I want women to stop being losers. And
so, I'm on a mission to really undo the
genuinely terrible advice that most
women have been given as it concerns
their health and their fitness. So,
we're going to talk through some
actionable strategies on how to build a
body that has curves, more of [music] an
hourglass figure. But, Stephen, if I can
be very honest with you, I am pissed off
because we've been sold a lie that our
worth is the number on the scale. And
I've seen tens of thousands of patients
over my 20-year tenure. And right now, a
lot of online dialogue is I want to be
toned. I want to have the Pilates body.
Be as small as possible. So, this is
where I get a little fired up because I
also have personal experience struggling
with my own weight and my own worth. I
was trying to become what I thought was
the right thing. And I had massive
problems afterwards. So, I am going to
be very transparent and honest with you.
The pursuit of skinny is a bad thing
with devastating consequences. Like,
you're going to end up with bone disease
like osteoporosis.
>> So, there's lots of things on the desk
here in front of us that I'd love to go
through. We've got these five fitness
myths.
>> Yes, so one of them, for example, is a
lot of women are scared to consume more
carbohydrates because they think [music]
it's going to make them fat. But, we
need carbohydrates for our mood, our
sleep, even performance at the gym. And
then there's also women are scared that
if they're lifting heavy weights, that
they're going to start looking like a
bodybuilder. But, that's almost
impossible. 97%
of women don't have the hormonal
environment to bulk.
>> And then we've also got these archetypes
here.
>> So, there's four [music] archetypes that
women identify themselves in their
fitness journey. And the most common
woman that I see is skinny fat Sophie.
And we'll talk about what this means.
>> So, let's talk about what the women
listening should understand about
hormones. How do you think about fasting
and your menstrual cycle? What are the
specific issues that mothers face as it
relates to fitness? I mean, there's lots
of things that I'd love to talk about.
>> 100%. That makes me so excited.
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the show.
Dr. Stephanie Estima.
Why is it you do what you do? Like,
ultimately, what is it you're trying to
change in the world? What impact are you
trying to have? And who are you trying
to have [clears throat] it for?
>> Well, I am on a mission to really undo
the
genuinely terrible advice that most
women have been given as it concerns
their health and their fitness. And what
I mean by that is
for the vast majority of health and
fitness goals for women, it's all about
becoming smaller. It's about becoming
skinnier. It's about losing weight. It's
about dropping a dress size. Stephen, if
I can be very honest with you, I want
women to stop being losers. I want them
to stop trying to lose all the time.
And instead, what I would love for them
to do is to shift their focus from
losing
and
focusing more on what they have to gain.
So, how much muscle can they gain? How
much bone density can they gain? How
much connective tissue capacity from
their joints, their tendons, their
ligaments can they gain?
Can they work towards building a body
that they love and trust and enjoy
living in?
>> Why do you want that for women?
Specifically this losing gaining thing.
>> We've been sold a lie that our worth is
the number on the scale, which is by the
way, you know, when you when you're
weighing yourself, this is really just a
reflection of your relationship with
gravity, no more, no less, right? But we
are told that when we fit into a certain
dress size, that we are now worthy, that
we will
somehow have arrived. That is not the
full experience of being women. Women
can be strong, women can be capable,
women can be competent, and you can't do
that when you're starving yourself, when
you're over exercising and you're not
prioritizing your recovery or treating
recovery like it is something that you
have to earn.
>> So, are you saying being skinny is a bad
thing or
>> I'm saying that the pursuit of skinny at
all costs is a bad thing. So, right now
a lot of online dialogue is, you know,
strong is the new skinny. I don't want
to pit those two things against each
other, but I do want to like if you are
obese, you are much better not being
obese, right?
>> Mhm.
>> But it is the
pursuit of skinny at the sacrificial
altar of everything else. So, if you are
somebody who values being slim, the
likelihood that you are going to pick up
heavy weights or weights that challenge
you with enough effort and intensity is
going to be lower.
The likelihood that your bone density is
going to be sufficient over the arc of
your life is going to be lower. You are
going to likely under consume calories.
If you are someone who thinks that
they've won because they can fit into,
you know, you're 40 and you can fit into
a size whatever dress. But when you're
65, you have osteoporosis, you haven't
won. You've been you've been tricked.
>> Tricked by who?
>> A society that tells us that our worth
is solely based on how small we are.
>> Hm.
And who are you? Like in terms of why
this matters so much to you as Dr.
Stephanie?
>> Yeah.
>> What do I what context do I need to know
there?
Cuz I can see you're a little bit pissed
off.
>> I'm so
>> [laughter]
>> Yeah, I am pissed off in a loving way.
So we'll say it that way. I have
professional experience in this and I
also have personal experience in it as
well. I have an undergrad in
neuroscience and psychology from the
University of Toronto. When I was
pursuing that, I became a fitness
instructor,
uh a personal trainer. So this is, you
know, very young. I started having uh my
first exposure to seeing firsthand how
people were setting goals for themselves
and having a difficult time achieving
it. Went on to the Canadian Memorial
Chiropractic College in Toronto, Canada.
And then I was in I've been in practice
for 20 years. So I've seen
tens of thousands of of patients over my
20-year tenure and the same pattern kept
showing up over and over and over. And
then personally, I also, you know, just
being a woman living in this society,
grew up also struggling with my weight,
trying to control my what I ate, trying
to do lots and lots of cardio to keep my
weight down into what I thought was the
ideal body type. I competed in a figure
competition, which was really the first
moment for me where I really felt like
the science failed me because I had
followed everything to a T. Do lots of
cardio,
restrict your calories,
you have to earn your recovery. The day
that I got up on stage, I was 11% body
fat. So just just for context, you know,
women have
about 10 to call it
13% essential body fat. And if you go
beneath that, then you start to get into
a lot of trouble. So, I was right at the
bottom range of that.
Most women, a healthy body fat
percentage is something like
call it 18 to 25%.
I had lost my period for 2 months before
I think it was two or three months
before I stepped on stage. I ended up um
with hormonal issues. My period had I
had It took a long time for that to
regulate again. I gained all the weight
back that I had lost.
And I felt like a total failure. And I
felt like the science had failed me.
>> And it caused you a lot of pain.
>> I hated myself.
Like, full stop. I looked in the mirror.
I hated what I saw.
I would pinch I would pick I was like, I
wish this, I wish that, I wish I wish.
The other thing I'll say is the weeks
before I stepped up on that stage,
people were coming up to me and
showering me with compliments. People
were like, "Oh my god, you look you look
amazing. What are you doing? What's your
program?" And so, it's I think it's so
confusing for women. Maybe we lose the
weight or we we go on this health
journey, which is often just code word
for getting smaller.
And we we get showered with these
external compliments. And at the time, I
was starving because I was not eating. I
was completely overworked. I wasn't
sleeping. And I didn't have my period.
Like, I was not the picture of health,
but everybody was telling me
how amazing I was, how amazing I looked.
So, I think that's where we get it we we
we hitch our worth to what the outside
world tells us, rather than thinking
about who we need to be and how we need
to show up for ourselves first in order
to be able to give to everybody else,
but also just unhitch ourselves from
other people's expectations of us.
>> And for the women and for all the people
I guess that have clicked to listen to
this conversation right now, what are
they going to leave this conversation
with specifically? And how is that going
to impact their life?
>> Yeah. So, this is for women and the men
who love them. So, this is for everyone.
>> Okay.
>> Um
I think for women, maybe you have been
doing like the good girl thing like I
was doing, you're doing the things that
you thought you should have been doing,
but you still don't have the dream body
or the body composition that you want.
We're going to talk through some
actionable strategies on how to do that.
I think if you're in midlife, so you're
in your 40s, your 50s, and maybe you're
finding that you used to do those
strategies and now they're not working
for you as well or as much as they once
did, we're going to maybe break a little
bit of your paradigm in the way that you
think you're thinking about health.
>> And how old are you?
>> I'm 48.
>> Hm.
>> Mhm.
>> I think it's important context.
>> Yeah.
>> But you're also a mother?
>> I'm a mother of two, yeah.
>> Of two.
>> Mother of two and then I have a I'm have
a stepson as well.
>> Okay.
>> Mhm.
>> [clears throat]
>> So, um there's lots of things on the
desk here in front of us that I'd love
to go through. They're all things that
really really interest me. We've also
got these five fitness myths in this
envelope here that we'll reveal at some
point and these archetypes here.
Where do you believe the best place to
start this conversation is?
>> I think that maybe we can talk about the
archetypes because I think that it sets
the stage for allowing women
to identify themselves in their fitness
journey, however that is.
Okay, my first Overwhelmed Olivia, this
woman wants to do the right thing. Okay,
so she is on social media and within a
couple of minutes of going on social
media, she sees someone saying, "Plants
are trying to kill you. Olivia, you
should never have plants. They're
terrible for you. And she keeps
scrolling and then she comes upon
someone else who says, "Actually, plants
are great for you. They have lots of
fiber. They have lots of phytonutrients,
etc."
So, she's like, "Oh, okay, that's weird.
Let me look up some fitness stuff." And
then same thing with the fitness. Some
people say,
"You don't want to get bulky, Olivia.
So, you need to do light weights, high
reps." And then there's other people
that are like, "That's not true. You can
As long as you're bringing the muscle
close to failure, you will build
muscle." So, she's getting the I like to
call it infobesity. It's like so much
information. It's too much information
that she ends up getting like you know,
it's like analysis paralysis. And this
woman, I have a soft spot for her
because she just is so scared to start
something else and fail at it because
she doesn't want
that to reinforce her own schema, her
own perception of her being a failure.
All right, so she doesn't do anything.
When we think about uh overwhelmed
Olivia, we don't want to get her A to Z.
We don't want to get her all the way to
her goal. We just want to give her a
couple of quick wins to start. Right?
Get her just A to B. We're just going to
get her walking. She's just going to
have a goal of racking up 5 to 7,000
steps in a day so she feels like she's a
winner in some vertical of her life. And
then you start to layer in more things
with her as she goes along.
The second one is probably my favorite,
the the most common woman that I see,
skinny fat Sophia. So, the technical
term for skinny fat is TOFI, thin on the
outside, fat on the inside. This is a
woman who doesn't present as obese, but
her body composition, she's starting to
see a loss of maybe bone loss, a loss of
muscle because she is not she's very
afraid of heavy weights. So, maybe I'll
do some Pilates, some yoga, maybe I'll
walk, right? She also calorically
restricts as well, right? So this woman
is my is like personally she's my
favorite woman because when we start
giving her a little bit more food
>> Mhm.
>> [clears throat]
>> and we start giving her just a little
bit heavier weights than the 2-lb
weights that she's been lifting, you
know, in her Pilates class. And by the
way, I don't want Pilates people to come
for me. I love Pilates, but it's just
not the main strategy for muscle
building. So it's just
>> Pilates.
>> I love Pilates. I do it twice a week.
It's fantastic.
But this woman, when she starts eating a
little bit, I all This is what she
always says to me.
I can't believe I'm losing fat. I can't
believe I'm losing weight by eating
more. What is this trickery? What is
this magic? So I love this woman because
when we get her to see the light, it's
actually just it's just a beautiful
thing to have all her schema sort of
rearrange in terms of what she thought
was possible for her.
>> Mhm.
>> Okay?
>> This subject to fat.
>> Yes.
>> If someone comes to you and they say,
"Stephanie, I would love to lose some
some belly fat
>> Mhm.
>> because I'm skinny fat. Or maybe I'm
just, you know, I just have a bit too
much weight on me. What is it you say to
them?"
>> You can't actually spot reduce.
>> What does spot reduce mean?
>> So someone wants to reduce their belly
fat, you can't just target belly fat. So
the way that you're going to reduce
overall adiposity in the body is you're
going to be strength training, which
we've talked about, but you will
probably also need some kind of caloric
deficit. So when we think about that
very famous, somewhat oversimplified
calories in, calories out, so you want
me thinking about
how am I going to create a deficit? So
I'm consu- either consuming less
calories on the calories inside or I'm
eating the same, but I have more output.
So I'm doing more cardio or I'm doing
more weight lifting or I'm doing more
walking or I'm doing something where my
calories out surpass my calories in.
>> Is there an easiest way to do that? Cuz
we hear hearing that, you know, just eat
less is is quite
>> I hate it.
>> It's it's, yeah, know, not great.
>> Yeah, and it doesn't it doesn't work in
the long term, either. You can
temporarily reduce your food, but at
some point, your hunger hormones and
your body is just going to drive you to
consume more calories. I often find when
women are like, "Hey, I just want to I
want to build muscle and lose fat." Or
if it's just, "Hey, I want to lose fat."
I personally find it easier for women,
specifically, to do more on the calories
out side. So, not to
>> Exercise.
>> Yeah, so doing more exercise, more daily
movement. I think that the calories in
is totally doable. People do it all the
time. I just find it's hard for most
women to stick to long term. Cuz then
they have to, you know, they got to
measure, they got to do all the things.
So, if you can figure out what your
maintenance calories are, and then you
can surpass that with maybe more walking
or something that's not going to ratchet
up your hunger hormones or your cortisol
levels, let's say, I think that that's
often I think it's a healthier option,
personally, um because you're also
making sure that you're getting in
sufficient substrate, sufficient
calories, so that you can actually build
you know, you can build muscle, bone
density, collagen, etc.
So, that's our skinny fat Sophia. Up
next, I was this woman I sometimes still
am this woman, exercist Emily. So, this
is a just a funny word, um
to really describe
the intensity that this woman puts out
at the gym, right? So, this woman, you
have no problem getting her to the gym.
She is the woman at the squat rack.
There's no problem getting her to the
gym and getting her to work very diffi-
like very hard. What her issue is, and
this was me for years, is that she still
has some of the skinny fat Sophia
attitude towards food. So, there's a
mismatch with her between how much
effort she's putting out with her uh
exercise program and how much energy is
coming in with her food. She's still
under eating because she's scared of
gaining weight.
>> Mhm. I was exorcist Emily. I was, you
know, had the hoodie on, wearing the ear
like I nobody talked to me with my big
earphones on.
Uh this was for me after I was going
through a divorce with my I had very
young children at the time. They were
five and three. So I was I was grieving
that and I was still adhering to this
idea that I had to punish myself. That I
was going to go to the gym and crush it
and then follow that with insufficient
calories afterwards because I still had
that well I can't eat a lot I'm going to
gain weight kind of mentality.
So exorcist Emily, we love her.
Um and then the pinnacle if you will is
the dialed in Diana. So this is the
woman who has
maybe made peace with some of her
demons,
um enjoys movement, knows that it's a
way for her to tend to herself. You
know, food is not a punishment. It's not
she doesn't restrict calories because
she ate too much. She fuels to nourish
her lifts, to nourish her recovery, and
for pleasure. Cuz I think a lot of us a
lot of women have forgotten that food is
is pleasure. It gives us joy and
happiness. My sourdough bread in the
morning gives me lots and lots of
pleasure and I will not give it up for
anything. So this is sort of the
this is where we want every woman to be
able to get to. We want her to dial in
both her exercise program, her nutrition
program, and to give herself some effing
grace with her recovery.
>> You can swear.
>> Yeah, her [ __ ] her [ __ ] So give
herself some [ __ ] grace with her with
her recovery.
>> got demonetized.
>> [laughter]
>> Okay, but I get it. So we're trying
We're trying to get everybody to become
dialed in Diana.
>> Yeah.
And also just know so if you've been
listening to these descriptions like oh
I got a little bit of the exorcist Emily
I got a little bit of that rage or grief
or something but then I also sometimes
have analysis paralysis like you will
also oscillate through them and that's
completely normal as well. Yeah.
>> When you were talking about excess
stamina, that was not a wasn't a light
season of your life, was it?
>> No, it was very dark. And it was the
There was the lifting that got me
through it, truthfully.
Yeah. It's, you know, sometimes when we
think about resistance training, it's
literally training your resistance. It's
not a question for, you know,
if something bad is going to happen,
it's just a it's a matter of when.
So, I think something,
you know, voluntarily putting yourself
in a situation where you are making
yourself uncomfortable, you know, going
to the gym and moving your muscles to
failure is not, you know,
it's not fun. Uh it can be quite
intense, but it does train your
resistance, your grit, your mental
capacity to withstand,
you know, terrible things.
>> So, by the end of this conversation,
everybody listening is going to be a
dialed-in Diana.
>> I That is my dream.
>> Okay, let's do it.
>> dream. Yeah.
>> First, we should start with debunking
some of the myths. What's the six myths
in this
little envelope here?
>> Okay.
So, the first one is carbs.
>> Mhm.
>> And so, the So, all the ladies who are
listening, we have to heal our
relationship with carbohydrates.
You can restrict carbs temporarily and
for certain populations, that's a
wonderful idea.
Uh if you're a woman that has a type 2
diabetes or PMOS, something like that, a
temporary clawback of carbohydrates is
fantastic for improving insulin
insensitivity, glucose disposal, um
but diets like a low-carb diet or a
ketogenic diet, which I am a big fan of
for certain populations and even for a
temporary amount of time, I think what a
lot of women did with the carbs is once
they started losing weight on a keto
diet or a low-carb diet,
they said, "Oh, you know what the
problem is?
It's the carbs. I'm never going to go
back.
And the problem with that is that if you
were sick, you had a bacterial
infection, you went to your doctor, they
did a swab, came back positive, and
they're like, "You know what? You have a
bacterial infection. I'm going to give
you a script for antibiotics." Right?
You're going to take it for the next 10
days, and then, you know, you'll come
back for a checkup and we'll see how
you're doing.
You do that, you follow the protocol,
you take the medication.
I don't think anybody listening, or at
least I hope, anybody who's listening is
not going to come to the conclusion at
the end of those 10 days, "Do you know
what I need to do to never get sick
again?
I need to continue taking antibiotics
for the rest of my life." No one is
going to do that. But somehow, for
carbohydrates, people made the
illogical conclusion that you should
never have carbohydrates ever again.
And for women, what I noticed, so I'm
sure we'll talk about my first book, The
Betty Body, I advocate for a low low
carbohydrate, a higher protein diet in
there, but for a transient amount of
time, right? Until you achieve the goal
of, you know, reversing metabolic issues
or losing some weight, etc., improving
your period, that's another thing that
we actually see is menstrual cycle
regulation. But if you stay here too
long, your thyroid, like so many women
>> What's the symptom of the consequence if
your thyroid being malfunctioning?
>> Yeah, I would say you're always cold.
So your hands are cold, you're always
cold. You might have very, very heavy
bleeding, so your menstrual cycle during
your bleed week, so that first three to
seven days, let's say, when you're on
your period. Hair shedding, so hair
starts to actually fall out. Hair is not
necessary at all for survival. So when
you don't have sufficient calories or
sufficient balance of macros, your body
is going to sacrifice the things that
don't matter at all to your survival.
And a lot of women will start to say
hair uh shedding comes out. The classic
sign is the lateral third of the
eyebrow. We start to see the lateral
third of the eyebrow start to fall out
as well.
>> mean the lateral third?
>> The outside the outside third of the
eyebrow. So, the tail for most people of
their eyebrow starts to get really
sparse and thin as well.
So, there's lots of common signs and
symptoms, but we need carbohydrates if
not for the thyroid, but for our
mood, our sleep, even performance
performance at the gym. In the vein of
transparency and honesty, I don't always
get to eat before I train, but on the
weekends when I do and I have some
bread and I have some omelets or I have
what it my breakfast and I go and train,
fantastic performance enhancer. A lot of
women are scared to consume more
carbohydrates because they think it's
going to make them fat.
And this is really comes down to this C
I M or carbohydrate insulin model of
obesity, which has kind of largely been
like disbanded. There's not a lot of
evidence to support it anymore, but
there's a lot of people online that will
scare you and think, well, if you have
carbs, your glucose levels might spike.
And that, you know, the way that it's
often presented is that is the worst
thing that ever could happen to you.
>> But there's such a thing as too many
carbs.
>> Correct. Yes. I think that the problem
is not that the carbs were the problem,
it's the overconsumption of carbs, the
overconsumption of fat, the
overconsumption of of total calories.
>> So, it's defined by calories here.
>> Yes.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
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so much.
What's the next one? What's the next
myth in your folder?
>> Oh, this one. I love this one.
Uh this one is
women
getting bulky.
Women are still scared that if they
engage in a program of
progressive overload, which is to say
that you are maybe you are lifting heavy
weights, maybe you are doing more
volume, meaning you're doing more sets
or more repetitions, that somehow you
are going to bulk up. As if
to say that they're going to start
looking like a you know, some a physique
competitor, a bodybuilder.
It [snorts] is the equivalent of saying,
well, if you drive to the store to get
some groceries that you are going to be
on par with Lewis Hamilton and you're
going to be a Formula 1 driver, right?
It's just
almost
impossible for I'm going to say 97 to
98% of women don't have the hormonal
environment to bulk. There are a few
genetically gifted outliers that
absolutely can, but for the most part,
women cannot bulk. We do not have as
much I don't have as much testosterone
than as you do. You have like 10 to 20 x
more than I do. So, even if we train the
same way, I'm never going to be able to
put on as much muscle mass as you.
But a gal can continue to dream, right?
I can continue to hope.
>> [laughter]
>> So, bulking up it's not a thing.
Um what I what I will say though,
actually what I will say is some people
when they do start lifting weights
initially, they will start to feel a
little thicker, right? Cuz the muscle is
a little bit more swollen. There's also
a layer of fat that usually sits on top
of the muscle. So, as you begin to lose
body fat, your muscles will begin to uh
poke through, let's say. Um but
sometimes that's why people will feel
bulk they'll say, oh, I'm I'm getting
bulk I started and I stopped because I
was getting bulky. It's just a sort of a
a swelling or an inflammation, let's
say, of the muscle underneath.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
Ooh.
Long fasts.
So, I will call myself out here as well.
I used to believe that this was the key.
And this is when I was in my skinny fat
Sophia era, when I was in my Exorcist
Emily era, where I thought that the more
you could fast, the less calories you
could take in,
and you could lose weight. You want to
make sure that you have total sufficient
calories. You don't want to over consume
calories, but you also don't want to
under consume them either.
But fasting doesn't actually teach you
how to eat when you are not fasting,
right? So, I think that a lot of people
overly rely on long fast. So, when I say
long, I would say 20 hours, 24 hours,
36, 72, like these really multi-day
fasts. If I start eating a lot less
calories than let's say you do,
I'm going to have, over the long term,
more detrimental effects than you might.
>> Why?
>> The female body is just more sensitive
to whether nutrients are coming in or
not, so that we can figure out whether
or not we want to direct our energy to,
you know, being able to get pregnant
that month. Our ovaries, when we sort of
look at the density of the mitochondria
in them, it's something like 100,000
mitochondria per oocyte, like per cell.
So, they're constantly scanning the
environment to see whether it's safe for
uh a woman to get pregnant. And so, if
you are fasting all the time, you run
the risk of sending a signal that it's
not safe, that these are famine
conditions, and that you should not be
producing an egg because that would be
terrible because if you got pregnant,
there's not enough food to feed you or
the baby.
>> So, it shuts off
the your your menstrual cycle as a way
to stop you having a baby.
>> Yes. So, you can still fast, but the way
that I like to fast is sort of pull the
food, you know, call it 2 to 3 hours
before you go to sleep.
That's when you cut off the food, you
sleep for 8 or 9 hours, that's like a
10-hour,
11-ish hour fast, and then you wake up
in the morning and you eat.
What often happens is women try to push
that they'll have a cup of coffee in the
morning and then they try to push their
eating window, let's say, to 11:00 or
noon.
And that ends up Oh, it becomes more
difficult, I'll say it that way. It
becomes more difficult for you to get in
sufficient calories, sufficient protein,
sufficient carbohydrates, and fats in a
restricted eating window.
>> Mhm.
>> Yeah. Okay. So, this is related to the
bulky myth.
I think a lot of women are scared of
lifting heavy partially because they've
never done it, so it's foreign.
And I think that the other
reason that women are scared of lifting
heavy is they're scared of getting
injured, which to be fair is a valid
concern.
I think that in the era of, you know,
again, social media can be a blessing
and can be the greatest thing ever and
sometimes it can be a um a vehicle for
misinformation.
And I think now we hear muscle mommies
and lifting heavy and I think that for
women, at least in my cohort, you know,
40s and 50s who grew up in the, you
know, the 90s, the Kate Mosses and the
asking a woman who is very comfortable
with a cardio machine as her vehicle for
exercise to now move into the, you know,
the free weight section of the gym, the
deadlifting platforms, even the
machines, can feel really intimidating.
So,
there are lots of different ways that
you can build muscle. It doesn't have to
just be heavy. There are other ways that
you can progressively overload the
muscle, which is to say that you are
applying sufficient intensity and effort
every single time, whether it's heavy
weight or it's more volume, or you're
increasing the density of your workout,
meaning you take less rest, so you're a
little bit more tired. Like, you can
There's a lot of different ways that you
can make a workout harder. It doesn't
always have to be heavy.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Heavy.
>> Oh, this one This one's good. This is
post-workout fueling. We used to think
that you only had 15 minutes to like
knock back a protein shake, right?
>> After you've done a workout.
>> After you've done a workout because you
need to replenish the glycogen and you
have to start muscle protein synthesis,
and I would say that this is largely
false. Your muscle protein synthesis is
not just limited to the 15 or 30 minutes
that are immediately after the workout,
right? Your muscles are building little
protein factories over the next, you
know, depending on how trained you are,
10 to 72 hours in some cases. As long as
you are getting sufficient, again, total
protein over the course of the day,
total calories over a 24-hour period,
totally fine.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah. Oh, pre-workout fueling. Okay.
I would say in an ideal world,
everyone would have some food before
they train. So, a little bit of protein,
little bit of carbs, just to start
raising some blood sugar to have some
available substrate um for the workout.
I don't do this
um most of the week. So, when I work out
during the week, I'm typically at the
gym around 6:00-ish in the morning,
and I don't I don't like the way that it
feels when I eat that early in the
morning, and it sort of feels like I
have a brick in my stomach. So, what I
typically do is I will
fuel with ketones. I have ketones uh for
my workout, and then when I get home,
that's when I have my big uh meal.
>> So, you have ketones before you do a
workout.
>> Yeah.
>> Why?
>> In the absence of food, I would say that
ketones are fuel that your body already
you your body produces ketones, right?
It's a fuel that your body already knows
what to do with, especially when it's a
big muscle group, so if you're doing a
leg day, let's say, or a back day, it
provides
you with the neural drive to continue
going. So, you get into that sort of
sympathetic state.
>> Mhm.
>> [clears throat]
>> That's my favorite um flavor, too, is
the green apple. My kids have the green
apple before their soccer, too.
>> I am a co-owner of this company, hashtag
ad.
>> Yes.
>> So, [laughter] I have to I have to
disclaim that. Otherwise, someone's
going to come for me.
>> Yeah. So, in an ideal world, we would
fuel before we work out, but my the
constraints that I have in my life is
that I just can't. In the weekend,
different story. I can wake up later. I
can have a long coffee with my boys, you
know, have breakfast, head to the gym,
and then, you know, I always know that
when I do have food, my performance is
>> better in the gym.
>> Better. Always, 100% of the time.
>> So, let's talk about what you do in the
gym. And why you do it. Cuz you clearly
got a big focus on muscle being
important.
>> Yeah.
>> I train with lots of women. I actually
trained with a colleague of mine this
morning called, uh,
George. She often goes off into like the
cardio section.
>> Mhm.
>> And she does muscles as well, some some
resistance training as well. And I go
off in the other direction to like the,
you know,
>> The platforms, yeah.
>> Like the men stuff that men typically
gravitate towards.
>> Yeah.
>> And I'm wondering what you think all
women should be doing in the gym. Like,
is there If you think about a 7-day
workout regime,
>> Mhm.
>> what do you think is optimal in those 7
days?
>> Yeah, there is I do want to I do want to
call out something you just said, and
then I'll answer your question. Um, you
just said, I go to the area that
typically men go to, and I do the
exercises that men typically do. So,
just because squats and deadlifts and
presses and pull-ups are typically done
by men, doesn't mean that those are male
exercises. Those are fundamental human,
you know, motor patterns that both men
and women can benefit from. Um, but to
your point, there is typically more men
doing those things that are more
comfortable doing those things versus
someone who's like, "Hey, I can figure
out how a stairmaster works. I'll just
get on this thing, and I'll be on here
for the next 35 or 40 minutes, right?"
>> I love the stairmaster.
>> I love the stairmaster, too. It's, uh, a
special kind of torture. It's great.
Okay, so,
in terms of what I think people should
be doing, if she can aim something like
three or four days a week of strength
training,
>> Yeah.
>> it would be alternating upper body and
lower body, and then we would be
thinking about what muscle groups are we
going to be working together. Is it a
pull or push? Yeah. So, this is um I
think
>> What is this?
>> This is from um my book, uh my upcoming
book uh called Nothing to Lose actually,
because we shouldn't be losing, we
should be trying to try to be gaining.
And these are the these are the muscle
groups that I want women to be thinking
about if their goal is body composition
and they are trying to build a body that
has curves. You can't spot reduce, but
you can definitely spot build. Like, you
can put curves where
uh you know, they weren't before. So,
what I've done in the book is I've
outlined muscle groups that I think
women should be focusing on in order to
help develop in more of an hourglass
figure. So, we have uh starting at the
top, we have the deltoid muscle group,
which you're these are your shoulder. I
like to call these your bread buns. So,
they're sitting on the side of your
shoulder, the lateral delts.
Below that, we'll have the back muscles
and the lats in particular. I like to
call the lats our angel wings because we
have, you know, it helps it sort of
create that V as the back widens, you
have a the appearance of a slender or
slimmer waist. Moving posteriorly, we
have glutes. So, there's three uh
muscles that make up the glutes. It's
max, med, and min. Glute maximus,
gluteus gluteus and then we have the
adductor group.
>> Which is the insides of the legs.
>> inner thigh muscles, yeah.
And then the last the last one is the
pelvic floor or may more broadly, we'll
say the the core muscles.
>> So, what do I need to know? For a woman
and I I'm thinking about building this
uh these five muscles that you've
highlighted here. Are there as it
relates to how I should be training and
the big misconceptions about how to
train to build this?
>> Yeah.
>> What do I need to know?
>> For these muscle groups, you probably
should be hitting something like 10 sets
of um exercises per week per muscle
group.
>> Okay, so if I do four hip thrusts,
>> Mhm.
>> um that is one set of four.
>> Correct.
>> And that's going to help my glutes.
>> Correct.
>> So you're saying that I should be doing
10 sets a week.
>> Per muscle group per week. Yeah.
>> But that's not actually that much.
>> It's not that much. No. And this is why
I was saying before the two times a week
that the ladies that are like I just
have I just have two. That's all I
That's all I can give you. You can still
have incredible results. As long as you
are taking the muscle close to muscle
failure, which is to say that you can no
longer perform the repetition anymore.
You don't have to take it to failure,
but as long as it's one to three
repetitions from failure.
That's all you need to do. And now, I
you know, it's simple to say that's all
you need to do. It's going to be very
difficult for you to do that because you
are going to start noticing your
uh range of motion, like your ability to
do your range of motion is going to be
limited. You're going to start noticing
the velocity of the repetition is
starting to slow down, so your ability
to sort of move the
the weight through space is going to
start slowing down. You're going to
subjectively, even though you can see
that you're holding like a 15-lb or
10-lb, you know, weight, it's going to
start feeling like 20 or 25. Like your
subjective perception of the weight is
going to be um increasing. You know, if
you were to rate it out of 10, you would
rate your effort like eight or nine out
of 10.
>> And men and women, because they have
different anatomies, should be doing
slightly different exercises?
>> I think that that's more a matter of
preference and goals.
>> But is my anatomy and your anatomy the
same?
>> Our anatomy is not the same. No. So,
when we think about the way that we move
through, let's say if you and I were to
squat together or you were and I were to
lunge together, there's going to be some
differences in terms of how we look. And
so, we'll pull up some props here if we
can. So, this is a female pelvis
and this is this little guy who doesn't
want to stand up today is a is a male
pelvis. So, when we sort of look at the
difference between them, the female
pelvis is wider and it's more shallow.
The male pelvis is more narrow and the
reason that we have more of the sort of
if you sort of look at the two this
looks like a little bit more like a
heart shape.
And this looks a little bit more like an
oval shape. And the reason for that is
to allow a baby to pass through.
Why this is so important is this is
going to shape the stressors that happen
in our knees and our ankles. So, in
particular we have something called the
Q angle which I believe I believe I have
a
Yeah, I have something Yeah, yeah. So,
here is the Q angle. So, what a Q angle
is is basically you take a measurement
from the hip and you draw it all the way
down to the kneecap or the patella and
then you take like another little line
from the tibial tubercle and and draw it
upward. So, that's just for all the
nerds that are listening
if you want to measure this it's the
anterior superior iliac spine all the
way down to the uh to the patella and
then the tibial tubercle. And what
you'll see for women here in pink
because the pelvis is wider, the femur
has to more aggressively come in
medially. It has to come more to the
center. So, this makes women when we
compare women and men, um it makes us
more knock-kneed. Which just means that
the knees are coming more together. So,
this is going to impact literally
every
how we move. So, it's going to affect
how we walk, how we jump, how we squat,
how we lunge, how we run. And so, it's
important to for women to understand how
we're different because often the
queuing and the instruction that women
get are sort of very they're based off
of a male pelvis, let's say. And so, we
can run into
feeling like squats are not comfortable,
that lunges are not comfortable, or we
start to even shy away from some of
these motions because we don't think
that they're meant for us. You just need
to know how to adapt your training so
that you can support some of those sheer
motions as you as you're moving. Because
what ends up happening for women is as
we are let's say lunging or squatting,
as the knee comes down, we will start to
see more sheer forces being placed
through the medial or through the inside
part of the knee. Right? So, that puts
us at a greater risk for uh ligamentous
injuries. So, in the knee, the big one
is the ACL that we often worry about.
So, as you're getting tired, you need to
be aware that you're going to have a
tendency for that knee to come in. And
there's nothing wrong with the knee
coming in as long as you have muscles
that can kind of support it. If I were
to grab this back here so we can sort of
think about superimposing it. If we were
to look at the the leg here,
the muscles that are going to be helping
to control the way that the hip moves it
are the glutes. So, you have the glute
max, but in particular the gluteus
medius, which is often called like the
upper shelf
uh muscle, that's actually going to help
the femur or counteract the femur being
pulled inwardly.
>> Mhm.
>> Yeah. [clears throat]
>> Yeah.
>> So, we do have different anatomical
differences that women need to be aware
of so that we can bias training that
will provide mobility and stability for
us. So, that's another reason why
I mean, yes, glutes look amazing in
jeans, but it's also because they are
providing such a driving force of
stability for the spine, for the knees,
for the ankles, literally for the entire
body.
>> And so, with squatting, men and women
should squat differently?
>> Yeah, not all women and men should squat
differently. There are women that can
squat in these sort of traditional
queuing.
>> Can you show me this?
>> I can. Yeah, I'll have to take my heels
off, but I'm happy to. Yes.
Do you want to do it now?
>> Sure.
>> Yeah, okay. Let's do it.
>> So, tell me how the anatomy of a woman
and a man determines how we should be
squatting.
>> So, I'll say first that you have to play
and see what feels good for you. So,
there's going to be some women that are
going to be able to squat just like the
traditional cues that I'm about to give
you. Most women prefer a little bit of a
wider squat and I'll show that. So, the
typical squat that were the way [snorts]
that we're often cued is feet are
hip-width apart, toes facing forward,
and then we're going to come down, and
then I'm just like I can't actually get
I'm trying I'm collapsing my chest at
this point. So, for women, what a lot of
women find is more comfortable can
actually get the range of motion that
you just demonstrated is taking your
feet a little bit wider, and then you're
going to turn the feet out. So, because
the female femur tends to sit a little
bit more spun inwards or in internally
rotated, now with this external
rotation, we can actually just get by
all of that, and we can come all the way
down into a squat.
So, and we can hang out here like I can
we can probably do the rest of the
podcast like this if you'd like.
>> I'd rather not. I'd rather [laughter]
not.
>> Yeah.
>> So, so that's the squat. Is there
anything else I need to know about the
squat, the the variance between men men
and women with squatting?
>> The other thing that you can think about
whether it's a squat with two feet or a
lunge or a split squat with one is with
a woman when she's coming down when
she's decelerating like she's coming
down into the into the lunge or into the
split squat, everything and your this is
true for you as well. Everything is
going to be internally rotating. So, the
femur, the leg bone is coming in, the
tibia is coming in, the foot on the
inside you're actually rolling onto the
you're flattening of the arch. It's
called pronation, which everybody says
is a bad thing by the way, but it's you
need it to be able to load the spring.
And then for women like if you and I
were to squat with the same leg forward,
you'll probably be able to see that as
I'm coming down, like my knee come my
knee tracks a little bit inward.
versus your stays a little bit more
straight. There's nothing wrong with
that. It's just a matter of whether or
not I have sufficient control with my
hip stabilizer muscles to in order to
make sure that I'm not putting excess
sharing forces on the on the knee.
>> So, you need to strengthen your hip
stabilizer.
>> Yep.
>> Okay.
>> The peach.
>> Cuz I I read something about I think it
was about the World Cup, the women's
World Cup, where they said that if
something like 12 women had got ACL
injury injuries in the lead up to the
World Cup.
>> Yeah. So, when we're thinking about why
that happens, it usually happens when
the athlete is tired. So, if it's
leading up to the World Cup, they've
probably over trained, they're not
recovering, uh and then it can be just
that they're training one day and she
takes a weird step, the sharing forces
happen just before her ligaments and her
tendons are able to stabilize it.
And and you and you damage it.
>> And is there is there true that there's
a connection between like your brain and
your mechanics that often result in
injury? Like so, I can't remember what
it was, but I think someone it was a
sleep doctor telling me that when you're
underslept, one of the reasons why you
get so many injuries is because when you
do like jump, your brain and your
>> time is slow. Yeah.
>> And you see a lot of athletes doing
doing this before games because they're
almost like practicing landing.
>> actually a little bit of deceleration.
So,
what that is is basically a stick and
land, right? So, they're jumping and
they're holding it so that the forces
are not dumped into the joints, but
rather absorbed into the connective
tissue, so the the ligaments and the
tendons.
>> And why is deceleration why is it
important even for everybody even
non-athletes to do that?
>> Well, if you are not an athlete and
you're just somebody who doesn't want to
fall and break a hip,
you know, I think that that's really
important. You know, if you're thinking
about falling, what you need to be able
to do is get the hip flexor up in front
of you, right? And then stop the fall.
So, there's a couple muscles. So, we
have the hip flexor muscle that has to
come up quickly in order to get ahead of
the fall. We have the tibialis anterior,
which is just this muscle in the front
of the tibia that is involved in what's
called uh dorsiflexion, which is just
nerd speak for toes come up, right? So,
you need to be able to clear the floor,
and then you need to have glutes to sort
of absorb and brake, right? And then we
were talking a little bit about the
hourglass figure before when we were
talking about the adductors or the inner
thigh muscles. One of the things that
the inner thigh muscles will do is
they'll actually pull the leg back
underneath you, right? So, they'll also
help to stabilize that fall. And the
adductors or the outside muscle group
like the side of the glutes, they're
also going to help brake. So, there's a
couple like when you're falling, it's
like you got to get the leg up, you got
to have the toe clear the floor, and
then if you're falling off to the side,
you need the adductors and the abductors
to be able to um
to stabilize so that you don't trip over
it.
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You guys know that I only drink one type
of coffee these days and it's called
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this morning when I came to work, I put
Cometeer, one of these wet balls, which
is another one of my favorites from
France. So, if you want to try your own
Cometeer,
they reserved a certain amount for Diary
of a CEO listeners. Just go to
cometeer.com/doac
and you can get $20 off if you use the
code doac at checkout.
So, let's talk about um let's talk about
supplementation. Do you take
supplements?
>> I do. I'll pre-frame this by saying that
I am a special category of nerd. So, I
take a lot of the foundational
supplements and then there are other
ones that I take because I'm just very,
very interested in the research and the
research excites me. But for I would say
for the general population, for women
that are listening, if they're thinking
like I got to supplement, there's a
couple of sort of tier one, we'll say,
supplements that we want to be thinking
about. So,
I will find my magnesium first.
This is our
tried and true bestie, okay? So, I love
a magnesium uh glycinate. There's lots
of different kinds, uh but glycinate's
just the easiest to absorb for most
people. It tends to help with
relaxation, helps with sleep, helps with
muscle recovery. So, this is something
that I love. I'll usually take one like
250 megs at lunchtime, and then another
one in the evening. So, magnesium for
everyone.
>> How do you remember to take them?
>> I tend to habit stack them. So, I always
know that when I'm preparing my lunch, I
actually keep my magnesium right beside
my salt and my pepper. So, as I'm like
salting my food, I'm like, oh yeah,
there's the magnesium, I'm going to take
it. And I have another bottle upstairs
in my bathroom. So, as I'm getting ready
for bed, I'm putting up my hair, I'm
doing my skin, whatever, I will I'll
take one there, too.
>> So, you put it in the way
>> Yeah.
>> of of other habits.
>> Cuz otherwise, if I put it in a really
beautiful supplement closet, it's just
going to
>> Yeah, same.
>> stay there.
>> I have to put it on my desk. And also,
when I travel, it's on the hotel desk.
>> Yeah. You're already doing something
else, so just put the thing next to the
thing you're already doing, and your
compliance and your adherence is going
to go up, right?
>> [snorts]
>> Um what else we got in here? Ooh,
omega-3s. Okay. These are so well
established in the literature. They
reduce inflammation, they help with
cognition. Something like 2 to 4 g a
day.
>> I didn't know you needed to keep it in
the fridge. I've been keeping it in a
hot cupboard for the longest time.
>> Yeah. I mean
>> Probably spoils.
>> It just yeah, it just helps with with
spoilage. So, you can pop them in the
fridge, and then same kind of thing,
like habit stacking. So, as you're
opening up the fridge, put it in front
of, you know, the thing that the thing
that you would most commonly reach for.
So, you go for fruits in the morning,
you put them right beside your fruits.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
Uh what other goodies do we have in
here? Vitamin D, for sure. Uh D3 with a
K2. Uh 4,000 IUs minimum uh per day, I
would say. Most people should be taking
that. They call it a vitamin, it's not
really a vitamin. It's more of like a
prohormone or prehormone. So, this is
really important for sex hormone,
reproductive hormone uh production, uh
again, inflammation, cognition.
>> Every day?
>> Every day. Every day.
>> I went to the doctor, and he said I was
deficient in vitamin D and omega-3. So,
there's
>> know how many Even if you live in a
sunny I can't tell you I've had patients
who live in, you know, Florida, let's
say, where it's you think that you're
getting a lot of sun exposure because
the temperature is
uh inimical to that, and you run their
vitamin D, and
>> It's crazy.
>> Yeah.
>> Crazy.
>> Ooh, I'm so happy you have this one
here, creatine. Uh I know you just had
Dr. Darren Candow on the show. He was
actually on my podcast as well. For
women,
you know, I think creatine used to be
this um
like bro supplement, you know, it's like
these the bodybuilders with the scary,
you know, noises and the, you know,
weird t-shirts and stuff. But the
creatine is really, really important for
women. The way that Dr. Candow uh
described it to me was he said, you
know, lifting weights builds the cake,
and this is like the icing on top of it,
right? So, you're not going to, you
know, enhance performance, you're not
going to build strength if you're just
doing the creatine. You have to be
pairing it with the mechanical signal of
resistance training, but I think every
woman can be taking 5 g, 3 to 5 g of
this every single day.
>> How much are you taking?
>> I take five.
>> Sometimes you take a bit more than five.
>> Sometimes I take a little bit more than
five. So, when you have been, and this
is this is the little perimenopausal
hack because I am in fully in the throes
of it right now,
there are nights where I don't sleep
well.
So, [snorts]
taking a higher dose of creatine that
day will help with your cognition, your
awareness, and your alertness. So,
something like a 10-g dose because it's
a little bit harder to get if my
understanding of it is it's harder to
get across the blood-brain barrier, so
you need a higher dose in order to
facilitate that. But yeah, 10 g.
>> And what impact has it had on you? Have
you noticed an impact?
>> When I haven't slept well, yeah,
definitely if I take it in the morning,
it definitely wakes me up. I would say
that when I am not taking regular like
I'm not taking the 3 to 5 g or, you
know, for some reason I start
forgetting,
um muscles look a little less swole, you
know, they look a little less full.
Um don't have as much energy in the tank
when I'm doing like a really intense
workout.
>> Mhm.
>> There's a performance degradation when I
am when I'm not on it.
And then collagen. I love this one
because it gets so much hate online, so
we're going to go against the grain and
talk about how great collagen is.
A lot of the criticism for collagen
often comes from this idea that, well,
it's terrible. It doesn't have any
leucine or has less than 3% of leucine,
which is an amino acid that
stimulates protein synthesis. And yes,
that's true. It is a terrible driver for
muscle protein, but this that's not like
the whole goal for women is not just
muscle, right? We have other tissues
that go to the gym alongside our muscle
that train, like our tendons, our
ligaments, our joints.
And so collagen is just like muscle is a
very expensive process, so it's very
expensive, you know, I mean, from a
mechanistic point of view to create
collagen. So taking collagen is great
for what I like to call the JTL, your
joints, your tendons, and your
ligaments.
So I will typically take something like
10 to 15 g of this a day. People will
probably come at me. I put this in my
coffee sometimes, which I know the heat,
I get it, but
if I don't, I won't take it.
>> There's so many collagen products out
there at the moment, isn't there?
>> Yeah. Yeah.
>> Collagen drinks, collagen collagen's in
everything.
>> Mhm.
>> Someone's going to figure out how to
like put it in the air or something.
>> Yeah, right. Yeah.
>> Is that all a fad? They're saying it's
good for skin, it's good for nails, it's
good for hair, it's good for everything.
>> It's good for fascia, it's good for I
mean, collagen is the primary compound
in joints, tendons, ligaments, fascia,
skin, hair, and nails.
>> type of collagen?
>> Hydrolyzed. Hydrolyzed type 1, 2, and 3.
Yeah.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Fine. What else?
>> Electrolytes.
I take electrolytes not as consistently,
again, in the vein of transparency and
honesty, I typically will take this on a
very heavy cardio day. So, I have
recently taken up tennis. I'm terrible
at it, but being outside tennis, you're
in the heat, you're running left and
right, and you're doing it for hours on
end, you know, you can when you're
sweating a lot, electrolytes are really
great.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah. So, like electrolytes, don't take
them all the time.
And with our last puppy here. Oh,
vitamin C.
Vitamin C I actually like to take with
the um the collagen because it can
enhance its absorption. And then this is
just a general antioxidant that I think,
you know, there's no harm in taking
vitamin C, right? It's water soluble,
you take too much, you pee it out. Um
but good as an antioxidant, good as an
anti-inflammatory,
helps with the absorption um of collagen
as well.
>> What about protein?
How do you think about protein? Do you
do you take protein shakes or anything?
>> I do when I'm traveling. So, I typically
in my day-to-day um
diet, I typically don't. I will if I'm
falling a bit short, but for me, my most
of my protein is coming from whole
foods.
>> What about cardio? Because we have we've
talked a lot about doing resistance
training and the importance of building
muscle.
Um what where does cardiovascular
exercises, running, sprinting, stair
master fit into all of this?
>> It's life. It's everything. Cardio is is
fantastic as well.
Um I think that again, you know, when I
think about my Overwhelmed Ophelia, you
you know, she's online and she has
people that are saying things like, you
should only lift weights and walk. And
then there's other people that are
doing, you know, the chronic cardio and
the people who are kind of overdoing it
that and not doing enough weights. I
sort of think about her as we start this
discussion. So, we want to be thinking
about cardio not as a punishment for
what you ate and not because you're
trying to get skinny, but because we
want to have other
goals around our health span and our
life span. So, living a longer life and
spending more of those years healthy.
>> A lot of women have PCOS, including my
partner.
>> Yeah.
>> Um and I was looking at the the comments
on your one of your interviews you did
and one of the top comments from a woman
was for women with PCOS or insulin
resistance spring training hit
often back backfires because it spikes
[clears throat] cortisol and insulin.
Many of us do better with strength
training plus zone two until hormone
stabilize. I would love to hear more
tailored guidance for PCOS.
>> Yeah. So the first thing I want to
dismantle in that comment is that
cortisol spikes are bad.
>> [snorts]
>> It really context really matters. So
without so I'll just say this way.
Without cortisol you won't wake up in
the morning. You know like we need
cortisol. There's something called the
cortisol awakening response where it
tends to peak, you know, somewhere you
know, right right around the time that
you wake up and then it sort of looks
like a ski slope and it, you know,
gradually
exits the chat, right? So cortisol is a
normal process. A cortisol spike is a
normal process. Just like when you
train, so when she was saying like I
train when I do resistance training, if
she were to be monitoring her hormones,
she would see both a glucose spike and a
cortisol spike when she's training
because though it to to be able to train
with enough intensity and effort, you
need to be you need to get into
something called sympathetic drive. You
need to be in like stress physiology. So
her cortisol spiking when she's training
as well. So I want to really caution
women away from being scared of normal
and predicted, you know,
uh spikes, right? Like glucose spikes,
cortisol spikes. So that that's what I
would say just to start off that
conversation.
Women with P-M-O-S, it used to be known
as PCOS, now it's polyendocrine
metabolic ovarian syndrome.
Her body typically behaves more like
someone
who is diabetic, like a type two
diabetic, where she has
issues with glucose disposal, she has
issues with insulin sensitivity.
So specific recommendations for someone
who has PCOS is absolutely she should be
training cuz every time she's
contracting her muscles, she's actually
helping whether insulin is present is
present or not for her to pull that
glucose into the muscle cell and to be
able to make energy. So, that's really
fantastic.
I also think that whether you have PCOS
or you're, you know, type 2 diabetic, I
think that zone 2 cardio is fantastic
again
for endurance, but you can also benefit
from the very high intensity cardio
that, you know, might be categorized as
high intensity interval training or hit
or sprint interval training sometimes
called sit. This is like sit is
basically like 10 to 20 seconds
all out ovaries to the wall 100% effort
uh and then you recover and then you do
that, you know, four five six times if
you're feeling, you know, particularly,
you [laughter] know, energetic.
Uh and that can also that stress, that
cortisol spike and all the, you know,
the physiological cascade that happens
from that
is going to make you stronger and
[snorts] a better glucose disposal
agent, right? Which is what she wants if
she has PCOS over the long term.
>> Are there any particular exercises that
women and people generally tend to stop
doing as they age because it's kind of
like it becomes harder as you age, but
they should definitely not stop doing?
>> Oh my gosh.
>> Like what are the ones where we all kind
of stop doing it, but it's it leads to a
downward spiral.
>> Sprinting 100%. I think that everybody
should be sprinting.
>> Why?
>> You are going to be increasing something
called your VO2 max, which is
uh just again nerd speak for how much
oxygen can you take into the lungs and
distribute to the cells, right? That
along with we've all heard the stat
muscle declines 1% per year if you're
not doing anything, VO2 max is the same.
So, you will decline your VO2 max
capacity 10% per decade if you're not
actively working on it.
>> I'll put some graphs on the screen that
show that decline over time.
>> Yeah, great. I can think of family
members, you know, going up the stairs
or down the stairs or trying to get
groceries and bringing them into the
house that are huffed and puffed, right?
That they're they've lost their breath
from going up a flight or two of stairs.
>> think, you know, they say that that's
just getting older.
>> Absolutely not.
It's absolutely not a function of aging.
It's just a loss of capacity.
There was um
>> Can you sprint?
>> I sprint all the time. Yeah, but there's
So I wanted what I wanted to say was
there's a couple of different ways that
we can sprint. So you can sprint in a on
a track. So I used to be a track
sprinter, so that's like my love.
But you can also sprint on a cardio
machine in the gym. So in the
wintertime, so I live on the East Coast
where I can't always sprint on the
track, so I will take my sprinting
indoors
and I will do something called the
Norwegian 4x4 on a bike.
Have you ever heard of a Norwegian 4x4?
>> heard of it, but please do explain.
>> Yeah, it's a special it's a special kind
of torture. I hate it up until the
moment I get on the bike and then when
I'm doing it, I'm like, okay, I'm going
to do this. And then when I'm finished,
I'm like, I'm so proud of myself. So a
Norwegian 4x4 is basically 4 minutes
your your In my case, I do it on the
bike, but it can be done on a treadmill
or any cardio machine.
85%
to 95% of your heart rate max. So you
need to know what your maximum like the
maximum heart rate that you have ever
achieved. 85% of that for 4 minutes.
It's a long 4 minutes.
And then you take a you take a 3-minute
break.
And then you do that again four times,
hence the name four minutes four times.
>> [clears throat]
>> Lots of really cool studies on looking
at
VO2 max capacity.
There's one that I'm thinking of where
they looked at women.
The average age of the women were 58. So
they were a lot of them were in like
postmenopausal, let's say.
And they put them on a sprinting
protocol.
What they found was that in a period of
8 weeks, they were able to increase
their VO2 max by 10% in 2 months.
Which is wild when you think about how
quickly you can lose it, and you can get
10% back in 2 months, which is which is
phenomenal. And the other really cool
thing about that study was they actually
took that cohort. So, that was the
we'll call them like the the well-lived
or the older cohort, let's say, and they
compared it to 18 to 30-year-olds, and
they found that the gains that happened
in the older cohort were they had
mitochondrial efficiency improvements of
69%.
>> Mhm.
>> Whereas [clears throat] the younger
cohort, their mitochondrial gains were
49%. So, all that to say, a lot of
people will frame aging as it's like,
"Well, now you're getting wrinkles, now
you're getting old, and now you're just
past you're over the hill, it's past
your prime." These women had maybe the
gap was bigger for them, but they had so
much more upside to gain, right? Which
is so that I mean that makes me so
excited because it's never ever ever too
late. Like you can like the best time to
start was 10 years ago, fine, but the
second best time is today. Like you're
not behind. You can totally do it now.
>> One of the top comments in your recent
video as well was one saying jumping or
hopping is a good way to strengthen your
bones and knees, and you should not stop
doing that as we age.
>> True.
>> Cuz a lot of people start thinking, "Oh,
I I can't run anymore because it's not
good for my hips and my knees, and I've
you know, I've had injuries and stuff
like that." So, running is one of those
things that people stop doing cuz
they're scared of joint issues.
>> Yeah, I think the old adage of use it or
lose it is really, really key here. Like
if you stop doing it, you're going to
definitely stop your ability to like
you're not going to be able to do it,
right? Your body is going to prioritize
the things that it does. So, So, you
want to be able to jump, you want to be
able to sprint, you want to be able to
squat,
age is is absolutely inconsequential to
that. So,
in that in that particular comment, if
somebody wanted to improve their bone
density, yeah, for sure, you can strap
on a weighted vest, do some plyometrics,
add some weight to your jump. Like,
that's going to, you know, increase that
strain magnitude and strain rate on the
bone, which is going to drive that
positive bone reformation. That's
awesome. But, yeah, it's if you don't
jump, you're going to lose your ability
to jump.
>> Do you jump?
>> I do it all the time. Well, sprinting is
jumping, right?
>> Do you like is there such a thing as
jump training?
>> Like plyos? Plyometrics?
>> Oh, is that what plyo is?
>> 100%.
>> do that?
>> Yes. Even if it's just isometric holds,
let's say.
Like, maybe somebody can't jump, but
they can stand with their with their
heels elevated, so that the Achilles
tendon and the calf, like the
gastrocnemius, is contracting. Just to
give you a little bit of a a visual
here, so what I'm talking about. Maybe
one of the most famous tendons in the
body is the Achilles. It is the
extension of the calf muscles here, and
then it sort of wraps around the heel
and attaches into the um into the uh
inferior part of the calcaneus, which is
just uh your heel bone. So, maybe you
can't quite jump yet, but you can
actually this
uh mannequin is doing a really good job.
They're just coming up on their toes,
contracting the gastrocnemius, and this
is called an isometric hold. So, that
tension
in the muscles and in the tendon, we
have these little mechanoreceptors that
sort of detect stretch. So, they will
detect that whether something's being
contracted or
whether something's stretching, and they
will say, "Oh, we need to remodel in
order to meet the demand of this this
activity." And then you can progress to
doing little hops, you can progress to
doing jumps, etc.
>> Very easy to do. You don't need to You
don't need a gym or anything like that.
>> Not at all.
>> I've heard you say that um deceleration
is important for mobility.
>> Yeah. Deceleration is the opposite of
acceleration. So,
we think of acceleration, it's speeding
up and getting fast. Deceleration is
coming to a stop.
So, in order to come to a stop without
dumping all of the forces in your
joints, again, the tendons and the
ligaments need to be able to absorb that
kinetic energy.
And from a sport perspective, your
ability to decelerate, so coming to a
complete stop and then changing
direction, so change of direction
training, is actually more predictive of
whether you'll go pro than your vertical
jump, your acceleration speed, or if
you're doing things like beep tests or
whatever. Um it's also really important
for us as we age. You might trip on, you
know, something on the floor or, you
know, the corner of a rug, or you might
lose your footing on the stairs. You
need to be able to get your foot in
front of you and then
be able to stop the motion before you
fall.
>> Are there any Are there exercises that
are like really, really simple and
underrated that one can do without
equipment?
>> I have so many to show you. Yes.
>> Okay.
>> [laughter]
>> So, the one that I love, this is almost
like a diagnosis, but then it, you know,
the diagnosis almost becomes the plan,
like the the care plan.
Uh something that um I just call the X
plank. It's very difficult to do, but it
is a test for stability and mobility of
the hip. So, we were talking about the Q
angle before. This is directly
challenging the muscles on the side of
the hip and whether or not you can stay
stable. So, uh this is a great exercise.
Yeah, I can show it to you.
So, this is, again, like I was saying,
it's the prescrip It's the test, but
then it also becomes the care plan. So,
um
maybe what we'll do So, I'll show it to
you and then maybe we'll have you try.
>> I'll I'm going to be over here.
>> Yeah, okay. [laughter]
So, you're basically going to come into
a side plank. So, where your wrist and
your shoulders are all aligned. Toes are
facing forward. Hand comes up and then
you're going to lift the arm up and
you're going to try and see if you can
hold this for 30 seconds. It is not
easy, and so this is really testing the
stability and the mobility of your hips.
It's also testing the integrity of your
ability to stay ab-ducted, which is what
my leg is doing right now. So, if
someone has a timer, hopefully I'm close
to 30 seconds, but we'll call it
maybe
now.
>> [laughter]
>> Probably about 30 seconds there.
>> Yeah.
>> Uh so, that's a that's a really great
test for anybody to do. And it's also
there's core work, there's shoulder
work, it's a really whole body workout.
>> Okay.
Yeah, my my turn.
>> Why don't you try? Yeah, see.
>> Okay.
>> So, on your side, toes stacked on top of
each other, wrist is kind of tucked
under the shoulder. Yeah, hands waving
hello. And now try to lift to your top
leg.
>> Oh gosh, okay. Let me just
call somebody.
>> [laughter]
>> I need one of my friends.
Okay, I'm going to stand on my
It my my feet hurt.
>> So, in this case, if you're not able to
do it, this becomes the thing that you
train.
>> I mean, the the pressure of putting my
foot on my other foot and putting all
the weight on this foot here.
>> Okay.
>> Or maybe I'll put my foot on the mat.
>> Yeah, yeah, like maybe you need a little
bit of grip. Yeah.
>> That's no better.
>> [laughter]
>> I think it's actually just me being
weak. Okay. So, like this?
>> Yeah.
>> And then lifting this leg up.
>> Lifting the leg up, there you go.
>> Okay.
>> Yeah.
>> Okay, I get it.
>> Yeah. Yeah. So, now you're just going to
work your yourself up to 10 seconds, 15
seconds, 20 seconds, and over time
you'll just be doing this at the
airport.
>> Where does this arm go?
>> Just Just on top. Yeah, just on top.
Yeah.
>> I think I've got more of a balancing
issue, is it?
>> Yeah, it's also it's a really strong
balance test, yeah. This is a This is
one of those exercises that literally
tests almost every system in the body.
So, I love it as a diagnostic.
>> Okay. Is there like a an entry to this
exercise that's a little bit more
amateur?
>> For For Yeah,
well Oh, if there's me you can maybe
instead of doing it on both feet, you
can maybe do it on your knees. So,
um I'll demo that real quick. So, if you
want to just come here, so you're
stacking the knees on top of each other,
and then you can do it this way.
>> Okay.
>> So, there's still you're still having to
recruit the glute medius
um here, but it's just less less stress.
>> Okay.
>> You want to try that? See how that one
feels.
>> Okay.
I got it.
>> Yeah, you got it. Okay. Take your
>> Is there anything else that you can show
me that you think's pertinent to the
conversation we just had?
>> You know what? Well, yeah, this one
actually relates to um mobility a little
bit, which we did talk about. So,
in cultures where people sit on the
floor, they eat on the floor,
um
you know, they toilet on the floor, they
their fall risk is literally almost
zero. So, I think as North Americans or
Western, we can do more sitting on the
floor. So, one of the big tests
um I'll you I'll usually won't start on
the floor, but I'll have if it's an
elderly person, maybe they're sitting on
a chair. Can they stand up unassisted,
like without using their hands? And this
is the hardest part of the test. So,
what you'll do is your feet crossed, and
we'll do it with both feet to see.
Without using your hands, you can use a
little bit of momentum if you want. Um
but you're going to see if you can get
up without using your hands.
There you go.
>> Ooh, that was
>> Well done. Nicely done. All right, let's
get back down. Let's try to cross our
feet the other way.
The wrong way.
>> The other way.
>> Yeah.
>> [laughter]
>> Cuz you always typically cross your feet
one way, right? So, [clears throat] I
don't do this one as well as I do the
other one, so I'm working on it as well.
So, again, no um hands. You can use a
little bit of momentum if you want, and
you're going to come all the way up.
That one was not as pretty.
Yeah. [clears throat]
There you go.
>> Okay.
>> It was really well.
>> What is that I do you know what is what
what muscles am I using there?
>> You're using every you're you are
recruiting mobility in your ankles, you
are recruiting your quads to be able to
extend your knee, your glutes to extend
your hip, like it's the whole leg.
>> Mhm, great. Thank you so much. We don't
>> awesome.
>> Any others that you love?
>> Oh, goodness.
>> can do without equipment at home?
>> Push-ups,
body weight squats, which I think you
should eventually progress to weights,
but so many people have terrible
technique, so you can actually have a
fantastic workout with just your body
weight. Um, glute bridges I think are
fantastic. So many. You can pick up like
a big um
bag of cat food or dog food
and, you know, do walking lunges down
your, you know, wherever.
>> If you know me, and if you've listened
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One of the I mean, I looked at lots of
the comments and a lot of them also
talked about the specific issues mothers
face after they have a child.
>> Mhm.
>> Um I saw comments about prolapse and
pelvic floors, etc.
>> Yeah.
>> You've had two children.
>> Mhm.
>> What are and you speak to many, many
mothers.
>> Yeah.
>> Um what are the specific issues that
mothers face as it relates to fitness,
their workout regimes, their goals,
>> Mhm.
>> um resistance training, etc., that I
wouldn't be aware of?
>> Yeah.
>> As someone that's not given birth to a
child.
>> So, you know, we talked about how the
um
the hips are different for men and
women. The pelvic floor is also very
different for men and women as well. So,
just from a
>> What is the pelvic floor?
>> The pelvic floor is like a hammock of
muscles that goes from the pubic bone.
So, um
if we were to think about So, here is
the uh female pelvis. We have the pubic
bone here.
>> Mhm.
>> And then it's it's like a sling of
muscles that come around and then attach
to the coccyx or what's known as the
tailbone. And these are called the
pubococcygeal. So, pubic, coccyx,
pubococcygeal muscles or PC muscles. And
they're different than, let's say, your
quadriceps or your glutes, because they
are literally working all the time.
They are working to keep your organs in
the pelvis, so that they don't just fall
out. And for women, this is another area
where we are different, because we have
more I mean, first of all, we have more
openings, right? So, if you think about
the sling of muscles for a woman, you're
going to have a hole at the urethra, at
the opening of the vulva into the
vagina, and then also the anus. So,
there's three holes, and so already you
have less surface area for that for
those muscles to be able to contract and
support, right? Versus a male, uh those
PC muscles just have to deal with one.
So, it's mechanically much simple
simpler for a man.
And then you layer on hormonal
fluctuations over the course of a, you
know, woman as she's menstruating, if
she becomes pregnant, under the
influence of different hormones like
relaxin, uh the weight of the baby, you
know, constantly pushing down,
um
and then birth, as I've mentioned
before, uh these can
significantly alter the strength and the
ability for the for the PC muscles to um
absorb load appropriately. So, for women
who've had babies,
first you have to obviously be working
with your OBGYN or your midwife or
whoever is managing your care plan to be
able to clear you for exercise. And once
they do, you don't want to necessarily
go back to extremely heavy loads with
lots of intensity
>> right away, because you haven't
you haven't necessarily yet completely
healed, right? So,
>> this is where we get into thinking
about, okay, so what are some ways that
we can connect with um
with the pelvic floor. So, the famous
exercise that everybody's probably heard
of is Kegels. You probably heard of
Kegels. So, those are wonderful if
you're someone who has a weak uh pelvic
floor,
not so much if you have the
>> Wouldn't just sit and contract and and
you say
>> Yeah, it's it's literally like you are
for men the way that I've often um sort
of queued men is like imagine you're
like zipping up a zipper. Like you're
just kind of coming up and you're sort
of holding it and then you're relaxing.
You don't necessarily have to move and
jump, but you're literally just sort of
connecting as much as you can. It's hard
because our uh neuromuscular connection
to the pelvic floor sometimes is not
really strong, but often just closing
your eyes and just think like just
coming up, holding, and then coming
down. And you can do all you can do
these all day long free, you know, no
one's going to know that you're doing
it. Um so that that if you have a weak
pelvic floor, that would be something
that you might explore. So pelvic floor
physiotherapist would be someone who'd
be able to diagnose that and give you
a bit more counsel there. But weak
pelvic floors, Kegels are great. They
can actually if you have if you have a
tight pelvic floor where you actually
have trouble relaxing, Kegels can
actually make things a little bit worse
for you.
>> Um on your book the Betty Body, the last
word on the subtitle is the word sex. A
geeky goddess guide to intuitive eating,
balanced hormones, and transformative
sex.
>> Yeah.
>> Why did you include transformative sex?
>> I included it because I think just like
all of the myths that we've been talking
about today about bulky and carbs, I
think that the other thing that has been
really uh taboo for women is women who
enjoy their sex life.
And so I was hoping in that first book
to give women permission to
to want to desire it, to figure out if
there wasn't if there was low desire or
low libido, what maybe some of those
causes were, and what are some of the
ways that we can we can learn more about
ourselves. I'm thinking of this one
patient that I had um
and she actually was part of the reason
why I included it in this first book.
She'd come in to my clinic she'd come in
for low back pain. It was like the most
typical like I'm have you know,
mechanical low back pain, right? And so
we were giving her adjustments, we were
giving her strengthening exercises, we
were doing the rehab, all the things.
Nothing out of the ordinary. At her
reevaluation appointment,
>> [snorts]
>> she said, I want like, Dr. Stef, I want
to I want to talk to you privately. I
was like, okay, fine. Let's go into this
room, close the door, all the things.
And she said, um
do you know the real reason why I came
in to see you? And I said, yes, it was
mechanical low back pain. And she said,
no.
Uh it's because when I was with my
husband, you know, getting on top of him
while we were being intimate,
was really hurting me. My back was
killing me, my pelvis was killing me, my
joints felt like they were rubbing on
top of each other. I mean, I was lucky
enough that this patient trusted me
enough and we had enough rapport for her
to basically say, yeah, I um I want to
ride my husband and I can't. I couldn't
before and now I can. And so I think
that there is a quiet, um taboo, we'll
say, around women not enjoying sex and I
want to give women permission to. So
whether you have low back pain and that
needs to be corrected, if there's a
hormonal input to that,
>> Okay.
Stephanie, what's the most um what's the
most important thing we haven't talked
about that we should have talked about?
>> Oh my goodness.
>> Well, we didn't talk about GLP-1s.
That's all the new rage at the moment,
isn't it?
>> The Yeah, GLP-1s are Yeah, they're
interesting, for sure. I do think
with all medications, and I am including
hormone therapy in here as well,
um at the risk of getting shot down by
some people,
is I think that we often marry ourselves
to what we feel the benefits might be
and we will divorce ourselves from the
possible side effects, right? Hormones
are going to help with your for sure,
your sleep, your mood. Uh if you're
experiencing some of the
thermoregulatory problems, like the
night sweats and the hot flashes and all
the things,
but it's not going to go to the gym and
lift weights with you. It's not going to
build a healthy plate. It's not going to
set boundaries with your boss, you know,
like those things you have to do those
things, right? So there's this beautiful
opportunity where we see more women
taking MHT to or hormone replacement
therapy, menopause hormone therapy
to blend that with lifestyle medicine.
You can't It's not There's no easy
button here. You know, you have to also
put in the work.
>> And lifestyle medicine meeting?
>> Training, br- managing your stress,
recovering, doing the cardio that we've
been talking about.
>> On that recovery point you just said,
what are the recovery protocols that you
think all women should be doing?
>> The best one that I can tell you is
sleep,
which can be a challenge in
perimenopause, I understand, but that is
where you have things like uh growth
hormone and IGF-1 tend to surge, muscles
grow when you're sleeping,
brain cleans itself out. Sleep is Sleep
is the number one thing that everybody
should be prioritizing. That's
wonderful. That's like sort of tier one.
Like if there's like an S tier, sleep is
an S tier.
Um under that, I would say if you have
access to something like a sauna, that
might be something that you can think of
for recovery, whether that's an infrared
sauna or it's a traditional Finnish
sauna. I often call it lazy cardio. So
if you don't feel like doing a really
intense cardio session, get yourself
into a sauna if you have access to one.
Not necessary, but really really like
there's a lot of really cool uh studies
that have come out of Finland, which by
the way, sauna is the only word in
English that we've borrowed from Fin-
from Finnish. Just a little little fun
little tidbit there, but um electrolytes
we've talked about. I think that if you
are really pushing uh yourself and
you're sweating a lot, helping to
recover and replenish those. As we lose
estrogen in in midlife, our ability to
regulate salt also starts to decline as
well.
>> So, what is what should we have talked
about that we didn't talk about as it
relates to the most pressing questions
you get asked by the people that consume
the content you make?
>> The only other thing I would say that we
didn't really go on a nerd safari on is
the joints, tendons, and ligaments. So,
like the connective tissue capacity.
We've talked a lot about muscle. I love
muscle. I train muscle. Um, muscle's
like the popular girl at the party. She
gets a lot of attention. You know, if
you think about a a superstar like, I
don't know, like Beyoncé or something,
right? She's beautiful to look at. The
pump is great. All of that. But, if you
put Beyoncé on a rotting stage or you
put her on a stage that can't handle
her, she's just going to fall right
through it. And then you have no
concert, right? So, I think that the
forgotten tendons and ligaments and
joints, we have to be thinking about
those as we age because you you can't
squat if you don't have good knees.
>> How do I get great ligaments and
tendons?
>> So, the way that you encourage them to
become stronger over time is how you
train in the gym. So, there's a couple
of different ways that you can bias for
more tendon strength and more ligament
strength. One of them is when you are
lifting, you can bias what's called the
eccentric portion of the lift. So,
concentric, muscle gets shorter, bones
come together. Eccentric is stretch.
When you start stretching the tendon,
the tendon's like, I'm being stretched.
Okay, we have to now create more tensile
strength to be able to meet that demand.
>> Okay, so stretching.
>> So, stretching under load.
>> Okay.
>> Not just stretching.
>> Pilates.
>> Not Pilates. No. So, Pilates, again,
love Pilates, do it twice a week.
>> got a bee in your bonnet about Pilates.
You really don't like Pilates.
>> what it Do you know what it is? No, no,
no. It's not that. It's people confuse
muscle endurance. So, in Pilates you
often have like very high reps. The
muscle burns. Um, it's fantastic for the
pelvic floor that we were talking about
before.
Phenomenal for women's health, for
pelvic floor health, that posture.
>> But you're saying it Pilates isn't
enough to build sufficient muscle mass.
>> That's the main point and that's where I
think that people are like, "How dare
you talk about this? Like I love
Pilates. I do Pilates. I'm probably in
your Pilates class." However, I also am
training four or five times a week. I'm
also sprinting one, you know, sometimes
two, but mostly one time a week. I'm I'm
doing tennis. Like I'm doing all of
these other things and Pilates brings me
a lot of joy, right? But I feel so I
always say I feel so happy after
Pilates. I don't know why. It makes me
really happy.
>> But some people are doing just Pilates,
isn't it?
>> Yes, so if you are just doing the
Pilates, that's where I fear that your
like look at me, I'm slim, you know, if
you if you're I'm able to fit in this
dress now, but then what you're not
doing is you're not loading your bones
appropriately, you're not building
sufficient muscle, your tendons and your
ligaments are weak, and you're going to
end up with bone disease or a loss of
load load capacity when you're older.
>> What's the most popular question that
women message you with on Instagram?
>> Usually it's
tell me about your skin care.
>> [laughter]
>> Okay.
>> Tell me tell me about what you do with
your hair,
um or, you know, what your workout
outfit is. All those little questions.
But it's how do I gain muscle and lose
fat? That's the big one.
>> So tell me about your skin care routine
then.
>> Yeah.
>> [laughter]
>> Uh it's pretty basic. Uh I learned this
from my dermatology friends. So some
vitamin C uh in the morning, some uh
SPF, um and in the evening uh there's
some kind of vitamin A. Uh I actually
really like NAD. I use a another company
I have has something called urolithin A
in it, which is supposed to help get rid
of senescent cells in the body.
>> Which are like dead cells, right?
>> Which are yeah, they're like the zombie
cells that um
uh they sort of hang around and just
create inflammation everywhere.
>> You're almost 50?
>> I'm almost 50, yeah.
>> Feeling good?
>> I feel great. I feel like I I inhabit my
body now in a way I wish I did in my
20s. Like I was so punitive and I was so
terrible to myself. Like things I would
say to myself and call myself um when I
was 20, 30,
um
I would never say that out loud to
anybody else. And so now I I feel really
proud of myself. You know, I got into
weight training just like a lot of women
who are watching. They want to look
better, build muscle, lose fat. That's
why I got into it as well. But I stayed
with it because of um
you know, it it provided me a way back
home. Like it provided me a like it
taught me how to love myself. It taught
me how to be patient with myself, right?
It taught me how to um forgive myself
when I felt like I had failed, right?
Like it re-imagines
uh your relationship with failure, which
I think is like a really big effort for
women.
>> Dr. Stefani, we have a closing tradition
on this podcast where the last guest
leaves a question for the next not
knowing who they're leaving it for. And
the question left for you is
>> What's your skin care routine? No, I'm
kidding.
>> [laughter]
>> Do you believe in God?
And why or why not?
>> Oh, mm. I do believe in God.
I believe that there is
a force greater than us, greater than we
will
uh ever be able to explain,
um that protects us, that gives us the
lessons that we need to learn, and it
will continue to present the same
lessons to us over and over and over
again until we're win you know, until we
are willing to
surrender to um
to learning the lesson.
>> When you're on your um when you're on
your last day and you look back at your
life and you go, "You know what? I did
it."
>> Mm.
>> What would warrant you being able to say
that?
>> That my family is around. I see my I've
met my grandchildren, maybe even my
great-grandchildren.
That they are all around my bed telling
me Oh, you're going to make me cry,
Steven. That that they're telling me,
um
all the ways, all the things that they
have learned from me and that they're
going to take on to future generations
in my in my lineage.
>> Why is that so important for you?
>> I think all all the reasons why I do
what I do, um
is it's
it's it's for my kids. Like, I want my
kids to have
a better life. I want to shortcut some
of the learnings for them that I had to
learn the hard way. And that's not to
say I want to deny them of their own
learning opportunity, but I want to be
able to pass on what I feel is important
values that I think make the world a
better place. Like, I just want to leave
the world better than how I found it.
And the way that I want to do that is
through my family and the work that I do
here.
>> Thank you. Thank you for doing all that
you do. Um
I think it's incredibly important for so
many reasons. I mean,
there's been I think a three I mean,
it's kind of says on the back of your
book here, The Betty Body. Through time,
people have thought that women were
little men.
>> Mhm.
>> [clears throat]
>> Um and that's what you wrote on the back
of your book. It says, "Women are not
little men, but that's how we treat our
bodies."
>> Yeah.
>> And it's great to have voices like you
that are so backed by science, so
eloquent, that are out there
demystifying what is a incredibly, um
complicated world of uh health
information and conflicting information.
And you know, I know it better than
anybody because my audience will often
say to me that
I relate to all of the personas that you
highlighted there, where you've got
uh
What was it? It was Anxious Which was
the one that was
This one.
>> Exercist Emily.
>> No, it's this uh
I get a lot of this one.
>> Overwhelmed Olivia.
>> Overwhelmed Olivia.
>> Where do I start?
>> Yeah.
>> Where do I start cuz I don't want to
fail again.
>> Yes.
>> Yeah.
>> So many overwhelmed Olivias. In part
because one of the upsides of there
being so much information out there now
is that people are getting,
you know, they're not having to go to
some expensive doctor and they can go on
an AI, they can go on a podcast,
whatever.
>> Right. Right.
>> But with science evolving over time and
with lots of different voices, people
are feeling often I think feeling more
overwhelmed than ever with what they
consider to be conflicting information
and I think you do a wonderful job of
demystifying that.
>> Thank you so much.
>> Um because it's nuanced, it's very
human, it comes from lived experience
and it comes from as you said, you've
you've you've sat with tens of thousands
of patients through the the your career
in practice.
And things aren't always so simple.
They're not always as simple as
they are easy as to sell and I think
things that sell are often simple and
reductive.
>> Yeah.
>> But um the truth is often complicated,
personal
>> Yeah, and it doesn't exist always in a
lab. Yeah, I think you can't always
replicate it in a lab.
>> And one of the things I learned from
your work as well is that it changes
through time.
>> Yeah.
>> I eat for me what's true for me now at
33 years old as a man, this stage of my
life with the hormone complexion I have
and the goals that I have, one thing can
be true. But maybe when I'm 55, a
different set of things are going to be
true. And I think that nuance is super
super important. If people want more of
your work, I know you've got a book
coming out the top of the year next year
called
>> [snorts]
>> Nothing to Lose, Build the Dream Body
You Want Today, Gain the Strength and
Mobility You'll Need Tomorrow. And
you've got this current book here called
The Betty Body which I'll link below
subtitled A Geeky Goddess. You use the
word geeky a lot and nerd.
A nerd's safari, [laughter] that's
interesting.
>> Used to be used to be sort of a you
know, a terrible word to use. I'm like,
no, I'm a total nerd. Yeah, special
category of nerd.
>> A Geeky Goddess Guide to Intuitive
Eating, Balanced Hormones, and
Transformative Sex.
>> Yeah.
>> Where else do people find you if they
want to learn more or message you or get
in touch or come see you? What What do
they Where do they go?
>> My podcast, not quite the reach that
Doac has,
uh but we are I have a podcast called
Better with Dr. Stephanie. So I do solo
episodes there where I go on my little
tangents about tendons and ligaments and
all the things and then I also interview
what I would qualify as the world's
thought leaders in science and
health and we try to distill what it
means for what it means to have a
well-lived life. So, podcasts free
probably where you're listening to this
YouTube and all the places and then you
can head over to my website dr.
stephanieestema.com.
>> Anything else you wanted to say?
>> I would say
for the woman listening my overwhelmed
Olivia's who are feeling that they don't
know where to start or my skinny fat
Sophia's who are scared of lifting
weights and eating like a bird
or my exercises Emily's who are still
exercising their demons
um
you're not behind.
You are absolutely enough
and don't be so hard on yourself.
>> Thank you.
>> Thank you.
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