WHOOP Podcast - Dr. Hazel Wallace, The Food Medic, on nutrition, exercise, and habit formation

Episode Date: January 26, 2022

Dr. Hazel Wallace, also known as The Food Medic, sits down with Kristen Holmes for an in-depth discussion on nutrition, exercise, and the keys to strong habit formation. Hazel explains her inspiration for going into medicine (2:20), why small improvements are critical to long-term success (6:30), the role sleep plays in metabolism (8:42), meal timing and sleep (10:52), why diet results are highly personal (13:53), gender differences in nutrition (17:00), training while fasting (20:10), behavior change and habit formation (28:50), and the importance of simplifying your processes (31:16).Support the showFollow WHOOP: www.whoop.com Trial WHOOP for Free Instagram TikTok YouTube X Facebook LinkedIn Follow Will Ahmed: Instagram X LinkedIn Follow Kristen Holmes: Instagram LinkedIn Follow Emily Capodilupo: LinkedIn

What's up, folks? Welcome back to the Whoop Podcast, where we sit down with top performers to help you figure out what the best in the world are doing to perform at their peak and what you can do to unlock your own best performance. I'm your host, Will Amit, founder and CEO of Whoop. We're still on a mission to unlock human performance. And it feels fitting because we're in January and many of you may have New Year's resolutions about new habits and particularly diets. that we bring you Dr. Hazel Wallace, known as the Food Medic. She sits down with Kristen Holmes, our VP of Performance, to discuss how everyone can live a healthier life. She's a trained physician, qualified personal trainer. She's a registered nutritionist, and she spent her career

bridging the gap between conventional medicine and nutrition. Dr. Wallace and Kristen discuss the keys to strong habit formation, some of the tips and tricks you can apply in your own life. The critical role good nutrition plays in your health and well-being. Some of the signs you can monitor every day to understand if you're optimizing your nutrition, how and why men and women should fuel differently in the science behind it, and a more personal story how losing her father at a young age inspired her to go into nutrition and medicine. I think Dr. Wallace has a great personal story.

I think this is a lot of really helpful research. As a reminder, you can get 15% off, a WOOP membership. If you use the code will, that's WI-L-L, that's WOOP.com. Okay, and without further ado, here is Dr. Wallace and Christopher Holmes. Dr. Hazel, welcome. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful to have this conversation with you. I'm personally a massive fan of yours, have been for a couple years now.

And I know our listeners are just going to take so much from this conversation, just given your background. You are just an expert in habit formation. and obviously nutrition and exercise and sleep. So we're just going to like dig into all of those things today and really try to give folks a nice foundation for kind of how to think about their habits and behaviors. This summer, so prior to the art podcast that we did on your platform, I, you know, did some more digging into your background. And I came across your TEDx talk from, I think it was from, was it from 2018?

Yeah, it seems like such a long time ago. But yeah, 2018. I just found your message and your personal story to be unbelievably inspiring and I'll be a bit heartbreaking on it. I teared up as you kind of told that story. So I thought that might be an unbelievable place to start just to kind of frame out your background and as a public educator kind of where your passion kind of comes from and would just love to hear that story. When I was 14, I sadly lost my father to a stroke. And as most people know, like a stroke is a condition that's a non-communicable disease,

which means it's not like infectious. You can't catch it. It's something that develops over a period of time. It's related to lifestyle risk factors like our diet or how much we exercise, stress, and also things like high blood pressure and type 2 diabetes. And so as a 14-year-old girl, this was so unexpected to me. You know, my dad didn't look sick or I didn't know he was sick. but it really changed my life like obviously it was heartbreaking but it changed my journey in life

and the career I chose to go on and so I was all teed up to go into business like my dad had done an accountancy and I decided that I wanted to be a doctor so that set out in my journey but even though I was in medical school I still felt like unsatisfied but the information I was receiving. Like, don't get me wrong, I loved med school, but I felt like we were paying a lot of lip service to things like nutrition and exercise and lifestyle factors. But we were just brushing over the surface and then we were moving quickly onto the, you know, the hardcore medications and things like that, which are obviously super important. But part of me felt like, why aren't we paying more attention to this? Because obviously, if we can focus on this, we can keep a lot more

people out of hospital and keep a lot more people's parents alive and things like that. And so I started my own blog called The Food Medic. And I was still at med school and got my first book deal where I wrote a book kind of discussing nutrition and its intersection with health. That was nine, ten years ago now. And I'm now a qualified doctor. I went back to university and qualified as a nutritionist. And I'm also a personal trainer. And I guess I did all of that to come full circle so that when I am educating on a public health level, I'm able to bring everything together. That's my story in a nutshell. I love it. It's beautiful. Thank you for sharing that. You're an incredible public educator, as I said, I think one of the very best out there,

honestly. I read all of your posts on Instagram, which are wonderful and just such an incredible message. I have a young daughter. I have her follow you as well, because I want her to soak in all of your knowledge and positivity that you put out there into the world. So in terms of agency, right? And really becoming independent as it relates to kind of your own health and wellness. How do you help folks think about gaining more agency over their health? Kind of where do they start as just at a foundational level? It's really tricky because it depends on who you're speaking to. And in my kind of medical setting, I'm often speaking to people who are obviously in hospital for a reason. They're usually very unwell because the type of setting I'd work

would be an acute medical care setting and at that point it's it's not always feasible to have conversations about lifestyle and what we can do to prevent things and often that comes later and it was part of that frustration that I don't have the time or I'm not the doctor in that position to have those conversations that I decided to go and bring what I do online and so in that way I can reach more people and I think I find find a lot of people who are at their day one and they've Googled my name or they've come across me on Instagram and they just want to know what to do and they don't know where to start. And I think a lot of people think it all needs to happen at once or that quick results are

going to happen really quickly. And that's not what happens. It's what we do every day and the small things that we do every day that amount to better health in the future. And I try not to make it too overwhelming for people because if you have had a health scare, you can feel scared and you feel like you need to change everything at once. But oftentimes it's just making these little tweaks. So looking at your nutrition first or your sleep or your exercise and thinking about the low hanging fruit. And so I often sit down with people and think, right, where can we start with you? What thing do you think needs the most work? And so for someone it might be, oh, well, I'm completely neglecting my sleep. And that might seem like a really trivial thing.

to start with but our sleep's not just a passive thing you guys know at whoop it's like it's there's so many physiological processes that happen when we sleep it's it's a form of recovery and so if we can optimize that first and foremost we're off to a great start right we've nailed that let's move on to nutrition what can we do there and it's taking everything step by step and building habits so that it seamlessly fits into your life and it doesn't feel like you're restricting yourself or having to punish yourself to have this really strict lifestyle. It's not about that. It's actually about it's almost coming from a place of self-love because you're supporting your health. I think people don't really, oftentimes when they think about, okay, I need to lose weight or, you know,

I need to decrease my BMI or, you know, whatever it is that they might need to do. I think they don't actually recognize the relationship between being able to achieve those results and sleep. Do you want to just talk real quick about the relationship between sleep and our hormones and how that impacts our ability to maintain or lose or lose weight. Yeah, absolutely. Or gain weight for that matter. Some folks are interested in gaining muscle and losing and gaining weight. And there's obviously a direct relationship between sleep and those things.

Yeah, 100%. I think, like I said, we often see sleep as this passive thing or something that just helps alleviate tiredness when there's so many other things that go on. And one of the biggest things that happen is like almost like this metabolic reboot that happens overnight. What we see, especially in like feeding studies overnight or night shift workers who are eating in our biological night, that often calls us like this metabolic disturbance because our body is not primed to take on nutrients in that biological night time. We're unable to handle high amounts of carbohydrates or fats. And that shoots up, you know, glucose and insulin in our

bloodstream. It also causes issues with fatty acids in our in our bloodstream. well. And so our sleep is so important and getting enough sleep so that our kind of metabolism can reboot and can take on nutrients and can and our body can use that energy the next day is super important. And so sleep deprivation has been linked with difficulty losing weight and also weight gain and people who have higher BMI's, although it's all an it's all associative data not causation, tend to sleep less as well. Again, you mentioned hormones. as well. Not only does sleep deprivation increase cortisol, which is one of the stress hormones and various other stress hormones, it also can affect our hunger hormones, ghrelin and leptin.

And with that kind of disruption, that often makes us more hungry the next day. We tend to eat a bit more. If that's happening day after day, chances are you're going to increase the amount of calories you're taking in, which isn't always a bad thing. But if you're doing it and it's happening mindlessly and you don't actually need that energy, then it will lead to weight gain. And of course, that can come with its own health problems down the line as well. I'm curious your thoughts on this. We see in our data that food close to bedtime negatively impacts recovery by up to 3% on average.

We have some hypotheses internally on why that is just based on all the mechanisms. But we'd love to get your thoughts on why people experience a lower recovery when people indicate that they're, eating food close to bedtime. Yeah, I think that's really interesting. I mean, I always get questions like what foods will affect my sleep and things like that. And I often say to people, it's less about what you're eating, but when you're eating when it comes to sleep. And so it's so much great literature on this too. Absolutely. And I think just like light is a cue for our circadian rhythm, meal times is also a cue to our peripheral clocks. So instead of our, our central master clock, the peripheral clocks in our bodies. And so when we eat, we are sending

a signal to our body that it's daytime. And so if you're eating, let's say 9 p.m. at night and you're having a big meal, you are essentially causing like a shift in your circadian rhythm, which is going to make it more difficult for you to fall asleep and also affect your recovery and all of the things that we just discussed in terms of your metabolism. As a rule of them, try to eat in the biological day, so try to eat when it's light outside. Obviously, this is a bit more tricky when we live in, like, you know, darker countries and things in wintertime. Right. Yeah. But trying to eat within the kind of 6am to 6pm window roughly in and around, which isn't always easy, especially if you're a shift worker and I've, you know, worked my fair share of night shifts over the last

couple of years. What I say to kind of shift workers overnight is have your meals, prior to and after work. And if you do need to eat in the kind of biological night, have something light and generally go for something that's high protein, lower in carbohydrates and lower in fat, so that your body is able to digest it. And that would be kind of my biggest rule of them. But yeah, food is a big signal to our bodies that,

which can really massively affect our sleep. To go just even a layer deeper on that, we actually see as well in our data that dairy-free paleo-vegan diets seem to have a 2% positive impact on recovery score. So again, small but interesting. Is there any reasons why you might think that might be the case? Is that one diet that you're talking about or three specific diets, dairy, vegan, failure? So three, those three each seem to have a positive impact. So people who indicate when they engage in a dairy-free diet, they personally have a 2% increase and we kind of aggregate all of those data. We see that on average to impact recovery

by 2% in a positive direction. I think it's super interesting. Obviously, as you guys know, like collecting dietary data is fraught with its own problems. Nutrition science is just as... Nutrition science is like a challenging field. It's such a challenging field. That's it. So while we're getting binary data here, like either you are following this diet or you're

not, but what I'd want to know is kind of like what constitutes that diet and what was the person eating before? because I think people often have to be very motivated as well to include in their whoop journal that they're following this diet. So obviously some kind of dietary overhaul has gone on and it would be really good to know what they were doing before and obviously nutrition's very individual. When it comes to performance and recovery, there's no single diet that stands out in terms of what we know from the research. And if I was hard pushed to say that there's a single best diet, I would say it would be largely like a Mediterranean-style diet because when it comes to

recovery, especially for people who are high-performing active individuals, you, first and foremost, you need to be getting enough calories and then after that it's focusing on macronutrients. And really, you want a balance of all three because while some people do feel good off a low carbohydrate diet from a recovery point of view, especially if you're doing high, high-intensity training, you really need to be getting sufficient carbs in there. You want to be getting sufficient omega-3 fatty acids in there. And protein obviously is super important, not just for muscle building, but recovery, immunity, so many other things. And then thinking about kind of colorful fruits and vegetables, which are full of antioxidants and polyphenols, and they're super

important for recovery. So what I'd say from a, I think it's great that people are starting to track their diets alongside their recovery because then they can pick up on patterns, but that's what they are, their patterns. They don't tell us anything individual. I think it will be really interesting to see where we can go with this and get really geeky and see kind of how it does influence performance and recovery. I know we're going to do some research together this year. So we're going to be able to ask all sorts of questions that add some context to some of this data because I think you're right. I think it is really interesting, but there's a lot of context missing and a lot of things that we don't know. And I think you make another really good point is that, you know, we need to look at our lifestyle and our behaviors and our choices kind of more longitudinally. You know, we do a 30-day elimination diet, for example, and we see really positive results. Well, there's a lot of other things going on, too. You're probably hydrating more. You're probably implementing some exercise. So, you know, there's a cascade effect, a halo effect kind of around this one behavior potentially that's really contributing. to, you know, potential increases. But sometimes over time, that will kind of even off to your point

where, you know, some of these specific diets might lack certain nutrients, right? That's going to have a deleterious effect on your health over time. Hazel, just at a foundational level, I'm really interested in digging into biological differences, you know, and how that it might impact how we burn fat and how we fuel. Are there some just kind of overarching principles that you would think about for a male versus a female as it relates to just to fueling and to burning. I think this area of research in terms of sex differences in nutrition is so interesting, although very limited. So understudied.

As with anything, anything in sex differences is just like clutching at straws, but we are getting more. And there is some really interesting research out there. So when it comes to fueling our training, as a rule of them, like we generally use carbohydrates and fats as our primary fuel sources. And the proportion of each depends on the intensity of exercise. So at like higher intensity exercises, we're using a lot more carbohydrates, at lower intensities, we're using a lot more fats. And this is where it gets interesting because what we see is that women can use a lot more fat at higher intensities. And so,

So theoretically, if they're kind of able to tap into fat sources a bit more, it might stop them from hitting the wall in an endurance exercise, so i.e. not using up all their glycogen carbohydrate stores, but actually tapping into those fat sources as well and keep them going kind of faster for longer. I do my track workouts in high intensity fasted. And that's good. Oh, really? And I do. Yeah. And I think with that, well, I guess I'm kind of thinking that tapping, I'm using my fat as fuel for that workout, right? Which to me seems like a good thing potentially just if I'm trying to achieve some sort of metabolic flexibility where I can use fat and carbohydrates as fuel sources when I need to. I feel like that's a good adaptive type

of framework. But maybe that's incorrect. I would love to. Let's come back. Let's come back to faster training. Yeah. So ideally, like women are going to, so kind of theoretically, women could potentially be better at endurance sport because of this reason, because they're more adapted to using fat over carbohydrates at these higher intensities or moderate intensities. But men still outperform women in insurance sports. The thing is, if we look at like ultra marathons, the gap gets smaller. And so like in ultra races, it's like 4% performance difference. And then it's even smaller for open water swimming because it's not.

not just down to fuel utilization. It's like we have different muscle fiber buildup, so our muscles are less fat-compositions. Yeah, body fat distribution. There's so many other factors that are coming into play. And then again, across the menstrual cycle, we often, we see differences in fuel utilization. So again, in the luteal phase, we're going to use a bit more fat than we would use carbohydrates. Again, the caveat comes with some studies don't show any different. and most studies show a very small difference. But it's just really interesting to show it really just illustrates how important our hormones are in determining how we function as females and not just in sports and exercise,

but in everything from our sleep, our mood, nutrition, how we use energy, our motivation. Which is huge, right? Like when we talk about trying to actually deploy sustainable, healthy behavior, like being motivated to do that is a big piece of it, right? and that's it which is why like everyone says around ovulation that you're like super motivated and it's like estrogen's at its highest testosterone's just increased as well so we're just like ready to go in and smash pbs in the gym when it comes to fasted training i think it's it's super unique because i know a lot of people do well on training fasted and sometimes i prefer it

the reason that i'm slightly cautious of advising it in women is that oftentimes lines, it can lead to low energy availability or red S that we cause in sport. So it can lead to menstrual cycle disturbances. So what I'd say to women who want to try it or who are doing it, it's fine if it's less than an hour and it's not super intense. But if it's really high intensity exercise or more than an hour, think about just having a snack or getting some fuel on board just because you want to be really careful that you're not kind of misaligning your cycles. And that's not just because we want to make sure that we've got a regular cycle for the sake of it. It's because our menstrual cycle is a vital sign.

It's an indicator of how healthy our body is. So that's one of the reasons why I love why Woombs included the menstrual cycle tracker. It's like now we can track everything. I think you raise a really good point. And there are some vital signs that can help us understand whether or not our behaviors are serving us or if they're not. right like if i want to be if i can't be alert when i want to be alert and i can't be calm when i want to be calm something's a miss right with how i'm fueling how i'm exercising and how i'm sleeping right like those are kind of the core pillars of health right that i'm trying to

you know check off every single day in some you know shape or form and if you're giving advice to a male and to a female what would you say are kind of the vital vital signs and for me it's like yeah am i getting a regular period you know what is the health of that period. You know, I'm asking questions. I'm looking at my heart variability and my resting heart rate, my energy levels, you know, and am I alert when I want to be alert? Am I calm? I want to be calm. Can I sleep? Am I getting into deeper stages of sleep? You know, all of these things I think give us a really nice source of truth to understand whether or not our behaviors are serving us. You know, I kind of gave a little bit of a laundry list. Like, are there things that I'm missing?

Are there other things that you would recommend for folks? And are they different, you know, for men and women? Yeah, that's a really good point. So, like typically we have vital signs in medicine and so like when you come through the door of hospital you'll get like basic vital signs checked and so that just gives us an early warning score if something was to deteriorate and that's typically your breathing rate so your respiratory rate your heart rate your blood pressure and your temperature and there's been recently a call from i think it's the american college of gynecology have actually released the statement and they said that the menstrual cycle should be the fifth vital sign.

Wow. Because, it's not surprising. But we don't ask women. Like the only time, the only time that ever comes up is if someone comes in, they're like, I've got an issue with my menstrual cycle and that it's irregular or it's heavy or it's

light or whatever the problem is. But we don't ask, you know, if someone comes in, they're like, you know, I'm not performing well, I'm not sleeping. I've got low mood. We're not asking women where they are in their cycle or if they're having a cycle. And that blows my mind. It's something we should be asking. So I guess that answers your question from the sex differences point of view.

We need to ask women like, first of all, if they're naturally cycling, if they're having a regular cycle. And secondly, if they're on contraception, what form of contraception, how long they've been on it, if they get on well with it, because it's a very individual thing. And then women who are approaching the perimenopause and the menopause, that's another huge kind of group of women who I feel are really not supported. And that period of time is not just a gradual decline in hormones. It's like this topsy-turvy absolute hurricane of hormones. And so you're going to feel off-kilter. And so we really need to get more research in that cohort of

women as well. But I think what people can think about without having to measure things like hard and fast measures is just thinking about, like, their sleep, their mood, like their digestive system, their performance, things like that, like really basic measures. Woof makes that easy because you can track it every morning. You don't have to think about having a paper journal. But I think when, you know, like specifics too, you know, when where things are going wrong specifically, you know, which I think is just so helpful. Yeah.

And what I would say to people is to not accept feeling. a little bit low all the time or don't accept feeling a little bit tired all the time. If that's how you're feeling and that's not your normal, then that is reason enough to explore what's going on. There's so many things that it could be. So don't put it off and speak to your doctor. Beautifully said. What would you say, you know, for men, like, you know, I kind of heard this, like men should have an erection in the morning. Like, you know, what are kind of the signs for, you know, they don't get a period? So what are their vitals that may be a little bit outside the ordinary that they don't have to go to the doctor to kind of learn, but, you know,

are just really how their body should be kind of functioning naturally. Yeah, absolutely. I think, you know, we spoke about Red S, which is like relative energy deficiency in sport. And I think it's often easier to pick up in women because one of the first signs is their cycle will go or it will be very irregular. Whereas I think men, even though they're going under the same stress, they can hold on a little bit longer. And the signs might be a little bit longer. And the signs might be little bit more sinister and you mentioned it there like you know they may find that in the morning they don't have an erection or they're just like have no libido and right they're very low in mood and they're not motivated by the things that normally give them excitement in life and so I definitely

think that we've focused a lot on women when it comes to that I mean red s is an extension of the female athlete triad so it was primarily done in women but it affects anyone people of all genders and so if you think that you're under recovering or overtraining like the signs are you know they're easy to slip by and it will be things like you're not sleeping very well you're very irritable your sex drive is low all of these things so I think especially for high performing men like don't let those things slip through the net because it could be easily fixable it might be that you just need to eat a bit more it might be that you need to pull back on your training a little bit more or you need to maximize on your recovery.

Little tweaks like that can make a huge difference. The article they published in Mary Claire the other day that we were both featured in, I thought was a good, I mean, I think we can apply all of those same principles that we're talking about for women to men. And you mentioned a couple there, you know, just knowing when to pull back on the training. You know, like I think both, you know, men and women suffer, all folks kind of suffer from this who are kind of hard charging type A personalities. They think they have to work out every single day. But it's really figuring out, okay, how do we actually think about recovery and using these vital signs to help us understand if I have the right balance, you know,

and, you know, do I, like, thinking about mood and thinking about, you know, I'm actually, am I able to actually live my values? You know, am I adapting well to external stress? I mean, these are questions that we should be asking on ourselves. And I think you make just a gorgeous point that, you know, it's like we don't have to accept mediocrity for ourselves. We don't have to accept this kind of suboptimal state, you know, like there's so much good information out there that we can grasp on to, that we can build behaviors around that enable us to really be the best version of ourselves a majority of the year. I'd love to get your thoughts. I mean, there's a lot of really good literature based on your biology and psychology that help us understand

how to actually form habits. I know this is an area that you think a ton about. You know, you're constantly helping people develop frameworks. You personally probably have like an amazing framework for helping you know for yourself to stay on track. How does someone kind of if we think about sleep exercise and nutrition as kind of the almost the non-negotiables, you know, and that sounds kind of harsh. And it's not like we need to be perfect every single day of the month, but we're aiming to be, you know, as close to optimal as much as we can, right? If we really want to live our values with as much joy and energy as we can, you know, the foundational level, I think that's we're all kind of striving for. You know, what would be kind of that

framework that you would advise to really be able to adopt the behaviors that we need to kind of get the sleep we need, eat relatively healthy and exercise a few times a week? The psychology of behavior change is just so fascinating. And like, without that, we have nothing. You can't just tell people to eat less and move more. This doesn't work. Like, it's all down to behavior change in motivation. And so that's where we should start. That's where we should start when we're building new habits. And in order to build a new habit, it's hard. It's not easy, you know. We all have these ingrained routines. And so you have to disrupt that to a degree. And you have to be motivated to do it. But what you do repeatedly shapes the person who you want to be. And that's like my message to

people when I'm saying, you know, this isn't like, I'm not taking anything away from you. This is your opportunity to build a new life and be the person that you want to be. And I read a lot into habit change and read a lot of the research. But I think ultimately there's some really great books that are available to everyone that have really revolutionized, especially my way of thinking about habit building. And, you know, like James Clear and Greg McCune. And atomic habits. Yeah. Yeah. James Clear talks about making it easy, make it attractive, of make it satisfying and make it obvious. And so that's his interpretation of all the kind of cues of behavior change.

And the neurobiology and they're all rooted in neurobiology and psychology like that. I think that's just such a great, yeah, a beautiful. Yeah. So it's kind of he's taken the actual research and just made it really easy for people to understand it. And it makes it really easy for me to think about it. So how I'd explain that to someone is, you know, if say I'm going to take up running in the morning, to make it obvious, I'm going to leave out my trainers in the morning. To make it easy, I'm going to have a plan of what I'm going to do.

You know, I'm going to go for 4K or 5K run. To make it attractive, I'm going to line up a podcast or a playlist to make it more exciting for me to want to go do it or I'm going to rope in one of my friends to do it. And then to make it rewarding, I'm going to track my progress every day. I'm going to tick it off or use a habit tracker. And that's basically, how I for my habits. I'm really big into habit tracking to the point that I've just developed my own journal because I found myself using two different journals, one for like gratitude and one for habit tracking. And I wanted to merge both of them because I think if there are too many steps to what you're trying to achieve, you're more likely to not do it at all. So you want to simplify the process.

By tracking your habits, it's a really simple way for you to be accountable. And you can do that with a plain diary and a pen or you can track it in your phone. And we as humans love to be rewarded. But, you know, instead of rewarding yourself with buying something new or having a certain food, just track your progress by documenting it and look back in a month's time and you'll have done up to 30 days of this new habit change and look back in 60 days and that habit change will be a part of your life. I think a couple things really stand out to me. And I was a coach for a really long time. So I was constantly trying to figure out how do I get my athletes to enact these behaviors that I know are going to help them be a more successful athlete. And one of the things that I learned was was that actual reward prediction. So I'm basically thinking that's kind of step four, you know, is basically what is this thing going to actually do for me? And that actually becomes a real motivator and kind of unconscious at an unconscious level, but actually does propel action. and motivate action when we're thinking about, okay, in the future, what is this, what is this

going to do for me? I also think that, for me, like, negative visualization is also really powerful. I just wanted to put that out for there for people who, yeah, I know, it's crazy. So if I'm, like, for example, looking at my phone in the car, but obviously looking at your phone in the car is really dangerous, right? So for me, like, I visualize, you know, myself getting an accident or, you know, worse, I visualize myself, like, killing someone. Like, I know that sounds crazy, but but the negative visualization, like it actually motivates my behavior in some cases in a really powerful way. So just putting that out there as a potential option for folks who maybe are a little bit crazy like I am. Another great way for building habits is, you know the concept of

habit stacking, which is BJ Frogs. Oh, yeah. His principle where you pay a new habit with an old habit. Say, for example, every morning you pour yourself coffee and your new goal is to drink drink more water. Every time you pour coffee, you drink a glass of water. And so it's less easy to forget because you're trying to stick two habits together. It's another kind of easy way of thinking things. I love that. I think the key is, you know, you got to like really sit down and figure out, okay, what are the things that are going to give me the most? What are the things in my life that are going to give me the most energy and, you know, make me feel kind of at peace? And then it's like, all right, those are things I need to do every day. Okay. And then you got to go,

okay, well, what do I need to change about my habits? How do I link those habits with my identity? You know, I think that's a really important piece too is like, you know, to your earliest point around habit formation is like you kind of become your habits, you know, and in a lot of those accumulate unconsciously, right? Like they just, they just, you mindlessly collect habits throughout the year that really probably, a majority actually probably don't serve you, you know, or not really who you want to be. So kind of linking those habits like very closely to the things that you've value, linking very closely to like your actual identity is also, I think, a really important loop to make sure that's connected if, in fact, you know, changing a behavior or really

developing a new habit is of interest. Okay, Hazel, on the topic of research, you are a part of our women's performance collective, which is essentially just a group of the most badass women who are just basically advisors, you know, to whoop to just help us, you know, stay honest on track with really our goal of being able to amplify the female voice. and, you know, doing that through quality research and case studies, you know, what kind of research are you the most excited about? I know that we're going to be able to use our data sets to do some deep dives and potentially, you know, send some surveys out to members potentially, you know, to get some at some context around some of these things that we're trying to investigate.

You know, what do you feel like you're most excited about going in the new year to investigate? Yeah, I think, first of all, I'm so excited about the women's performance collective because, like, you know, the reason that we founded it is obviously because there's such a huge lack of research into the kind of female body and physiology. And that's just an area that like I really want to get my teeth into and have recently be doing a lot of the kind of my own independent research in that space. And what we know is that, you know, men and women are completely different. We're not small men and, you know, we perform differently.

We sleep differently. we use nutrients differently, even down to the diseases that we suffer from, we experience them very differently. And what's really interesting as well is across our hormonal lifespan. And so we see at these major milestones, premenstrually, puberty, around pregnancy and postnatally, and then into the menopause, they're almost like periods of vulnerability where women are more likely to experience certain health conditions, namely things like insomnia, depression and anxiety, gut issues. And so that's what I want to know more about

and how we can best support women during that. And I think, you know, thinking about what we have at whoop, like sleep is obviously central to recovery and central to the loop tracker. And we know that we're very good at it. It's a very clear objective measure that we can rely on. It's so good for research and the research looking at sex differences between men and women is a little bit outdated and we know that like you know at certain points of the menstrual cycle women have greater sleep disturbance namely kind of in the second part of the cycle in the luteal phase coming up to the next period and also we see it at different parts of a female lifespan and so how can we because we just spoke about how important sleep is

And so I think this is a public health issue that women aren't sleeping as well. And of course, this is, you know, not just our hormones and our physiology. It's also women tend to be, you know, more caregivers. They ruminate more over things. Yeah. But if we have these high-performing female athletes who aren't sleeping well, there's so much scope there to maximize that. And it might be that we come up with unique sex-specific sleep hygiene measures

to ensure that in these periods of sleep disturbance, we're able to actually offset some of that. And that's kind of, that's my vision. I love that. Well, I'm excited to support you in any way that I can. I know WOOP is excited to support you. And yeah, we're really excited to just continue 2022 with our mission to unlock human performance, you know.

And I think having folks like you in our ecosystem who we can do quality research with is, is everything, you know, and I think the actual real value that we bring to our members. So thank you for just all the good work that you do, educating the public around these really important topics. You're just such an inspiration and just really grateful for that conversation today. So thank you. No, thank you.

I'm so excited to be part of the Woop team. Thank you to Dr. Wallace for coming on the podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, please give us a rating or review. Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast. You can check us out on social at WOOP at Will Ahmed, and you can get 15% off a W-W-Membership by using the code Will, W-I-L-L. All right, watch that respiratory rate, keep it balanced, stay in the baseline. We'll see you next week. Thanks, everyone.