The Liz Moody Podcast - How Women Should ACTUALLY Eat, Train & Sleep (You've Been Following Research Done On Men...)

Episode Date: May 20, 2026

 Women were left out of medical, nutrition, and exercise research for 16 years. They studied men, and then they told women we would get the same results by following the general health guidelines. In this episode, you're going to learn what the research actually says when women are the subjects. You're going to learn an easy shift to work with your hormones to get the sleep that you need, how to help your body effortlessly lose weight, what actually makes you happier and calmer, and what will help you live longer.  I’m joined by Dr. Stacy Sims who has her PhD in exercise physiology with a focus on nutrition and sex differences. She spent years in her postdoc at Stanford studying how different interventions impact men and women differently. She has devoted her life to figuring out the real science of women's health, and today she is sharing her exact playbook with you. 🎧 What you’ll learn: • Why intermittent fasting backfires for women • The workout class you may have been sweating through unnecessarily • Why your wearable could be gaslighting you • The male-data fitness myth costing women results • The truth about lifting heavy • Why calorie deficits often make women hold onto fat • Cold plunge vs. sauna: what the research says for women • The supplement that outperforms SSRIs in early research • What the birth control pill may have changed in your brain • Why you can't have it all at once in your workout  Check out our NEW YouTube Channel with tons of YouTube exclusive Shorts, exclusive podcast content, and full video episodes: ⁠https://www.youtube.com/@LizMoodyTV⁠  For more from Dr. Stacy Sims: • Newsletter: https://www.drstacysims.com/newsletters/articles • Website: https://www.drstacysims.com/  • Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drstacysims/?hl=en  Ready to uplevel every part of your life? Order Liz’s book 100 Ways to Change Your Life: The Science of Leveling Up Health, Happiness, Relationships & Success now!  Connect with Liz on Instagram @lizmoody or online at www.lizmoody.com. Subscribe to the substack by visiting https://lizmoody.substack.com/welcome.Buy our cute sweatshirts, conversation cards, and more at https://shop.lizmoody.com/. Use our discount codes from our  highly vetted and tested brand partners by visiting https://www.lizmoody.com/codes.  To join The Liz Moody Podcast Club Facebook group, go to www.facebook.com/groups/thelizmoodypodcast. This episode is brought to you completely free thanks to the following podcast sponsors: • Evlo: go to EvloFitness.com and use code LIZ to get 6 weeks free today. • LMNT: head to https://DrinkLMNT.com/Liz to get a FREE 8-count sample pack with any order. • Pique: head to PiqueLife.com/LizMoody for 20% off + a FREE Starter Kit on $100+ of subscriptions.  • NOCD: to learn more about OCD therapy with NOCD, go to NOCD.com and book a free call. The Liz Moody Podcast cover art by Zack. The Liz Moody Podcast music by Alex Ruimy. Formerly the Healthier Together Podcast.  This podcast and website represents the opinions of Liz Moody and her guests to the show. The content here should not be taken as medical advice. The content here is for information purposes only, and because each person is so unique, please consult your healthcare professional for any medical questions. The Liz Moody Podcast Episode 432. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Hi, friends. I just wanted to quickly pop in and let you know that I have launched a brand new YouTube channel and I would love your help and support with it. I started a YouTube channel over a year and a half ago without knowing anything about YouTube and it just did not grow like I had dreamed it would if I'm being very honest. But since then, I have learned so much about the YouTube world and I am now so excited to launch the brand new The Liz Moody Podcast channel. I'm sharing lots of YouTube shorts. I'm going ham over there. I'm sharing completely new content only. found on YouTube. And I'll be releasing some YouTube exclusive podcast content, as well as the full video podcast episodes that you all love. You can search Liz Moody TV on YouTube to find or

subscribe to my new channel. That is Liz Moody T, like the letter T and then the letter V. Thank you so much in advance for checking it out and for subscribing. My goal, I'm just going to put it out there and be honest with you guys. My goal is to get to 100,000 subscribers by the summer and have a real presence over there like the male podcasters all do, and your help is so, so appreciated. All right, now let's get into today's episode. The research is not wrong. They just didn't do it on women. In 1977, after a prescription drug given to pregnant women caused widespread birth defects, the FDA issued a guideline that excluded women of childbearing potential from early phase drug trials. And researchers interpreted it so broadly that women were

were left out of medical, nutrition, and exercise research for the next 16 years. So they studied men, and then they told women that we would get the same results. Today, you're going to learn what the research actually says when women are the subjects. You're going to learn an easy shift to work with your hormones to get the sleep that you need and to help your body effortlessly lose weight. You're going to find out what actually makes you happier, what makes you calmer, and what will help you live longer. I am so excited to welcome Dr. Stacey Sims to the podcast. She has her PhD in exercise physiology

with a focus on nutrition and sex differences, and she spent years in her postdoc at Stanford studying how different interventions impact men and women differently. She's the author of a number of best-selling book. She has devoted her life to figuring out the real science of women's health, and today she is sharing her exact playbook with you. Welcome to the Liz Moody podcast, where we're not going to add a million things to your life in the name of biohacking or being healthy. No, we're going to help you figure out the exact levers to pull that will make you feel how you want to feel that are going to get you the results that you want. And no matter what you're going through, no matter what you're dealing with,

we always, always believe that there's a lever. All right. Dr. Sacy Sims, welcome to the podcast. Thanks for having me. So I just want to kick it off with if a woman listening right now only changed three things about her workouts based on new research, based on actually studying women, what would you want her to do and what changes would she see? Well, it depends on how old she is. Okay.

And I say that because when we're looking at the male data, it's coming from that linear aging process. Yeah, men will have some bumps up and down with their testosterone. We start to see a decrease when they're in their 50s, 60s. But for women, we think about all the touch points in our lives. We have massive change at puberty. Then we have a reproductive years. And in the reproductive years, are you on a hormonal contraception or not? do you have PCOS, endometriosis, are you naturally cycling? Are you pregnant? Are you not pregnant?

You're trying to get pregnant? Get through all that. Then you have perimenopause. Then you have postmenopause. And aging teases into the pari and postmenopause set, but it's not just aging. So if we're talking about how do we train as women, we have to really look about where we are in our lifespan and what our hormone profile is doing. Well, and this is a lot of the excuses that they gave for not studying women for so long, right? They're like the hormones change all the time. Like we don't know what we can do here. Have we solved that problem in a way where we are able to actually study women and get these answers?

Sort of. Okay. There are still new method papers talking about what's the gold standard and how do we rate research. And I think part of it's missing the mark because it's just focusing on hormones, but there's also sex differences. Like what? As you're getting into purity. When we're looking at XX versus X, Y, we know inherently that XX has a smaller heart. smaller lungs, has less capacity for carrying red cells, lower hemoglobin. We also see that the growth

factors are different. Cognitive development is different as compared to an XY or a boy. Then we hit puberty, and this is where we have the epigenetic exposure of hormones. So not only do we have those undercurrent of those sex differences that I just explained. Then we have testosterone that comes in for the boy and they get leaner and stronger and more aggressive, stronger bones, denser muscle, more fast twitch. But for girls, we have a complete biomechanical change where our hips widen, our shoulder girdle widens, our center gravity changes. We put on body fat. We have cognitive changes where we become very aware of what other people are thinking. And we see this in our teenage girls, right? And that is the exposure of estrogen. So we have sex differences, and then we have that layer

of sex hormones over it. So when you say to the public, look, this is what we've told men to do for years, And now we have updated research and here's what women should do and here's what women at this age should do. Are we able to study that in an effective way at this point? Yeah. So we know in the earlier years because of the exposure of estrogen progesterone, we can control for menstrual cycle. We can control for hormonal contraception. And we can look specifically at women who are similarly trained. They come from a similar background.

And we know that they are in their follicular phase. Let's look and see what's happening. Then we have ways of testing for ovulation to make sure it's a little bit intensive because you have to do blood test and then everyone's hormones kind of pulse a bit. So it becomes more complex. It's not complicated. It's just more complex. That's interesting. Is that something AI is going to help a lot with? No. Part of the problem with AI right now is it's an echo chamber of existing data and it ignores all the nuances and what are the nuances in the data is women. because you look at the publications and how many publications are done on women, it's a very, very small amount. And of the global funding in health care, only 11% is for women's health.

So you're thinking about all the parameters that are being marked in AI algorithms. And then the human touch is a male data scientist who isn't really looking through a female lens. So the example that we like to use is with open evidence. And that's your point of care for physicians. and it told all the physicians who are talking about menopause hormone therapy that no one should go on it because it causes breast cancer. And we know from new research that that's not true. So they're getting this and they don't have a way to vet it. But it's just this echo chamber of the bell curve. So AI is compounding the gender data gap and having worse outcomes for women.

That's so interesting because of its ability to parse through data, like large, large data. I've heard from many health experts. So that's going to be immensely helpful for breakthrough research. But I had not thought about that gender bias being made even stronger. It is. Yeah. That's so interesting. Okay, so going back to my original question, this can be at any age, any point of the menstrual cycle. What are three things that we have told women that they should be doing the same as men? And now we know they should not be.

Fasted training if you're exercising. So we have fasted training is one. We look at recovery metrics. So we're looking at heart rate variability. sleep metrics and those things that people pin their training stress on and how that's different between women and men. And then another one is probably intensity training and what women should do to optimize for later years rather than what they're doing right now. All right, let's dive into each of those. And we're going to get into a lot of different stuff in this episode, but fasted training.

Interminton fasting has been all over the internet for years and years and years. And you say that it works very different in a female body versus a male body. Can you tell us why? We know that a woman's circadian rhythm is slightly shorter than a man's circadian rhythm. And what's so tightly tied to circadian rhythm is our hormone pulses, and part of that is also our appetite hormones. So if we look at how a woman wakes up without an alarm, we have a cortisol awakening response, which means cortisol starts to come up. A woman's cortisol peak is higher than a man's. And with it is tied our appetite hormones, we have oscillated garrulin, which is active form of our hunger hormone, and peptid y-y-y, which is a satiation hormone.

If we have cortisol and acolyta gyrin elevated at the same time, then it's signaling the body that, yes, we need some food. And if we don't get food, then it starts to wonder what's going on. So if we wake up and we hold a fast and we aren't eating until like 11 or 12 and we're exercising in the midst of that, then we are actually compromising our body's ability to get that exercise stress, learn what that stress is and overcome it. Because you need fuel to hit intensities, you need fuel on board for the hypothalamus to understand that this is a stress that we can overcome. But for men, from a biological standpoint, it doesn't happen that way because in historical and biological times, in times of low food, men would lean up and get fitter and faster in times of low calories because their appetite hormone and their set point for nutrition density is much lower than women's. When we are looking at the absolute baseline need of calories for women versus men, and I don't really like to talk about calories, but before we start to have dysfunction,

we see that men sit around 15 calories per kilogram of body weight. For women, it's 35 to 40. And we start to see dysfunction below 35 for women and below 15 for men. And all of that starts at the beginning of the day. So if we have this elevation of cortisol peak, and we're not taking care of that cortisol peak in acylated garrulin, then we have dysfunctioner appetite hormones all day. And most of the time what ends up happening is women will hold a fast because they don't feel hungry.

Then they'll eat. And then they're like, I'm really hungry. And then it's like trying to catch up with some of the fueling things that they've already missed out on. So if they have this fueling window from noon to six or seven, their body's like what's going on. Like, this isn't when I need the food, I need it earlier. And then it phase shifts. So we see that a lot of women who are holding a fast and exercising or not, exercising

compounds it so that when they are trying to get to sleep, they've missed the melatonin peak that usually happens at nine. So they aren't getting the signal to get into good sleep. And so they're like, oh, I can't sleep. And it's because they have dysregulated their sleep patterns as well. Without adequate sleep, you can't. get any kind of metabolic or body composition change. Well, and you feel like a shell of a person.

Exactly. That is crazy. So you're saying by skipping or delaying our breakfast in the morning, we are impacting our ability to get quality sleep at night? 100%. And that's not true for men. That is only true for women. Correct.

Wow. Okay. Let's untangle that a little bit. What would you say to the woman who says, I'm not hungry when I wake up and I really want to listen to my body. I want to listen to when I feel my hunger cues and honor those? Right. you've dysregulated your appetite hormones, so you don't feel hungry. So I retrain women. I want you to do your normal thing, and I want you to write down your energy levels throughout the day. And we'll start to see they eat and then they have energy, so they get stuff done for a few hours and then they have a lull. I just feel really awful about two o'clock, three o'clock. And you start to have like the wall lean and you're not moving as much. And you're craving simple carbohydrates. You're like, oh, I really don't want that cookie, but I kind of want it because that's all I really crave. I don't want any real food.

So you have this caffeine or a simple carb crash because you want that. And then dinner comes and you're ravenous. So you're snacking before dinner and then you're eating dinner. And then after dinner, you're like, oh, I just feel awful. But I feel like I need something else. And then it interferes with sleep. I love how in detail you just described so many people's exact experience. So what should they do instead?

Just have something very small within a half an hour they get up. We can look at protein coffee, which made the rounds on the internet. It could be half a banana. It could be a piece of toast, a few bites of yogurt, just enough to bring blood sugar up and drop cortisol. And then that sets your body up. It's like, okay, now I know there's some nutrition coming in. I can start to get on my day. And then you have your real breakfast, like an hour later.

And if you're going to do some training, well, you have that little bit of food, and then you do your training, and then you have your real breakfast. And I try to get people to really understand that every meal opportunity and every eating opportunity is protein and fiber. I don't like macros, I don't like counting calories. It comes too complicated. We want some good fiber and we want some good protein. So what would that be for breakfast?

It could be overnight oats with chia seeds and some nut butter, maybe some yogurt on top. If that is not your jam, maybe you want scrambled eggs on toast. There's really good ways of getting protein and fiber at every eating opportunity. And if we do that, then we're starting to work with our circadian rhythm. We start to increase the diversity of our gut microbiome, which is really, really, really important for immunity, for brain health, for serotonin production, for melatonin production, and then you get into 9 o'clock, your melatonin starts to rise, you feel sleepy. You try to ride that wave. If you miss it, the next one's at 11. Try to get to bed before 11, so then you can get

into deep reparative sleep. Wait, talk to me about that. The first wave is at 9 o'clock and the second wave is at 11. What happens if you go to sleep at midnight? You've missed the actual influence of melatonin. When people wake up at like 3 or 4, like, whoa, what's going on. Why am I awake? And I can't get back to sleep. This is when melatonin's dropping and bottoming out. And then cortisol starts to come into play to wake you up. So if you miss those first two peaks, you're going to have very disjointed sleep and have a lot of awakenings. So let's really try to hit that first nine o'clock, wind down with that nine o'clock. So you're not sitting on the couch with your partner watching Netflix. You're like, okay, I need to wind down, which is really hard

because it's early. It is early. Yeah. I hang out with my husband. My daughter goes to sleep at 9.30 or 10. And I was like, well, I want time with my husband, but I'm really tired. So when do you go to sleep? I tried to get it in bed by 10.

Okay. So you're really aiming for that second peak. Yeah. Does it matter which one we get? Like, is the 9 o'clock one better? Yeah. Okay. But we're like trying to do the best we can with the real lives that we have.

Exactly. Okay. Exactly. But for men, it's later. Their peaks are later. So we see like men, they don't get bothered by nine a They're like, yeah, whatever. And then 10 o'clock comes and they start to get sleepy because they're riding their way from 10 and 1.

So our alignment is different. Wow. That is so interesting. So that's why at 9 o'clock I might feel really sleepy and be falling asleep on the couch, but then I'll get up and like do my nighttime stuff and then I'll be like awake again. Yep. Wow. I hate that.

I know. Me too. So when we talk about circadian rhythms, like I've always self-identified as a night owl. Is there any truth to that? Is that research done on women and men? Yes. there is definitely variations within the bell curve of a circadian rhythm. So there are women who are night owls and there are some women who are early larks.

The general, I guess, bell curve area for women is most women are larks. They wake up early. So it sounds like two things that we can do if we're having these middle of the night wake-ups is, one, eat breakfast in the morning when we wake up and two try to catch one of our two sleep windows. So 9 p.m. or 11 p.m. Is there anything else that we can do for that 2 o'clock in the morning, 3 o'clock in the morning, like I'm tired but wired feeling? This is where you can start to look at what sleep hygiene and maybe what kind of supplements you might take.

So we know that apigenin and altheonine are really powerful for getting rid of that middle of the night awakening because it works to increase the parasympathetic activity of the brain. The other thing that we find with women who don't eat enough, they think they're eating enough, but they're not, is they have lots of these micro-awakening is from hypoglycemia. So women who are fasting and they hold their fast, and they might not get enough calories and nutrients that they need, then their body gets hypoglycemic at night. So this is why we look at how are we feeling through the day.

Are you in a low-energy state? If you're in a low-energy state, you're going to feel tired but wired, fatigued, you're not going to recover well. You'll get more soft tissue injuries. You might have some endocrine dysfunction. You might get some blood work back, and you're in your 30s,

and your doctor's like, hey, you have high LDL what's going on, which is a disruption in your lipids. And it comes to not eating enough and your body's trying to conserve. So we see that when women start eating a little bit more, those awakenings at night dissipate. I know that he's a rather controversial figure, but Brian Johnson, who loves to end of one his own body, has said that the single thing that makes the biggest difference in his sleep is lowering his resting heart rate as much as possible before bed. And he does that by not eating for a number of hours before bed. he does meditative activities. How big of a lever do you think lowering your resting heart rate is for good sleep?

I don't think the measure of a resting heart rate is for everyone. And we know that women's resting heart rates are higher than men's too. There are so many different factors that affect heart rate. What he's talking about with withholding food three-ish hours before bed and meditating is increasing parismpathetic activity. And that's what you want to do. It's part of the wind-down process. If you're not going to get that 9 o'clock, let's try to get ready for bed so that when you're

on the couch and you're getting really sleepy and you're like, I'm going to fall asleep on the couch. Then when everyone gets up to go to bed, you don't have to wake yourself up because you're already in that parasympathetic wind down mode. Yeah, I've started this recently where after I eat dinner, I floss and I brush my teeth and I wash my face. So if I floss, brush my teeth and wash my face, I'm so much more likely to go to bed because for me, that is such a mountain to climb that if I'm on the couch and I know I have to do those three things, I like won't go to bed. Me too. I do the same thing. It's so helpful. And it stops late night snacking. It does because you you've already brushed your teeth. Yeah, it's really great. Is there anything else that we get wrong

about sleep because we're relying on this research that's been done on men? The other faulty thing that people do is rely on their wearables too much. And we know that the wearables are not accurate enough for sleep phases. Are those mostly tested on men? Yeah. What's my aura always saying? Like you're in crisis mode or something. I don't know. It like turns red like a volcano and it's like, you're going to die, but we don't know why. It's a mystery. Actually, you know what? I have noticed this. Because it does it when I ovulate. Yeah. It does it when I ovulate.

And it's like your temperatures spiking, like you have major signs, go to the hospital. And it's because I'm ovulating. Exactly. So I'm laughing because I was trying to explain like some of the side projects I'm doing, but trying to correct this. And one of them is about wearables. And I was like, so the example is a woman who's looking at heart rate variability as a sign for resilience. The algorithms and the parameters and the human touch points are all for male and male data. So men's heart rate variability, yes, it will.

increased as they get fitter and more stress resilient, but across the menstrual cycle, women's heart rate variability varies. So we know that it's higher in the follicular phase. Ovulation makes our wearables go whack ado because it's like, what's going on? People lean into these wearables because they have research behind it,

but there's still all the algorithms and parameters and touch points are based on male data, even with sleep and sleep metrics. We know that there's a variation in sleep architecture across menstrual cycle, perimenopause, postmenopause. And we see that women with PPMD have a different shift in their sleep architecture the few days before their period starts from having the worst symptoms. And all of that is not picked up as what's happening to their body, but as, oh my gosh, what's going on? You're in the red.

You're not recovered. And it compounds the stress that people have about sleep. So at this present moment, should women forego wearable? Should we engage with them differently? What's your advice? I tell women that they're useful because it does give us data over time, but use it as trend over time. Don't look at what the recovery score says in the morning. Don't try to close the Apple loop when you're walking because I've had people say,

oh, I've been on my feet all day, but haven't closed a loop. Does that mean I need to go for another 5,000 steps? I'm like, no, it doesn't. It's not going to kill you if you, yeah. It's because all of the 10,000 steps and stuff is based on marketing. So when people get into the wearables and really get into the data and plan their day, are really affected by it, I try to get them to remove it. If you can be very conscious and listen intuitively to how you feel and use it as trends over time,

then you'll start to see trends across your menstrual cycle. Well, and trends over time, so many people I know get a wearable and then they stop drinking because they're able to see the impact of drinking on their sleep. See, that's good. That's really good. How does alcohol impact women differently than men? We have to look at their ability to metabolize it. men can't metabolize alcohol as fast as men. So we know it stays in the system longer. We know that

it because it stays in the system longer than the residual effects of alcohol on the brain as a depressant is much longer as well. So that's, you know, when we're thinking about having a glass or two of wine with dinner and then trying to get to sleep, your brain is depressed, but it's not depressed in a way that it makes you sleepy to get good quality sleep. It's just kind of flat. where it's not metabolizing well because you have more alcohol circulating, and it's kind of disjointed where it's like, I'm not quite sure. And so you wake up and you feel hungover even though you might not have had that much because of the impact it has on the brain, how much longer alcohol stays in the system.

I mean, I stopped drinking alcohol largely because of the cancer risks, which from that JAMA study, but I do think that it's really interesting. Okay, so you said that intermittent fasting is different for women. You said sleep is different for women. And then the last thing you said was hit and intensity training is different for women. What did you mean by that? So we have to look at our muscle fiber differences. So women are born with less of our fast twitch fibers, our power-based fibers than men.

So we have more of the aerobic type endurance fibers. And this is one of the sex differences. It's not a sex hormone thing. This is actual sex difference. So if we're looking at intensity training, power-based training, and it's all in the eye of preserving and enhancing our glycolytic fibers, because as we age, we lose them and we lose them rapidly. So if we're looking at the, how we are training now to be able to preserve function and mobility and be able to live a really long, happy life, then you want to pepper in good

intensity work, so both in resistance training and cardiovascular. The other reason for really influencing women to try to do more high-intensity work is to produce lactate, because lactate is preferred fuel for the brain. So the heart and the brain both use lactate. And if we are exposing our body to more lactate, then the brain starts to use that more. So when we start having changes in brain metabolism with perimenopause, we have a reduced risk of developing our amyloid and tauplax. Is there a way that we can know if we're releasing that lactate? From a physiological standpoint, people are like, oh, it burns, it burns, it's high, you know, my heart rate, and I can't hold the interval for that long, then you know that you are producing lactate.

In general, people aren't necessarily so intuitive to feeling that. So we look at what are some of the time windows. We know that the fueling mechanism in the body is going to produce lactate. So we see from one to four minutes at a relatively hard pace, so you're about 80% or an eight on a scale of one to 10, you're going to be producing lactate. That's why we see things like the four by four minutes on, four minutes off, so effective for body comp, but also for overall health. And it doesn't mean you have to do all four by four. You can start wherever just to get used to what's going on.

Maybe you shorten your intervals to two minutes. So you are getting some of that lactate exposure. So just for people listening, the four by four is this Norwegian, I believe, protocol. And it's four minutes of recovery or like walking, four minutes of really high, like fast. as you can go and tend to the hardest you can go and then four minutes of recovery and you do that four times. It's not as hard as you can go. Okay. It's like I said, it's about 80%. 80%. If you're doing sprint interval training, then that is your 30 seconds as hard as possible. And then you have two to three minutes recovery in between. It's still very effective. And that's good for brain health. But when

you're younger, you don't necessarily have to worry about doing all the really high intensity sprint stuff. Focus more on that 80%. For is there a rough amount of minutes we should be aiming for every week? I try to get people to think about a high-intensity interval session twice a week, so it might be 20 to 22 minutes of actual work time. Okay. And it's not a lot. If you're thinking your whole session, you go in for a warm-up, you have a 20-minute work block. But the work block, you're not doing 20-minute straight. You're doing- No, it's intervals in the 20-minute. And do you prefer four minutes? You prefer one to two minutes. Based on what the research shows for women at present, what's the absolute best way to do this. It varies, depending on what the goal is. Like,

There's no real specificity. There's no, like, you have to do this. You have to do that. It's if you're training for life and health, sometimes you do four by four, maybe another time you do every minute on the minute. What does every minute on the minute means? So this means every minute with one minute rest. So it could be one minute you are doing 10 cows on the erg

and however extra time you have in that minute is rest. So maybe it takes you 40 seconds to do 10 cows on erg, then you have 20 seconds rest. then the next minute you're doing 12 burpees. And if you have a little bit of recovery, then that's your recovery. The next minute, you might be doing max farmers carry for that full minute. And then the last minute you're doing a set of lunges, and then you have a little bit of recovery, and then you have one full minute off.

So you have four active working minutes and then one full minute. With maybe a little bit of recovery if you get tired. If you get time. So it's trying to move really effectively through the prescription of what that one minute is. where you move to the next one minute. And then the next one minute says usually four with one minute recovery. And you do that a couple of times through. And you do that two times a week?

Yep. Okay. It's interesting because you said it depends on your goals. And there's so much confusion about working out online these days. And I think that's because people have different goals, but we're not overtly saying that. Like some people are trying to maximize longevity. Some people are trying to maximize body composition. And within even that category, that has wildly different goals.

I work out mostly for my mental health, and so I need to have something to do every single day, which we're going to get into the details of, to like burn off my energy in a way. So is it true that our workout should be really different based on these different goals? Like what's the overlap and what should we be changing? I really try to get people to understand the periodization model. So you have consistency. You're building, you're building, and then you delode, and then you have a little bit of a break, and then you build again.

For a periodized model over the year, you know there are times where you're super busy and maybe not so busy. So especially if you're a mom and you have school to navigate around, right? So I have a lot of moms. They're like, okay, during the school term, I have a little bit more time to work out and plan. But over the school holidays, I don't have any time. So we're like, okay, over the 12 week of your school term, we're going to have that as a building block. And what is our end goal?

Are we working on V-O-2? Are we working on improving your capacity? So that becomes a goal for that 12 weeks. So then we pepper in each week. We want to add a little bit more capacity work. So that could be two to three high intensity sessions. And then the others are strength to make sure people stay strong so they can hit the intensities. Those two weeks of school holidays, it's just about maintenance and doing what you can to maintain what you've done. So it's not any real massive structure every day, but it is moving every day. And then when school starts again, let's look, maybe we're doing a really huge strength and power block to build on your capacity. So then we're doing more plymetry. type work building on what you did. So when we talk about how should we scope it and what are the goals, we have to look at people's lives, where they are in the journey, and then for someone like you who wants to move every day, I always say I'm like a dog, I need to be outside moving every day for mental health, but I don't do the same thing every day. I do something, and one day it might

just be strength. Another day it might be hill walk, maybe another day it might be high intensity work or an adventure, but I plan what I'm doing so that it's not going to compound my mental angst of what am I doing today? Yeah. Would that building period though, that period where we're really working, would that change if our goal was like, I just want to live as long as possible, I want to do the bare minimum to live as long as possible versus I want to look lean and toned versus I want to diminish my anxiety and depression? Should the workouts that we're doing during that time differ based on that? I mean, if we're looking for longevity, what are the critical things for longevity, right? So we look at brain health and we look at cardiovascular bone lean mass. So we can

optimize those through strength training and intensity work. We know strength training, especially on the heavy end, because there was a really cool randomized control trial that came out looking at the power based end of the strength continuum affects prefrontal cortex. It increases the neuroconductivity of the prefrontal cortex. So it really does help with cognitive decline or preventing cognitive decline. And it also affects other areas in the brain in a positive manner with metabolism. Body weight and modern intensity doesn't affect prefrontal cortex. So if we're looking for someone who has dementia in their family history and looking an eye of what do I need to do to prevent that, we want them to err down here in this heavy lifting range. If you're not so

concerned about that, then you have the whole range to work through because you'll build strength and muscle through the whole range. But, if we are staying down on the power and the strength end, you're going to get strength, fast twitch, and connectivity. If you're someone who's looking for body comp and want to be aesthetic, you know, because summer's coming, right, then we want to have less of the power end. We want to do more muscle endurance work, which might be in the 8 to 10 rep range, and we want to pepper in some high intensity work because we know that high intensity is going to help

strip body fast. And what do you mean by that high intensity specifically? So we might end a strength training session with some sprints. Or we might actually set aside two full days of our training where we're just focusing on a high-intensity interval of session and mobility. If we're looking for someone who just needs to get out because they have anxiety or mental health issues or maybe they have ADHD and they just need to be out doing something, then we want to make sure that we're not tipping people over. So we don't want them to go and just do high-intensity work because that increases cortisol. It disrupts our parasympathetic ability. It interferes with sleep.

So we have to say, okay, well, we're going to taper it. Where if we're going to do high intensity, we have to be very specific on what the interval is and what the recovery is. But for the most part, I find that a walk in nature is really good for mood. And then we work on strength without high intensity because that also helps with central nervous system. and improves confidence and clarity. So there are different things that we want to do depending on goals, but that depends on the actual session. Within that brain health category,

I thought when you said lift heavy, like it was that 8 to 10 rep range, it's not that. What gives us those actual brain health benefits? So we look at 80% of one rep max, and that tends to be in the 3 to 5 rep range, maybe six. So by the time you get to that sixth rep, you're failing. I want to prevent dementia as much as possible. How much of that do we need to incorporate to get those benefits in our weekly training regimen?

Three times a week. Have all of our muscles? If you're doing like three times a week, you can do like Monday is a squat focus, compound movement for squat and you're working the knee hinge and working that part of the lower body. Maybe Wednesday you're doing upper body push pull. And then Thursday or Friday you're doing posterior chain. So it's not the whole body all the time, but it is compound movements three times a week. But like would you only do those very high weight low reps? Because I'm feeling like I want to mix in, you know, the eight to ten reps so I can get the middle benefits.

Yeah. And I want to mix in the brain health benefit. So should I do like on Monday my heavy weights, low reps? And then on Wednesday my slightly less heavy but still heavy weights and like a little bit higher the eight to ten rep range? I try to get people to go, okay, let's focus on the compound movements in the heavy range. And then after we finish that, we can accessorize and really tax out the glutes with some 8 to 10 rep range. Okay. So you can put that higher rep on after the heavy load.

But if that's not your jam, because you're like, I'm just too tired now to do 8 to 10, then yes, you can go two times a week. I'm really focusing on total body compound movements. One time a week, I'm going to go for that 8 to 10 rep range. but ideally you're working with someone who's created a periodized program for you. So if you're looking at, okay, I want cognitive benefit and I want to lift heavy for six weeks. I'm going to work on heavy lifting. And I might throw in some contrast training with that. So that means that you're lifting heavy and putting some explosive movements right afterward.

I think my problem is that I want everything, like all the time. Like I want my body comp to be great. I'm on camera all day every day. I want all of the longevity brain health benefits and I really want the mental health benefits too. So if we want everything, what's the ideal sort of like day-to-day program for that? Or is that an option?

It's not an option? Wait, so I do think this is a lot of the confusion though. I think we spend a lot of time being like, what's the right way to do this? Like this is right, I got these benefits with this and it's because you can't actually get everything at one time. No, you can't. I feel like that's revelatory.

and way under-discussed. It is under-discust because the body's not an algorithm. We change every day. And this is why some people wake up feeling, yeah, let's go. I can do a hard session. And then they do a hard session. And the next day they don't feel great, but they don't feel really flat. And then the day after that, they're like, oh, my God.

It's because the body is like accumulating fatigue. So you can't do the same thing every day. And if you're looking at across the year, if you want to make improvements, then you can't do the same thing every week. the body likes lots of variation and change, but not too much where it can't actually recover and get that benefit. So that's why we like a periodized model

where you're like, okay, this block I'm working on this, the next block I'm working on this, that builds on what I just did. Okay, so like one block, we might literally be like, this is my brain health time of the year. And then the next block might be, this is my body comp time of the year.

But they don't have to be mutually exclusive. It's just what's your main focus. Okay. Because if you're doing brain health stuff, your body comp's going to benefit. But not in the exact same way. You're not going to be stripping down fat when you're building lots. Because in order to build, you have to eat. If you're looking at what am I doing to maximize everything, you just have to taper it a little bit.

Brain health, heavy lifting, a little bit of pliwork. Body comp, I'm going to add in some really high intensity work into maybe some higher rep range strength training. And then as we're getting into winter and fall and you're like, oh, okay, now what I do is getting dark, I don't feel that motivated. Then we're going to live it as a recovery. So what are we doing for recovery? Where am I the most fatigued? What do I have coming up?

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And this is why you talk about somatotypes. Some people are more muskly. Some people are skinnier. Some people have a really difficult time losing extra body fat because they're endomorphic. So you have that genetic code first. But you can definitely influence what your genetic code does with varying exercises and good nutrition. So that's what I always hear that bodies are made in the kitchen, not in the gym, but you're like these types of exercises are really good for fat loss, actually. So that feels different

than what I've heard. It's a little bit of a mind disconnect because we've been so conditioned to think what we do in the kitchen will influence what our body does. But there's so many people that are on the clean band wagon and looking after gut microbiome and all this kind of stuff, but at the neglect of lean mass and bone health. So you can eat is clean. It's clean. and as good as you want, but without any kind of stress to the skeletal system and muscle mass, you're not going to have any kind of change. And you're not going to necessarily invoke the same kind of brain health changes that you want if you're not stimulating the neuromuscular system. So when we're talking about the whole picture of things, it's not one or the other. They have to

work together. If we wanted to lose belly fat specifically, what would be your protocol for that? Well, you can't tell your body I want to lose fat here, I want to lose fat there. If you store belly fat there, then you can work on doing some more high-intensity work and increasing gut microbiome and doing some strength work so that you're becoming as strong and as lean as your body will let you. But that doesn't necessarily mean you're going to strip body fat off. We see some women who put more weight on in the hips and the thighs, and they can have a really ripped abs. And then you have other women who store more of their fat in their upper body.

And no matter what they do, they're not going to have ripped abs. Because it's just not genetically in their code to have really ripped abs because that's a protective spot where people are putting or their body is conserving fat. And I mean, you see lots of the images and all the magazines and stuff. And everyone tends to have a longer torso and they tend to have the ability to store fat in their hips and their thighs. And that tends to be the image that we all see, but not women, not all women are like that. It's easier for men to lose fat in that area? Absolutely. What's going on there?

There's a difference in our appetite hormones. We also see that there's that nutrition density issue where men could have a lower intake of calories and lose weight really quickly. Yeah. Right? For women, we can't because then we'll store fat. Like calorie deficit doesn't necessarily work that well for women. And then we're looking at testosterone as well. So testosterone does enhance muscle build and fat loss.

So we see that older men will have a more difficult time losing fat because their testosterone is dropping. And their lean mass is also dropping. So for older men who want to keep lean and get rid of the belly fat, then they do have to work in the gym to build lean mass and also get a boost of testosterone from building that lean mass. You just said the caloric deficit doesn't work for women. Not as much. I don't like counting calories and I don't like encouraging people to count calories. If you have a lot of weight to lose, and yes, calorie deficit is going to help. But for the general active woman who wants to lose the vanity 10 pounds or budge a little bit more off their belly, that calorie deficit is most likely going to put them too low in an energy availability standpoint. And what I mean by that is when we look at how much energy your body uses a day. We have our resting metabolic rate, our sleep metabolic rate. We have increased energy needs whenever we get up and move around. And for a general healthy woman who might have 25% body fat might be 5-5, her resting metabolic rate is around 12 to 1,500 calories. I have women who don't

even eat that much because they're afraid they're going to put fat on. And because they're not eating enough than their body's conserving. So they're in this chronic low energy state where they're not taking in enough to support all the natural functions. And then they're trying to train and they definitely are not taking in enough for all of the stress of daily activities and training. So if we have a woman who fits that profile, 25-ish percent body fat, 5-5, gets up, does some strength training, has a really busy life, and then comes home and still is stressed out. for immune system, for mental health, all that stuff, we're looking at least 22 to 2,500 calories. And most women who fit that profile are not eating that much.

So then when they're like, oh, I have some extra weight to lose, they cut calories. They're eating even further into their reserves and their body starts conserving more and more and more. So what would you have them do to lose weight instead? I would look at the timing of their food and I would front load their calories and work with their circadian rhythm. So they're getting more of their calories throughout the day. And then we start looking at protein fiber throughout the day, working with cortisol responses and appetite hormones, and then not eating after dinner. And this tends to really reset and allow the body go, okay, there's fuel for when I need it.

And I can do all my reparation and everything I need to do while I'm sleeping, which improves metabolic control. If you have better blood glucose control, metabolic control, then your body starts to lose that fat. So would you say that for women, cortisol is equally, if not more important for weight loss than calories? It's a bit more complex than that. Because when we're talking about cortisol, it is something that our body needs. It allows us to function and function properly. And if we talk about calories, 100 calories of protein is completely different than 100 calories of ultra-processed carbohydrate, and they impact the body differently. I'd rather have someone have 100 calories of protein because it's going to be more beneficial. And that is here and or there

with regards to cortisol. So if we're looking at what really holds body fat on women, it's at sympathetic drive. Is it cortisol? Not necessarily. It's at hype, like never letting our body kind of relax. And so we're always in on that, uh, mode. And then if we're not fueling for that, then we're never able to get into parasympathetic. If we can't get into parasympathetic, then we have disrupted sleep. And again, it comes back to sleep and sleep quality. If you have poor sleep quality, you cannot have any kind of body composition change. So if I'm taking one action step from this whole conversation so far, it's really like eat a big breakfast and eat it when you wake up.

Like move your food earlier in the day because that's going to have downstream impacts on your nervous system, on your sleep, on your metabolism, all these different things. Exactly. Yeah. That's so interesting. I've never heard that anywhere before. Okay, I want to dive into some of the other parts of working out. You've said a few times we want to do this like high intensity work. I think what you mean by high intensity work is different than what a lot of people listening might think of as high intensity work, like a hit workout. Can you explain how you're thinking of that? Yeah, so I'm coming from the exercise physiology, sport science way that we define high intensity versus more of the marketing thing where we have high intensity classes, right?

So if we're thinking about someone goes to Orange Theory or F-45 or spin class or some of these other high-intensity classes, it's that sweat session. They come out feeling exhausted. That's, I hate to tell people, modern intensity. because if you're doing true high intensity, you can't hold it for 45 to 60 minutes. What we mean from the sports science world of high intensity is very specific on getting to 80% or 90%

or 100% of our capacity for a certain interval recovering so that we can do that again. And for high intensity purposes, we also have that sprint interval, which is a subset, where you're doing 20 to 30 seconds, all out 110%. of your capacity and then fully recovering before you do it again. And you maybe do up to five of those max because your body really can't hit that intensity much more than that. If we're talking about a little bit

like our four by fours, which is a true high intensity session, then those four minutes is about 80% of your max. So you're pushing it. So you're really looking forward to those four minutes of super, super low. Okay, now I can chill. Are you laying on the floor? Are you like walking Walking slowly. You might like bend over in that recovery position for the first minute or so. And then your heart rate starts to settle and you're like, okay, though, I can do it again. But those four minutes of work are going very slowly. You're like, is it so hard? But yeah, I can do it. I can do it. Okay, two minutes through. Okay, just two more. Okay, three minutes done. Last minute. Go, go, go, go, go. And then you're like, you can't wait for that four minute recovery, which goes really fast. And then the next four minutes. That's true high intensity because you have a block of recovery that. allows you to hit your interval session at the intensity you need to. And this is prescription of high-intensity interval training. So we see all the conversation about how perimenopausal women shouldn't do high-intensity work because it increases cortisol.

If you do true high-intensity work, then you have a post-exercise response of growth hormone, a little bit of testosterone boosts that drops cortisol, which is beneficial. And it creates all the changes that we want and the feedback mechanisms we want to improve overall health. If we're doing that moderate intensity that feels like high intensity, we don't get that post-exercise response. Cortisol still stays a little bit elevated. You still feel smashed. You feel like it was a really hard workout, but you're still not seeing change. And would you call that moderate intensity zone two? No. No. No. Okay. Because this is where a lot of my confusion is, I'm like, everything I read online is like zone two is good for heart health. And I feel like you're like,

don't do zone two because it raises your cortisol and doesn't let you clear that cortisol out. No, zone two is completely different. Okay. So if we think about zone two, it's really low, low key. It's the long endurance. Maybe you're going for a walk for 90 minutes. You can have a conversation. I thought it was like you can have a conversation, but like it's a little strained type of thing.

Would you not say that? When we're looking at true zone two, you can still have a conversation. Okay. Because I like can't talk while I'm jogging, but I can talk while I'm walking. Yeah. So I was like jogging zone two, walking is not zone two. What would be correct? What is jogging?

Jogging would be more of your zone three. Okay. Like if you're having short gasps, then you're like, I can't talk. Yeah, then that's your moderate. My husband can talk while he jogs. I cannot. Yeah, I cannot. And then those classes, what zone are we talking about that being?

So that's like your upper three, four. So it's right in that modern intensity because we're thinking about zones from zone one to some people say six, but we usually use five to six. So the five to six is your true high intensity work or six is your super maximal. So your 110% of effort. So it can't be in there very long. Five is where you're sustaining that lactate kind of right above threshold. Four minutes is your max amount that you can work. And then when you get into our three and fours, that's where you're like, yeah, I could probably do this for an hour and it hurts.

But it's moderate intensity. And that's what we want to avoid. Are there any benefits in that space? If we are women. I assume for men it's different. For men, it's different. If you're training for something that requires you to be there, so you're training for an event, then yes, you have to spend time there. But if we're looking for overall health, it's better to polarize. Where you're, because we're women, we want to focus on the fast twitch and glycolytic, we want to spend a little bit more time focusing on that high intensity work. And then I tell people the soul food is the zone two, where you're going out in nature, you're going for a walk with your friends or your dog or someone like me who comes from a bike racing background. I love being on my gravel bike. And I'll go forward. four or five hour ride. Like that is. And that's not spiking your cortisol without giving you the opportunity to clear that out or bring it down? No, because I'm going really slow. Okay. I might go on an

adventure, but I'm not, I'm out for so long. I can't really go very hard. Okay. This is helpful because I've read your stuff. I've listening on podcasts and I'm like, should I not be hiking? Oh, no, definitely. Okay. I'm just like, I'm like, is hiking, spiking my cortisol in a way that is, it's no longer beneficial. No, because if you're eating, because most people will go out on long ventures, right? You're eating along the way. So if you go for a two-hour hike, you're taking some food, that's beneficial. Or if you're eating right after your hike, that's beneficial. What benefits are we getting from like the gravel bike, work out, the long hike, this sort of like extended period zone two type of thing? Mental health. Really? It's not, there's no body benefits? When we look at

the research, there really isn't, it's not a strong enough stress on the body to invoke mitochondrial change. And I can hear all the haters right now. But most of the zone two rhetoric, came from some of the top influencers who were doing an end of one, and they're like, I need the space work, and it's male data. So we look, for men, they need to do all that zone two work to become more like women. But for women, we already have a massive amount of endurance fiber and mitochondrial function. We have more proteins that enhance mitochondrial function. We have better oxidative function. Estrogen enhances that oxidative function. We're really, really good fat burners. yes, you'll get a little bit more oxidative capacity, but not as robust as men.

So all this rhetoric about Zone 2, Zone 2, Zone 2, it's a huge time suck if you do it correctly, where you're like 90 minutes, four times a week. Who has that? Well, and some of these male thought leaders in the longevity space really want you to do many, many hours every single week. Right. And it's just not the same for women's bodies. You're like, we don't need to do 10,000 steps. That's marketing. And I actually had a guy on the podcast who was like, I'm responsible for that marketing. That was me.

I did that study. But I have heard in general that we should be moving as much as possible throughout the day. Like that has benefits from a longevity perspective. Is that true or not true? Yes. Okay. Because we are now in a society where we sit and we're hunched and everything's automated. We want blood circulating and moving.

It's good for metabolism because if you're just kind of stagnant and you're not using your muscles for posture, then you're not really encouraged. glucose uptake or free fatty acid use. So it's really beneficial to move incidentally throughout the day. You know, the old fashioned park far away unless it's raining, get up, move around your house, walk up the stairs. This is why I like the 10,000 steps because I just feel like it encourages me to go for a walk between meetings or like move incidentally throughout the day. What you say is it's not, you know, super intense training, but that still has a lot of benefits.

Huge benefits, yep. We know from the research that if someone does a specific exercise session, like has a really focused session and then sits the rest of the day versus someone who doesn't have a really focused session but moves a lot through the day. The person that moves a lot through the day actually has a better metabolic outcome than the person who does a specific exercise session and sits the rest of the day. This is the other thing I wanted to ask you about because you're talking about like polarizing training and like I want to go eight out of ten and stuff like that. But then when you look at the people who have lived the longest in the world, they're, you know, lifting heavy

things sometimes at home. They're mostly walking. They're not doing any of these crazy training things. So how do you think about that? Because our society now is different from the people who are living long now. So if we're looking at like my grandmother lived to be 106 and she died a year and a half ago. And her whole life was different from the way that our lives are. Right. So if we think about my grandmother, she grew up on a farm. She was running around. She was doing all the farm work. And then when she got married, she moved into the city. She's taking care of the kids. She's walking everywhere because an automobile was, you know, it was a, it was a luxury. It wasn't everyone has one. So if we're thinking about the people who are living long and are aged now, their way they got

there is completely different from society now. So society now, everything is automated and we sit all the time and everyone has a car or you can call on Uber or you can get into what are the driverless? The Waymos? Yeah, the Waymos, right? You just call one of those. Everything is automated, so we have to be purposefully moving and we don't. And so when we're looking at how are we maximizing our health in a very short amount of time, we have to create an exercise stress that allows our body to be shocked into creating change. So for thinking about people who are just walking now, they're not creating an exercise stress

that's going to invoke enough of a change to promote longevity. So we're not seeing walking as being a strong enough stress to improve bone health. We know that it doesn't improve muscle muscle function. There's lots of sarcopenic older women who walk all the time. For looking at Alzheimer's prevention, we know that you have to have neuroconductivity changes, and that comes with new motor patterns. New motor patterns often come, and they're really easy to come by with resistance training, wherever you are in your journey.

So today's society is completely different, which is what we're. why we talk about this stuff and how are we going to maximize what little time we have in our really busy lives to invoke that change to improve our overall health for now and as we get older. That makes so much sense that essentially we are sprinting. We're lifting these really heavy weights even though we wouldn't have been in the old days because we're trying to balance out the rest of this life that we're living. Exactly. That's so interesting.

Can I walk you through my weekly workout routine as an example and you can just critique it? Okay. So I do. Oh, no. First, you move. And that is not a critique. That is fantastic. Okay. Thank you. And you're consistent in your movement. Those are two big steps that so many people can't overcome. Yeah. No. And I will say I didn't become a consistent workout person until this year. So I will take that as a huge win. That's huge. And for me, it was that I associate. I realize I get so much better sleep and my mental health is so much better if I move during the day. Okay. So I do an arm. strength training workout. I usually do like, I don't know, five or six exercises and eight to ten reps usually. And then the next day I'll do a legs strength training workout. Same thing. You're like, I will reserve judgment until the end. I do a jog. I'm just learning to run. I did it. I started running because I asked my husband and my sister what my things I was missing for my anxiety journey was and they both said your breathing's not that good. Maybe you could try running for your breathing for your cardio. I do a jog. It's like not that far, but for like 20, 30 minutes.

And then I'm back to arms, legs. And then I do a hit workout on the stairmaster where I go one minute really, really hard. And then I go like three minutes recover, one minute really, really hard. And I do that four times. And then I repeat the whole cycle. What am I doing right? And what am I doing super wrong? It's all good. Okay. But on your arms and legs, we can change it up where you might look at what you're doing, like your circuit, maybe adding a little bit more weight to what you're doing? Because 8 to 10 is going to give me some of those body comp benefits, but not all the brain benefits.

Correct. Okay. So you don't necessarily have to change what's in there, just add weight and drop the rep. What if I'm worried about hurting myself? You can work with a personal trainer. Okay. Or have a buddy.

Okay. You can also film yourself to see what your technique is. Is it common? Like, I'm always like when I'm squatting, I'm like, am I going to be paralyzed? Do you know what I mean with the squat rack? Right, but you can squat to a box instead of trying to do free squat. Okay.

Where your butt touches a box behind you. And you have to keep your core engaged the whole time. So you're not sitting down. You're touching it and coming up. Your core stays engaged the whole time, which protects your back. And you're not going full depth. So you're trying to add load and get stronger in that range than you can do a squat to box. Okay.

And then you can take the extra weight off and take the box away and finish with like 10 reps, all the way to depth. Okay. So then you're going to get all those benefits that you want and you're not going to hurt yourself. For the woman who's listening who is scared of hurting themselves

but maybe can't afford a personal trainer or can't fit that into their schedule and they're intimidated by weightlifting for that reason. What would you say to them? The beginning of your journey and we want to add some resistance training or don't want to go to the gym.

I get it. There are a lot of women and the gym intimidation is real. I even get it sometimes when I walk in someplace and I've been in gym since I was 16. And you're like strong. History.

So you can start in your house, like with your air squats and stuff, and then you can put stuff in a backpack and front load it so that you learn to be upright when you squat. And you can look at ways of adding load. Like playgrounds are great because you have monkey bars and you do a hang. You can do, you know, some pull-ups. If in New Zealand we have tires and you can do tire flips in the playground, you can do balance stuff. All of that is beneficial.

You can also get some of the at-home programs. You can look at different apps that are out there. What I tell women is like, start where you are. Add a little load, but find a buddy. Find a friend because it makes it better because now you have that communication and the togetherness, which helps from a mental health standpoint, because isolation is not so great. And you also end up pushing each other a little bit more.

Some days you might feel really flat and your friend feels great. and your friend is lifting you up and it might reverse itself, right? So that's how I tell people to start your journey. But really start with 10 minutes three times a week as your wellness meeting that you cannot break. And in the first set of it, maybe you are just drinking a coffee and looking outside and taking in the air and just mentally preparing yourself for the day. Then you add in some body weight stuff. Maybe then you take your dog for a walk. or if you have a kid, maybe you put them in the stroller and on your walk, you pick up the pace a little bit.

Like there's different ways to start implementing that stuff and not having to go to the gym. I feel like a lot of the people listening to this podcast are a lot like me where they like are kind of doing a workout routine. They know they're not going to become like the super longevity maxi and biohacker, but they also aren't at the beginning level. And like I feel like that's almost the hardest place to be because you're like, I'm spending the time doing it. I've managed to work it into my schedule, but I'm not sure I'm doing it right. and I'm getting the benefits that I want to get. Yeah. So when we look at that, it's like for you, right, adding some load and then for your jog,

it's fine. I'm not spiking my cortisol and not clearing it. No. Wait, why not? Because you're doing it for 20 to 30 minutes, right? And it's a learn-to-run program. And you're going to have to spend some time in that zone. It's not bad.

You just don't want every workout to be in that zone. Am I getting bad? Because I hate it. Like, I like it, but I hate it. You know what I mean? And if you told me I'm not getting any benefits, I probably would. want to do it. Oh, well, you are getting benefit. Okay. What benefits am I getting? So you are new motor pattern for one. Okay. So that helps with your brain. You are increasing your stress resilience through breath work. So my sister and my

husband were kind of right where it is helping my mental health potentially via my breathing. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Definitely. Is there something that you would replace it with if I wanted to be more optimal? I would do a walk run. Okay. As your running form starts to deteriorate and you start doing more jackknife because you're hanging off your hip flexors and you're not lifting your feet, then that's not that beneficial because it's providing a poor motor pattern and it can predispose you to injury. Okay. I don't want anyone to get injured because then that sets everybody back and people like, I don't want, like, I don't want to do that again. So I tell, like, for you, if you start off with your jog, maybe start your first two to three minutes at a walk and then pick up the pace and then maybe you're running for five minutes and then as you start to feel

like my running form's getting a little bit then you drop it and walk for a minute or two and then pick it up and do five or six minutes so you're peppering it in with really good running form and then that 30 minutes goes a lot faster and you come back feeling more invigorated rather than I hate that is there anything to the postrunners high yeah definitely yeah and I mean I'm an injured reformed runner. So I had knee surgery in December and I'm learning to run again. And I'd been running since I was 13. And there's nothing else that gives me that ultimate like euphoria than a really hard, hot run. And I can't, all of my years racing on a bike, never had that. I still can't get it on a bike. It's the extra stress and impact and everything that your body is doing running. When you're

run fit and you can get that and then the afterwards the euphoria you're like that was amazing yeah that's i think i i sometimes get a little tiny taste of that but again my husband can be doing like straight running for a long time and that's going to impact his body in a really different way than me yes and he like is beneficial for him yes okay is there anything else what about my stair master do we like that i like that yeah would you do though an eight to 10 an eight out of 10 for a little bit longer i only do I do one minute intervals and I do it for basically the hardest I can go to survive a minute. Would you want me to do four minutes? No.

One minute's fine. Because when you're looking at high intensity, anywhere from one to four minutes with variable recovery. Okay, so why would we not always just want to do one? I feel like I always want to do less if I can. Because like I said, your body's on an algorithm, right? So it likes to have change. It learns that one minute.

I can maybe do like three minutes one day, but then go back to one minute. Anybody ever request something and they're like two to five? And you're like, okay, too. Yeah. Like, that's what I feel like I usually am, but you're like, you actually want to bop around in there. Yeah. Okay. No other critiques, though. Like, that's, I'm pretty much add heavier load and maybe walk run and then do my hit once a week. Yeah. And but switch it up a little bit more. What do you do for your weekly workout? I'm kind of all over the show because it's traveling, but I make it a point to have at least three to four days of lifting.

part of its rehab. And when I'm at home, I'll do ocean swimming in the summer because we live at a place where you can swim around the islands and see little sharks and fishies. And I only go in the ocean to see the sea life, not to actually say that I'm a swimmer or surfing. That's fun too. And then I'll ride my bike when I can, which is really on the weekend.

So generally it's strength training, and I might end one of the sessions. Like this morning, I ended the session with a hundred meter sprint on the skier, and then 200 meter heavy farmers carry. And I did that four times. So I ended my strength session with a little bit of sprint and heavy carry work. So you do your sort of cardio at the end of your strength training often. And I like to separate it out mostly because I like to do something to fatigue my body every day for mental health.

Does that make sense to you? Yeah, absolutely. Okay, cool. Yeah, I'm doing it for time. Yeah. Is there research that if you move your body to the point of fatigue during the day, you will sleep better night? Because I feel like that. Yeah, you do. And I know that if I don't have a good exercise session, then I can't sleep.

Yeah, that's how I feel too. So my entire split is designed so that I can have something to do every day. I'm similar where I make sure that what I'm doing is different every day. But it's to a point where I know that I'm going to be ready to go to sleep. Did you see the study that said that tennis was the best workout for longevity? I did. What do you think of that? Well, it makes complete sense because it's power and it's multidirectional. So you have to have a really fast reaction.

And so when you're thinking about all the things that go into brain health and preserving function, power is one. We see that power and grip strength is a really good indicator for longevity and brain health. So multidirectional, trying to keep an eye on the ball knowing where you're going. It's all neural connections. And dancers, too. Dancers have a really good eye for longevity, too, because dancing is very multidirectional and the steps and everything, and it's very neural. tennis and dancing. And if I said, Stacey, weight loss is really my focus right now.

Is there anything you would change about the routine that I just told you? I would want to know when you're eating and what you're eating. Okay. Just to make sure that you are eating enough and you're fueling and recovering well. And if somebody listening is in perimenopause or menopause, is there anything that you would change about the routine that I just told you? I would probably add a little bit more intensity. So on one of the lifting sessions, maybe add a sprint session. like at the very end and also reassure women that they're not going crazy because there is a

complete slowdown of your sleep metabolism, your resting metabolism as you go through perimenopause because of the way the hormones affect you, but it gets countered on the other side. So as we have a decrease in our sleep metabolism and our basal metabolism, you want to do things to shake the body up. And so that's where your intensity and your strength training come into play. So when you say sprint training, how long ago on a sprint training, for it for? 20 to 30 seconds. And then rest and then do it again four times? No more than five. Most people will hit three and they're like pooped. And if you're pooped, listen to your body. Exactly. What do you mean that it's countered on the other side with perimenopause or menopause?

Oh, your body finds a new biological baseline and your sleep and resting metabolism come back up. Really? Okay. Let me tell you them in my late 30s, I have gone from being excited about my 40s and 50s and the rest of my life to being terrified of it. Oh, don't be terrified. Because of the perimenopause conversation. And I think it is such an important conversation because we need to be able to talk about these things. We need to be able to research them. We need to be able to find solutions. And I'm like, am I never going to sleep again? Is my mental health going to go in the toilet, et cetera, et cetera? And you're like, no, it will balance. You'll be fine. Because the more that you know, the more you can put in interventions, right? And every woman's journey is a little bit different. I get asked about

menopause hormone therapy all the time because people think that I'm anti-MHT. I'm totally not anti-MHT. It's very much a huge tool in the toolbox. Are you using that the same as HRT? Yeah. Okay. So we say menopause hormone therapy. Okay.

I even had to use it early days because I had really severe rage and anxiety issues. And then I did some CBT with it and was able to get off it. So it's very beneficial. But if we know what is happening from all the more research is coming out with a diminishing of some of our muscle fiber contract, Pactile proteins. What do we do to counter that? We do some heavy lifting. What do we do for brain health? We lift and do sprints. What do we do for our gut health? Because we see that we have a significant decrease in the diversity because we're losing our hormones. Fiber. Fibre is really important. We become more anabolicly resistant to protein and resistance training. So we have to

make sure that we are really capturing our protein and protein intakes. Not only that, it helps with satiation and when you have disjointed sleep, you tend to crave more simple carbs. So if you have protein, that eliminates that. We know about circadian rhythm and chronobiology and how to maximize sleep. So we want to fuel for the day. So we're working with our chronobiology. All of these are tools in the toolbox that really benefit perimenopausal women. So they don't have to be afraid. Yes, you're going to have changes. But when you get to the other side, you can keep doing what you're doing and still improve. We see women who pick up strength training in their late 40s, early 50s, and they end up being stronger and more robust in their late 50s than they were in their early 40s.

And are they sleeping and happy? Yeah. Okay. I'm so nervous about the sleep thing. I just don't function well on no sleep, and so many perimenopausal and menopausal women are like, sleep was the first thing to go. Yeah, I've heard that. Personally, I didn't have that. I sleep like I can get in a car and I fall asleep immediately. And sleep architecture has always been something that I've been interested in. And it comes down to, yes, we know that there are changes in the brain, and we know that sleep can be futile when you're in pari menopause. But again, what are we doing in the day to really maximize the brain's ability to be parasympathetic in sleep?

So then we can look at using elthenine and apigen and these kinds of things. and if we know that we have a diagnosis of ADHD, then we can use melatonin three to four hours before bed because we have phase shift. So there's lots of things. That 9 p.m. 11 p.m. thing? Is that we're talking about? We need to be earlier.

Okay. In perimenopause? If you have a diagnosis of ADHD and you have problems sleeping, a lot of people will go, oh, I'll use melatonin to help. You can microdose melatonin three to four hours earlier. So you're looking more at 6 p.m. You take your first little microdose of melatonin, so it's 0.5 milligrams. And then that jumpstarts your brain into parasympathetic and actually producing that 9 p.m. peak.

So then you actually can get into a good sleep pattern because we see a lot of people who have ADHD, their brain is always on and it can never really settle. And it's as if they've been a shift worker and they've face shifted their circadian rhythm. So if we're looking at just using a small amount of melatonin to reset that, then they can get into sleep. And we see it's very effective in pariomipausal women because their brain is wired in a sympathetic way too because we end up being more sympathetically driven. So we can look at using a small amount of melatonin, not the big amounts that you buy over the counter now, just to help reset and get into more parasympathetic and good sleep. So they're like cutting a pill in quarters or halves. Yeah. Or you can get a prescription for 0.5.

milligram. And what are your thoughts on HRT just clearly stated? I think it's very beneficial. And I came from the background of working on the WHOI data and doing some clinical trials and I was terrified of it. And the WHO data for people who aren't familiar is the data that originally came out that kind of scared people away from it. Yep. But the more I got into it and saw women who had been using it and realizing that that study was set up for older women who had been really far away from parimenopause when they started it, it started to make sense. They have not been exposed to hormones for 10 to 15 years and then they get put on it. That isn't necessarily a good thing, which is not something that was communicated. There's a woman who's have a lot of problems and it's having

severe anxiety and depression and vasomotor problems and really is leaning into wanting to use menopause hormone therapy. Yes, definitely. See how it works for you. But it's not, beneficial, we know there's no evidence to show that it's good for weight management. So some people will go on it thinking that it's going to help with body composition. It doesn't. We see that some people are going on it for brain health. The trials haven't been done. Yes, we see that it's beneficial for people who have the APOE4 gene risk factor for Alzheimer's, yes. But for everyone else, there's not enough evidence yet. The studies haven't been done. We don't have longitudinal research. Cardiovascular disease, still, we don't have. We don't have

longitudinal evidence to show that it's beneficial. It might help change our lipid profile because when people start feeling better, they move more. It's going to be a while before we get those studies because we just haven't been encouraging people to take it. We haven't been studying women, all the things we've been talking about for this entire episode. So mechanistically, can we make hypotheses about, oh, we're losing this organ function? We want to replace these hormones because we know these hormones mechanistically have this impact on our bodies. See, that's the misstep in thought process. Okay. Because what's happening as our natural hormones are being lost because we're having kind of ovarian wind down, we're also having changes in our receptors, our estrogen

and progesterine receptors are changing in their density and their responses. And then when you're taking exogenous or external hormones, even if they're bioidentical, they affect each of those receptors differently than what your natural hormones would. Even though they're identical, in their molecular structure, the response of the target tissue is different. So when you're taking an external hormone, it doesn't do the same thing as when your body's naturally producing it. So mechanistically, we can see what estrogen naturally does,

but when we're taking exogenous hormones, it's a different story because the target tissue response is different. And each formulation has a different response in that target tissue. So do you think there's not enough evidence yet to take HRT preventatively for the health effects versus to treat symptoms?

There is definitely evidence for bone. There's definitely evidence for people who have, like I said, a precursor for Alzheimer's. But for the other ones, I'm still, it's an individual conversation to have with someone who really understands it, but there isn't enough equivocal evidence to say the blanket statement

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mattress from Birch. Go to birchliving.com slash Liz Moody for 20% off. That is birchliving.com slash Liz Moody. And you're going to get 20% off birch living.com slash Liz Moody. I want to talk about hormonal birth control. How do you think about that in terms of the health equation? Do you think there's health benefits? Do you think there's training benefits? Do you think we should be training differently, eating differently? I look at hormone birth control and I think we're in 2026 and there really hasn't been too many formulation changes, which I find very interesting. And then I hear stories like someone gets put on the DIPA Prevara and you're only supposed to be on it for a year. Otherwise, it has massive ramifications on bone density.

But they're not told that. So they're on it for 20 years. Right? So the side effects aren't really well known or discussed. When I look at hormone contraception, it's absolutely great. Like, it's fantastic feminist, it gives you control. There's lots of health benefits if you have reproductive problems like endometriosis and PCOS really good. When we look at how it's being prescribed in Western culture where a 15-year-old girl will go in with irregular periods,

some of it's heavy, some of it's, sometimes it's not, maybe some bad skin. Instead of trying to really understand what's going on, oh, when did you start your menstruate? Did you start just last year? Well, yeah, you're going to have lots of irregularity. Let's see how we can control the heavy bleeding without hormones. Those conversations aren't being had. So from a health benefit, I think there's still a lot of misstep. There's still lots of good, but there's still a lot of misstep. From a training perspective, there's not a lot of research yet, but the small amount of research we know, there's a dampening in your sprint capacity, and there's also a higher amount of oxidative and inflammation that occur by using hormonal contraception. I tell women to really understand

how it's affecting them to track just like you would track your natural menstrual cycle. Because then you start to see your own pattern or responses. And then that's how you can tailor your training. Because if you know that day 18 on a 21 pill pack day, day 18, you're like, oh, God, I feel awful. And then you know you're not going to try to go and go and do any kind of high intensity or like really hit it hard in the gym, that's a day to take care of yourself. So we can start to see these patterns. When we start looking at hormone contraception, we know that the brain changes across the menstrual cycle. And then there's research that came out last year looking at young girls who were put on an oral contraceptive pill for various reasons. There were actual structural and functional changes to the amygdala.

And older girls who were on it, when they got off the pill, those changes went back to normal, but it didn't change because in the young girls, their brain was still developing. What are we calling young here? So this is 16-year-olds. I got on it when I was 16. So is my amygdala fucked? Not necessarily fucked, but. What would I experience as a result of that?

We see a lot of inhibition, like more fear. Oh, no. I have that. Yeah, more fear, a little bit more anxiety. I have that. So, yeah, and it can be an offshoot of being on the pill when your brain's developing. So it's new emerging research and it just started coming out last year. Can I do anything to counter that at this point in my life?

Are you still using a hormonal contraception? I am not. Okay, good. Then, yeah, there is stuff. And this is what you're doing with strength training, right? And you're looking at building muscle and connectivity. You're not necessarily going to change the structural component of the amygdala, but by doing various things through exercise and nutrition,

you're going to dampen that anxiety and that fear. So you're going to have more control over that area of the brain. Not to be a broken record, but that's the thing that I've noticed the biggest difference for is that my anxiety is significantly different since I've been on this workout journey. There you go. Do you think there's any truth to train harder during this phase of your cycle, do yoga during this phase of your cycle, et cetera, et cetera. No, because the caveat is we don't know if you're ovulating or not. So when we're looking at the origins of cycle sinking and the research that was available at the time that the stuff started coming out, it was all molecular-based looking at what is the follicular phase? How does estrogen without progesterone affect everything. Then after ovulation with a rise in progesterone, how does that affect everything? And there are molecular changes that happen when you actually have progesterone and estrogen together versus estrogen by itself. But what we don't know is, is a woman really ovulating? And how long is her cycle? Is there individual variation within a cycle? Absolutely. And how does that affect her body will respond to exercise? So it is very individualized.

And that's why we've had more resources come out and said, look, a woman has to understand her cycle on how she feels and can navigate just like any athlete does on a wellness check when they go into a session. Am I really capable of doing this session today? I want to just tap into a few more of like the nutrition, supplement things, creatine. There's a lot of research on creatine. Creatine's like the new hot topic on the internet. Should women be thinking about creatine different than men think about it? Yes. And I say this because I read a systematic review that came out yesterday that was looking at non-athletic benefits of creatine. And the population that benefited the best or the most were women aged 18 to 65. Oh, what benefits did we get? So in better cognition, better reaction time, we had better muscle function, better gut health, heart health. So all of the things, which makes complete sense. Because if we think about creatine,

and saturation levels, women by the nature of being women tend to have less muscle mass than men, so we don't have as much storage of creatine, but we still have the same functions. So all of our tissues still function the same way. So if we're looking at supplementing with creatine, you have to eat a lot of creatine-containing foods to get five grams of creatine. So if we're looking at what is five grams of creatine, it could be anywhere between five and seven chicken breasts. You have to eat in addition every day.

That's disgusting. Right. But if you're taking a little half a teaspoon of creatine monohydrate and you're saturating your body, then you get all these benefits. And there's some research that's coming out that's looking at cognitive behavior therapy and creatine versus a serotonin re-uptake inhibitor for depression and anxiety. And cognitive behavior therapy with creatine actually gives better benefits, allowing women to get out of depression and anxiety a lot faster than someone who's on an SSRI. What would be the mechanism there? So brain metabolism, really. No one is really, really sure how an SSRI affects brain metabolism.

We know how it affects neurotransmitters, but it also has an impact on glucose metabolism. So if we're looking at the fast energetics with creatine helps support, and the brain is full of fast energetics, that's how it works, neuroconductivity, and the tissue is always, always needing to be fueled, and creatine is there. So if we're looking at cognitive behavior therapy and then allowing the brain to have the the necessary fuel for fast energetics, it helps with depression. So the idea is that men have more muscle typically, which lets them store more creatine so they get more of the benefits associated with creatine even without supplementation.

Right. And women don't have as much muscle typically. So the supplementation benefits us even more. Exactly. And what do you think about? I've heard a lot of people say five grams feed your muscles, but you need 10 to get the brain health benefits. So Darren Candell is doing research in that right now.

And they're saying why people need 10 is because it takes a lot longer for the brain to be saturated. So if we're trying to get over the three weeks, three weeks of five grams a day really does fully saturate all your tissues except your brain. 10 grams over three weeks saturates your brain too. And if we're looking at what does that look like and can I take that? If we stepwise increase, sure. But if we're looking at cognitive benefits for like jet lag, shift work, then we can look at taking an acute dose, a large acute dose over the course of three to five days and get a benefit. So if we're looking for brain health for anxiety and depression, then yeah, you can look at stepwise increasing to that 10 grams and making sure that you can take it and then that becomes your new status quo. But for the most part, if you're just settling on that five grams, it really does help across the board.

Does the research at this point you think stand behind the fact that this should be a supplement that most women are prioritizing including? I think so, yeah. Are there any other supplements that you would include in that world of women? This probably is something that most of us should be including. Vitamin D. Is there? What's the reason for that? So if we look at vitamin D3, a lot of people don't get enough of it anyway because we use sunscreen and we use hats.

And if you're in extreme north or south, in the wintertime, you don't really get any. at all. Well, and women are told we're not allowed to age, so we're even more conscious of those things. Right, right. And it helps with iron and iron metallism, iron regulation, and women have a higher predisposition for iron deficiency and anemia. So we need vitamin D3 because it helps drop hepcidin, which is our inflammatory hormone that inhibits iron absorption. We also see that it's good for immunity, it's good for our bones, good for our muscles. And then we know that women who have really severe perimenopausal symptoms, PPMD, PMS, they often also have low vitamin D levels.

So if we bring vitamin D, it helps attenuate those symptoms. Do you have an optimal dose of vitamin D? Dose, yeah, about 5,000 international units. Okay. That's more than most people would take, and I think than a lot of, you know, the standard recommendations would be. Yeah. I have people in the summertime take it once a week.

because they're also getting sun. But in the winter, it's every other day. 5,000 units. Okay, cool. Do GLP-1s impact women differently than men? I don't know, because the research hasn't been done. How do you think about that? I think about it as men lose weight more rapidly, and women tend to hold on to fat more.

And so the risk of losing lean mass appears to be greater with the GLP-1s. That's just the hypothesis. I don't have the research to back it up. I think it's beneficial because it does help get metabolism and everything back under control if the lifestyle implementation is there too. So that's your lifting and protein and making sure you're taking care of your muscle on your bone. I will say I was really shocked at all the awards where you see the Hollywood actresses and stuff coming out. And it breaks me as a mom because now my daughter is seeing all those images where

so far in the household, it's all about being strong and eating and being powerful. And then she sees TikTok and images and her friends are like, we need to be skinny. It's like, no, you don't. You don't. Yeah. Do you think of it as a miracle tool, though? Do you think of it as something that has potential to cause a lot of harm, something in between? Probably something in between. It's a great tool for what it's made for, like initially for diabetes. And the dosage for diabetes is also useful for weight loss. The massive doses that are occurring for weight loss, I think, is problematic because the weight loss is so rapid and it's not necessarily the adipose tissue. There was a JAMA article that did a systematic review of all the research on the post-GLP1 body comp, and it's just like the biggest loser, where they rebounded and gained more and lost all the benefit. So there's no endgame for people losing all the weight.

There's no endgame to get off it. And that's a scary factor. I'm waiting to see more research and see, is it really that beneficial or is it only beneficial in certain populations? And I also want to see more women included in those research studies because they're not right now. So a lot of the studies that we're seeing about GLP1s, just like know in the back of our mind, that's largely men. Exactly. I want to touch on sauna because you did your PhD on sauna. Is that correct?

On heat acclimatization. Yeah. So the Finnish sauna study that everybody quotes, which is 40% lower all-cause mortality with four times a week of sauna, it's the single most cited longevity study that I've been able to find on the internet. It was done on all men. Yeah. Zero women. Should women be approaching sauna different than men? And somewhat yes, because we actually do better in the heat.

So these results might have been even better? Or what have they been worse? because we're already like acclimated and we're chill in the heat. And we need to like have the, you know, heart effects. Oh, we want those environmental stressors, right? So we see thermoregulatory differences between men and women's. We know this is why men do better in icy cold and women don't. And women do better in really hot conditions because across a menstrual cycle,

our internal temperature changes by about one degree with ovulation. And all of our thermoregulatory capacities shift with that. So we can sit in the heat and we can sit there and we dissipate heat through our skin first and then our core temperature starts to warm up and then we start sweating. And when we start sweating and we get that really hot head feeling, we're still getting all these like signals for heat shock proteins to recouple and we're looking at cardiovascular improvements and glucose improvements. And all those are really strong stimulus, very robust in women, not as robust in men.

because men can't spend as much time in the heat because they'll get in and they immediately start sweating and their core temperature skyrockets faster. The faster rate arise for men in the same environment as a woman. So they don't have the opportunity to have as much heat stress. If they can stay in for as long as a woman, then they're going to get the similar responses. How long should we be staying in for? If you're looking for health benefits, 10 minutes, maybe two to three times a week. Okay, I feel like the bros I see on the internet are in there for like 40 minutes.

Like we know that when we're doing heat studies, we have to pull someone out of the heat chamber when they hit 39 degrees. Ethically, we have to pull them out. Oh, interesting. We ethically cannot push people past 39. So all of the benefits we're talking about with the heat shock proteins and all of that, that's happening below 39 in all the studies because they're pulling people out of 39. We know like athletes in the field, they'll push their core temperature up to 40 or more, right? because they're in a situation where they're pushing and pushing, but then there's a lot of issues post-exercise, like post-race, where they have medics and they're trying to bring their core temperature down. So that's in the field situation, right? And we have studies for that. But for health benefits, no, we poll people because ethically we can't keep them in the heat when their core temperature goes beyond that point. When you start feeling hot and sweaty, like your body is like, okay, I'm trying to offload the heat here. My core temperature keeps creeping up.

up. And that's why, you know, like when we're talking about men, they get in for 10 minutes and they start feeling really uncomfortable and hot. They've driven their core temperature up. They're getting responses. If they stay in too long, then they can end up having issues, right? In a controlled situation, it would be ideal to see what is the optimal temperature for each individual, but we don't. So we go with, how are you feeling? Like, are you feeling like your head's going to explode and you're sweating? Then you probably should get out, right? And that's enough, Like we've probably increased our heat shock proteins, et cetera, et cetera. Yes.

Okay. Yeah, definitely. For heat acclimatization, we put people in for up to 30 minutes. Okay. We start them 15 minutes and then gradually work our way up. And so we'll have nine days in a row of around 30 minutes. So if we're looking for health effects, we know you can shorten that to 10 because it's a really strong environmental stress. The thing I've always wondered is it is it 10 minutes once you're kind of like hot and

sweaty or 10 minutes from the second that you enter the sauna? When you enter. Okay. Because you have a rate of rise, it goes, but if you exit and you're like, yeah, that was fine, then probably need to increase the heat just a little bit, not go over 80 degrees Celsius. And if you have the tolerance to be in there for 10 minutes and not start sweating and feel, yeah, good, then you should probably stay in a little bit longer. Like, do you want your heart rate pounding a little bit?

You want to be a little bit sweaty to know that you're getting those benefits? Yeah. And to really garner the benefits, if you go in after a training session and you're slightly dehydrated, then you're going to get a stronger stress response from the heat. So will you not drink water in the sauna? I wouldn't. I'd slowly rehydrate afterwards over the course of three or four hours. Okay. I don't know if I can do that.

You're like you can. You can. Okay, I'll try that. Is sauna protocol different during perimenopause? I don't know. That hasn't been studied. But what I can tell you is that it's very beneficial for people who have. really bad hot flashes. We did a study at Stanford during my postdoc where we're trying to

actually capture what a hot flush look like. And we had women who would sit in the environmental chamber for hours and hours and we'd capture what it looked like on the thermister. And I was like, well, if we're trying to invoke the brain to say, I'm really hot and how do I handle it? Let's put them in the heat. So then we started putting them in the sauna and they'd have these massive amount of hot flushes. Like, oh my God, I hate us. This is like, yeah, but we're creating a stimulus. Let's see what happens. So we had quite a few women who were like really uncomfortable for a bit of time. But then it made their normal like daily hot flashes less severe and less frequent because the brain was able to understand what really hot meant

and then how to navigate that. Is it helpful for sleep? I feel like I feel huge differences on the nights that I sauna with my sleep. Yeah. Is that what would be the mechanism there? So you've increased your core temperature to a really high, and then the rebound as it comes down. And one of the critical factors for getting into a really good sleep is you have a significant drop in your core temperature. And you can also do that with a hot shower before bed, right? This is why I'm always telling my husband I want a freezing bedroom. I feel like so many people I know are having this fight with their spouse. Like one of them wants it freezing cold.

And the other one is like, no, I'm too cold. I want it hot. And I'm like, no, it's better for our sleep to have a freezing cold. Yeah, that's true, right? Yeah. Okay. And then you mentioned cold exposure. and that that's not as good for women.

It's interesting because the main person that I could find who's done a lot of research on the benefits of cold exposure is a woman, is Dr. Susanna Soberg. What does the research show about cold exposure for women and for women's hormones? Yeah, so Susanna and I agree and the research agrees that for women, if we're looking at around 14 degrees Celsius for a water exposure, that's cold enough for women. And you will get some benefit. I'm trying to do the math. 55 degrees Fahrenheit, which is not as cold as like these people who are breaking the ice chunks in their backyard tubs, etc. Right. But ice is too cold. So when women get into ice, and I think the protocol is 30 seconds to a minute of being in the ice, it's such a severe sympathetic shock. Because, again, our thermoregulatory systems are different from men. And it invokes a sympathetic drive instead of a parasympathetic drive.

So we don't actually get the responses that men do. When we get into that a little bit warmer water of that 55 degrees Celsius, we will start to get some of the endocrine responses that men talk about from the ice, get some parasympathetic responses, but it's not as robust as men. Because our thermoregulatory challenge is one of survival, not of, okay, I understand the survival and I can get through it and benefit, which is why I'm always like women, sauna. Yes, you can cold plunge, cold water swimming.

My ocean swimmers, I have them do face immersion just so that they don't get a vagal response, which means they can't get their heart rate up because that's a survival mechanism. So we train them to be in that cold water. For women who find benefit of being in the cold water for mental health and you're already doing it, keep doing it. It's great. But for the general trend of telling every woman they need to be in the cold plunge, it's like, hold on. It's a billion dollar industry, which is why there's so much marketing. But if you actually

look at the science, women don't have to be in ice to get some benefit. It's that cool water plan. We should start saying cool water immersion for women, ice water immersion for men. Men need it to be colder, though, to get the benefits? They don't have to. Okay. They just like it so that they're like, yeah. But we see that came from another influencer who has all these breathwork things in the ice, right? And so that's how that's how. that trend started. Yeah, I was at a hot spring in Colorado once and there was a cold plunge there and there was this group of men and you could just tell that they were waiting for each other to get out. They were just like so cold in the cold plunge, but they wouldn't get out until somebody else got

out and they were in there for like eight minutes. And I was like, this is not good for you guys. Or when you hear influencers be like, oh, I did like seven minutes to the cold blanche day, and I'm like, that's not good for you. No. Why are we bragging about this? I know. It's not. And my worry is people who start falling into those trends, if they have an undercurrent of heart issues and they get in the ice. Like we see a lot of 40 to mid 40 year old men who think that they're really fit in their endurance athletes or something and they get in the ice and they have heart attack. Oh, no. If you're doing everything else and you want to add something else to your team that, for women at that 55 degree mark, do you think it's worth including?

Is there enough benefit there or not really? Some women really love the cold and hate the heat, right? And so if it's the option of cool water versus sauna and they're like, no way am I getting in the heat, go in the cool water because you will get benefit. It's not as robust as men. It's not as robust as what you get in the sauna, but you still are going to get an environmental stressor that's going to invoke change, positive change for health. But if they're both environmental stressors that invoke change, choose on her. Yeah. Okay.

Yeah. Does stress impact women's bodies differently than male bodies? Yes. It's a learned response in women. Say you enroll in college and you have to take an exam and you get really stressed and anxiety and you have a cortisol response that happens, right? And then throughout the whole university experience, you get used to the exams. But every time you sit down for an exam, you're still going to have that same massive cortisol rise, even though you're okay with the exam. But for men, they'll go the first exam and they'll get this massive cortisol spike.

And then they get used to exams and their cortisol doesn't come up as much. We have a learned response and whatever that learned response is will stay with us. So this is why when we see women who are sympathetically driven and we see a lot in paraminopause because we are sympathetically driven, that we have an over-response of small stressors. And it can be a big problem. How would you suggest that women deal with stress differently than men should? I don't know if they have to deal with it differently. we just end up doing things differently.

For the most part, women are the nurturers. If we remember to nurture ourselves, then we lean into that. But a lot of women don't necessarily remember to do that. But when they do, then they start taking care of themselves inherently. Whereas we'll turn to our very stressed husband and say, you know, just chill out. Like go outside, breathe the air and like, oh, that's stupid, right? But for us, we're like, yeah, okay, I'm going to go do that. Where do you see the biggest research gaps being at present?

Like where are we still following protocols that were designed for men based on research about men? I'm going to say everywhere. Except for breast cancer. Cool. So we have one thing. So everything. Like the way we're eating, the way we're working out, the way we're approaching our sleep, even though we've shared all this advice today, all this wisdom for what we can do differently as women,

you still see that there's huge gaps in all these places. Yeah. Because what I'm explaining now is the most recent research that we have. have, but it's not a robust amount of research like we have for male research. So we keep doing it and we keep adding to the knowledge. When we're talking about it, I don't really foresee any more changes in education coming because that advice is there and is based on sound research. It's just making that research more robust. So people can have more insight into who they are, meaning like, We see all this, and unfortunately, most of it's done on white upper middle class women.

And we know that the sociocultural aspects around all these things is different. What is access? What is opportunity? And that also influences. Because it doesn't matter where you are. You want to take care of yourself, right? And maybe you don't have access to really good food. You can't make those choices.

So you have to deal with what you have. And that kind of research hasn't been done. What's the impact of someone who is an effective? and these are the choices they make. And how is that going to influence her ability to build muscle and brain help? Those are the research studies that's going to add to this advice. Okay. We're going to do a just one thing, quick round.

What's one thing that women can do in their workout routines that will make them feel better based on research done on women? Plan it. Tell me more. So I tell women that we are so kind of misguided where we go and there's a session on the board, right? and we're like, oh, I'll do that session. Or we go, I need to go to the gym, but I'm not quite sure what to do. And the best thing to do is have a plan. Be like an athlete.

If you are exercising on purpose, you are an athlete. And I say that because I want you to have an athletic mentality, meaning that each athlete knows exactly why they're going to do a session, how to prepare for it, and how to recover from it. So if every woman takes that mentality for every workout that they do, they are going to get extreme benefit and feel good about what they're doing. What's one thing that every woman should be doing in terms of their nutrition or what they're eating every day? Making a focus to have protein and fiber at every eating opportunity.

The general recommendation to make it easy is 30 to 40 grams at each main meal, and then you try to get 15 to 20 grams of protein at every snack. And then fiber, you want to get around 30 grams a day with 30 plants in a week. That's a really good way of making sure you're getting fiber. And protein is also in some fiber-rich foods. So you look at at Nami, you look at nuts, seeds, sprouted grains, all of that also contributes to protein. What's one thing that a woman who is listening and they want more energy should be doing? Making sure they nail their patterns in the day to enhance their sleep at night. Front load your calories and then make sure that you don't really have food two to three hours before bed, if possible.

And then try to ride those waves of melatonin. What's your favorite thing to do for bone health? Jumping. One of my friends did a lot of research in New Zealand on jump and the impact loading, and it's not landing how we've always learned on soft knees. It's landing really hard. And it's maybe three minutes a couple of times a week is all you really need to do. So it's not jumping really high.

It's not being on a trampoline. Jumping rope isn't quite as good. It's about the multidirectional stress you can put on a bone. and when you're landing hard, you have all those ground reactive forces that are multidirectional that come up in the bone and stimulate it to get strong.

One thing for mental health. Finding your soul food. So if your soul food is going out and going for a long walk, do it. If it is going outside first thing in the morning and looking at the light with a cup of coffee, great. If it is finding 10 minutes in the day of no noise, try doing your next errand in the car

with no radio. But you just have to find a little pockets throughout the day that is your soul food that allows you to reduce anxiety and just kind of center yourself. What's one thing we could all be adding in for longevity? Walk with your best friend in nature. I do that regularly. Why will that make me live longer? Because isolation is a killer and conversation with your friend is also a neurostimulus. And walking outside in nature, we know that green space has a magnificent effect on mental health and well-being.

And if you're walking, you're also improving cardiovascular fitness, which also helps with brain. What's one thing that all the women listening should stop doing? Because it's outdated advice and it was meant for men. Slamming themselves in the gym or exercise every day where you're like, I have to go for an hour to 90 minutes. I have to get a big sweat session. You don't. You don't. It's like, let's really look at what kind of stress we wanted to put on the body for positive change. It's not about volume. It's about the quality. When I see women who really embrace that, it's like less volume, more quality. It's, they get more time in their day. They have less stress about it. They have more freedom and things that they're eating and they're doing. It just becomes a whole mental and cultural shift for them.

Stacey, if people want more from you, where can they find you? Our website is Dr. Stacy Sims.com, and that's where you can see all the things that we're up to. You could also sign up for our newsletter and we put out information there. me on socials, and we just launched a new company called Collective X, where we are going after the whole research gender gap and the AI thing. So you can find us with Collective X too. Thank you so much. I mean, from myself, from everybody listening, I just so appreciate everything that you're doing on behalf of women in this world. It's so important. Oh, thanks very much. That is all for this episode of the Liz Moody podcast.

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