels like fire i remember it just felt like this fire like uncontrollable fire and um i was able i yelled a lot in a lot of pillows i screamed on a lot of pillows at this time um i you know who probably got the brunt of this unfortunately was my husband a little bit just a little bit more snappy a little bit more irritable i really tried to ensure my son didn't see any of that um but that's when i got on i got on oral micronized progesterone immediately to nip that in the bud. And what are some other hormone replacement that you've had experience with? Testosterone.

I love it. I love it for the cognitive benefits. I really love it for a lot of the off-label reasons. I love the motivation. I love the workout recovery. I feel like I can push harder. I'm building more muscle. And my brain is just better.

And again, the reason why I got on testosterone initially was for my brain. It wasn't for, I mean, what we used testosterone for what it's allowed for for women in in america is libido that's what we that's what it will prescribe for um off label or all those other reasons oral micronized progesterone was the first thing to address the mood changes and the sleep and all that stuff in the ludial phase of my cycle so the second half of my cycle so i cycle it i only take it halfway through my month and then with the migraines um we thought estrogen would help um and also i had noticed that progesterone just wasn't cutting it. So I brought on or I brought on a estrogen patch probably a year ago. So

all and then I also take a thyroid medication too. So I take four hormones pretty consistently. Are there any, you know, within HRT for men, there's so many different types of things. There's creams, there's patches, et cetera. And you know, we've talked to different people who mention how, okay, you know what, that's actually, that doesn't make that much of a difference. But it's a popular thing, right? Are there any things that when it comes to, to hormone therapy that woman need to be, like I think Mark kind of mentioned it earlier, but kind of red flags of suggested hormone treatments, whether it's a type of patch that you know isn't really that beneficial. Is there anything like that within HRT for women?

Yeah, that's a great question. I would say, you know, when, you know, a lot of the, you know, the OB-Gynees would tell you that it all needs to be FDA-approved. Problem is there's no FDA-approved testosterone. So they're prescribing, you know, because of compounded. testosterone as well, but the progesterone and the estrogen, and it's mostly patched patches that we're talking about when it comes to FDA approval. So when we get into the realm of compounded, you know, there's some compounded creams that are using not just estradiol, but estrone, E1. And, you know, there's the argument is that it's helpful in terms of mitigating inflammation, but it doesn't really, you know, it's a very low dose of E2, which is esteridial, and that's what we need.

We need the estradiol. And so when we start messing with the formulations a little bit, you know, if we're not getting enough of what we need, then that can mess with us. But I would say, you know, if you're working, especially most of us are not working, like most doctors for sure, not working with sketchy, compounded, you know, places. But yeah, I would be on the lookout for that. You know, I find like progesterone creams tend to not protect the uterus or protect the brain that we want.

The progesterone molecule is just a little too big to go. through. A little bit can maybe help manage a little bit of mood during the day. But like if you want that brain protection, sleep, and you want uterine protection and all the real big benefits of progesterone, it's going to need to be oral. And so when it's just cream based, some of these may not be high enough dosage to maybe move the needle. So just make sure that you're working with someone who really knows what they're doing. What did you notice? What did you notice change, you know, when you got on these different hormones in terms of like your workouts and stuff like that? Did you notice a huge boost or was it just bringing you back to like baseline?

I would say bringing you back to baseline. I want to tell you that HRT has been like the game changer, light bulb moment. And for some women, it really is. But for me, it's been an optimizer. That's kind of how I thought about HRT. I will say with that, with the oral micronized progesterone, it has really helped to calm down that late, that second half of the cycle. You started like lifting and being pretty way into exercise when you were

very young, right? Yeah, 16 years old. So to me, I don't know, I love lifting weights. I love being in the gym. So I haven't really needed a lot of motivation in that department. I did not love when I was having a harder time recovering. I think anytime as we're getting older and you're just like, damn, like this hurts. Like I'm not, I'm not recovering the way that I used to. Testosterone for me was the big game changer in terms of recovery and really feeling like I was moving the needle in terms of building muscle a little bit. Yeah. What are some things people can expect from your book? And like what inspired you to write it? Yeah, I, well, I'm going through it, you know, and it's been, I think it's one thing to take care of patients for 17 years and to watch them go through it. It's a whole other thing when you go through it. And I was like, damn. Like, I was not ready. I had literally, I literally, I thought all these women were exaggerating this whole time.

I definitely did not, but I thought, I thought because I had been doing so many of the right things for so long that it wasn't going to hit me. like it hit me and again maybe it was because i was you know postpartum into 43 years old like that could have been the thing i maybe my body was like we're not recovering okay we're not getting over postpartum we're heading this next this next transition um so number one again most of the time doctors are not educated there's a knowledge gap in perimenopause this is the window of chaos and the window of opportunity and so number one it's going to tell you are you in perimenopause i'm going to get that question answered for you out the gate i'm also going to to point out what's going on with your symptoms and how hormones are impacting those symptoms

and how those symptoms are connected to your future health outcomes. I think so often women are told that we can just ignore a lot of what's going on in our bodies. And I just want to highlight that these are signals. This is your body and your brain telling you, hey, we need to pay attention to this. We need a new level of care. I go into the metabolic aspect of things, the silence shifts, the blood pressure, the blood sugar, all of those types of things that are driving heart disease, cancer, dementia, I want us to stay on top of that because this is the window to do so. And then I have a five-week program that lays it all out. But the most important thing is that I want women to know that number one, it's consistency. Number two, it's about deciding.

We get to decide how we want to live the second half of our lives. We get to decide who we want to become. We get to decide how we want our bodies to feel. 30 days, 90 days, a year. out. That is on us. I don't want women to blame themselves, but I want them to take ownership. And that is what this book lays out. My mother decided that she was going to train different, that she was going to work out different, that she was going to have a body that thrived. And my God, it is paid off. That woman is an inspiration. That's super cool. That's amazing. Yeah. I was going to ask you, like, what is your nutrition like? Because you did mention you did keto for a while.

Yeah. And, yeah, what's, What's the diet that works well for you? Yeah, I would say what it looks like from the get-go. I'm a big fan of a metabolically morning boosting, metabolically boosting morning routine. Sorry about that. And what it looks like is I try to do, I try to get 40 grams of protein out the gate. So I like to try to set myself up to win. I wake up early.

So sometimes it's some protein coffee just to get me in the gym. I find that I don't do well with fasted workouts. Starbucks, by the way, has added protein to their coffee recently. Really? I didn't know that. Yeah, I just saw it on the news the other day. I was like, oh, look at that. I make it, so I'm a big fan of setting your future self up for success. So I make it in the, in the night before. I have it in the fridge. It's like an ice protein coffee. And I have my clothes laid out. I got the keys at the door. I got the shoes at the door. Like I want to be, I love efficiency. Like I want to be from wake up to out the door. You're set up for the next day in the evening. Yeah. I have my emotional support water ready to go. So I'm a big fan of electrolytes in your water.

getting to be really hydrated, cinnamon in your coffee. Ideally, let's not get you on that blood sugar roller coaster out the gate. So watch out for those sugar creamers and all those things. It just adds up. And here's the thing, if you're breaking your fast with a sugar creamer or a vanilla latte out the gate, you are going to spike your blood sugar. That's just what's going to happen. And what people don't realize is that it could take up the 36 to 40 hours to recover

from that blood sugar spike. Even if you are eating clean and eating just protein and vegetables, and fiber all day long, like the second you get on that roller coaster, it is hard for the body to adapt, especially as we get older. So I make sure that my coffee, it's usually cinnamon, usually cinnamon, maybe some unsweetened almond milk. And then it's usually, it's an egg omelet with obviously an egg omelet with chicken and veggies. It's a protein smoothie with like frozen cauliflower, flaxseed, avocado. So I just try to meet the combination between 40 grams of protein in the morning, about 10 grams of fiber, a little bit of healthy fats,

and that's going to keep me going until lunch. I don't eat between meals. I don't snack. You know, I'm curious about this. I've heard you mention, I've heard you talk about sauna and the cold plunge, and you've mentioned that the cold plunge is a little bit too stressful for you. And I'm actually, I'm really curious, is this something, has that always been that way,

or has that changed as you've gotten older? Or is it just always been a stress? Yeah. And I'm mainly to ask this because we've had so many people that have come on the show. They love the cold plunge for its dopamine benefits, et cetera. But it's interesting to have somebody where it's just like, nah. Nah. I have complex PTSD.

I was abused as a child. I have a very hypervigilant system. My default mode is to go into the stress response system. That's how my brain works. And so anything that's going to ramp up that sympathetic nervous system is going to, is going to burn me out. And so cold plunging tends to do that to me. It just, it's like tips the scale in terms of my stress response system.

And so I think you just have to know where your level of stress is. Like, I'm using my stress reserves on working out. Like, what are the hormetic stressors that I can get away with? Movement, training. I can do sauna. Yeah. I can do sauna okay. And, and then.

Okay. It's like, does the heat or when it gets too hot, that doesn't, that doesn't stress you out since it's not like an immediate shock? Yeah, yeah. And I think it's a little bit of a. different stressor on, at least for me, a different stressor on the system. I'm not in a 150 degree sauna. Usually it's 120. All right, Mark, you're getting leaner and leaner, but you always enjoy the food you're eating. So how are you doing it? I got a secret, man. It's called good life protein. Okay. Tell me about that. I've been doing some good life protein. You know, we've been talking

on the show for a really long time of certified Piedmontese beef. And you can get that under the umbrella of good life proteins, which also has chicken breast, chicken thighs, sausage. shrimp, scallops, all kinds of different fish, salmon, tilapia. The website has nearly any kind of meat that you can think of lamb. There's another one that comes in mind. And so I've been utilizing and kind of using some different strategy, kind of depending on the way that I'm eating. So if I'm doing a keto diet, I'll eat more fat and that's where I might get the sausage

and I might get their 80-20, grass-fed, grass-finish, ground beef. I might get bacon. And there's other days where I kind of do a little bit more bodybuilder stuff. where the fat is, you know, might be like 40 grams or something like that. And then I'll have some of the leaner cuts of the certified Piedmontese beef. This is one of the reasons why, like, neither of us find it hard to stay in shape because we're always enjoying the food we're eating. And protein, you talk about protein leverage it all the time.

It's satiating and helps you feel full. I look forward to every meal. And I can surf and turf, you know? I could cook up some, you know, chicken thighs or something like that and have some shrimp with it. Or I could have some steak. I would say, you know, the steak, it keeps going back and forth for me on my favorite. So it's hard for me to lock one down. But I really love the bovette steaks.

Yeah. And then I also love the ribbyes as well. You can't go wrong with the ribbyes. So, guys, if you guys want to get your hands on some really good meat, pause, you can have to Good Life Proteins.com and use code power for 20% off any purchases made on the website. Or you can use code Power Project to get an extra 5% off if you subscribe and save to any meats that are a recurring purchase. This is the best meat in the world.

Okay. You know, so like I'm not, and I usually like to get in like when it's around 95. I like to warm up to it a little bit. And I'm usually in there for 20 to 30 minutes, but like my migraine days, it's a no-go. Yeah. And so, and I have migraines two to three times a week.

So it's always kind of like a, so I just, I'm really mindful. I build a lot of practices in to send safety signals to my brain. One of my favorite mantras is nothing is wrong. nothing is wrong because I'm constantly looking for the things that are wrong. I'm constantly running the list. And so I think if you're finding yourself feeling like overstressed, you're not recovering from those cold plunges,

like even hit workouts. Like, you know, when I was doing consistent amount of hit workouts, I was burning out on the other side. Like I had nothing in the tank left. So I can get away with one or two hit training sessions a week and that's about where I'm maxed. Yeah. I think that's really important, by the way,

just because when you're really fitness, minded a lot of times people try to bulldoze through things. More is more. And even if, yeah, even if they're getting the signals that this might not be for you, they just, they hear people like us say that we love cold plunging and they don't stop cold plunging, you know? Yeah, even when their body's telling them, right? Yeah, I, you know, I've overtrained so many times.

I bet you guys have been there too. I don't know. Yeah. And I have, you know, when I talked about those breaks I've had to take, it's when I've overtrained myself, I've overtrained, you know, to the point where I was putting on weight, to the point where cortisol was out of control. and I have no desire to go back there. I want to be able, I want, I'm in, I'm in the long haul.

It's about sustainability at this point for me. Also, it's about showing up for the people that matter most to me. So I have a lot of checks and balances in place to make sure that I'm the kind of mom I want to be, that I'm the kind of practitioner I want to be, that I'm showing up with the energy that I want. And I, I've burned out so many times on so many things that I just kind of know my guardrails. So let's say you're at the grocery store and someone behind you says, hey, you look great. I want to be jacked like you. Like, what do I got to do?

What do you just hit him with this book now? Yeah, I hit him with the book. I have got it. I'm glad you wrote a book about it because it's sometimes when someone asks you a question, it's like, man, it's such a long story. You know, if they actually ask you something very specific, then it's a lot easier to answer, right? But if they're like, man, how do I get in shape or what's the best? and then you kind of recognize that different people are at different stages in their life and some people have net they just have never even really looked at a food label before no some

people don't know that like milk has sugar in it like they're just they're just never they've never no gone down that path before then they weren't educated on it yeah i was we were just at the grocery store i did a little video on this a couple days ago we ran out of water we were we were out going to a pumpkin patch and you know i'm not going to lie no emotional support water? I mean, we had, I, my son, man, that child drinks water like gets his job. And he loves his, you know, we had him at a farm camp earlier this summer and they were refilling his water with some like tap water and he came home and he was like, mom, I don't know what they're put in my water, but it's nasty. You know, and I was like, okay, good to know. We've got to send you

with a second water bottle to school. And so you should see the amount of water I pack for family trips and we were running out so I run into this grocery store again we're not in a food desert that this is a nice nice town that we're in I'm not going to call the town or any of that or the store and I'm looking for water you've ever been in a grocery store and you're just like I don't even know where any of this is and I'm going down aisle after aisle after aisle and I'm looking down in every aisle it's hundreds of ultra processed foods I mean by the eighth aisle I haven't found the water yet and I'm just feeling overwhelmed and I'm thinking how do we navigate this There's families and moms in this store right now who are just trying to feed their kids.

They're trying to feed their families. And I'm like, it feels like a lost battle trying to navigate this situation. But mind you, I found the water aisle. It's past the power aides. It's past the blue and red and water, you know, like subs. I don't even know what that stuff is before I even get to the water. And I thought, man, like this makes it so hard. The marketing, the addictiveness of so many of these.

of these things. And what has been the through line of every book I've ever written, it's really like, it's got to be whole food. It's got to be single ingredient foods as much as possible. You know, even in the perimeter of this store, I was concerned because I always say shopped the perimeter. Yeah, they've destroyed that. They put a bunch of junk out there too. So it's not the same. And so in the book, I give you over 75 recipes to make it easy so that You are not only hitting your macros in a meaningful way, but also the micronutrients. You're feeding your gut microbiome. You're supporting that cellular information.

I always think of food as being molecular information. But also the question I always ask, and I always tell people, ask yourself, is this what I want to fuel my future brain with? This is what I want my future brain to be filled with. And that's how I make decisions for myself and my family. And the recipes are there. The meal plan is there. exercise snacks and I'm not talking real snacks I'm talking about bursts of hit training three to five

minutes you're not allowed any snacks no snacks um so yeah so that you're built you're building a movement I think if there's one thing I want to leave everybody with and I think your audience is already doing this but it's you need to build your life around movement not build movement around your life strength is never weakness weakness week this never strength catch you guys later bye