The New Rules of Exercise for Menopause with Dr. Stacy Sims (Re-Release)

If you are somewhere in your 40s, 50s, 60s are beyond, and you felt like your body is changing, your brain is foggy, your moods are all over the place. Here's what I want you to know. You are not alone. So many of us experience this as we move into our postmenopausal years. So for starters, you're not broken. Just keep in mind that because you're going through a transformation and like any phenomenal transformation, it's really important to have a guide, not guesswork. So this is why I created what I call my reset academy. It's a really cool group of online women from all over the world where we come together to learn how to fast for hormones, how to eat for our brain, how to understand the behavioral changes that are going on with us, and to really give women an opportunity to feel at home in both their bodies and their brains again. In the reset academy, we do many live calls, we do lots of challenges together, we have monthly programs, and you have an incredible community that is built not only from me and my team of coaches, but from women who have been in the academy for years that have read my books, done my videos, listened to my podcast, and are working on making themselves the best version they can possibly be. So if you're looking for that community support, if you're wanting to lean into more knowledge, get off of the socials and into a really cool live community, come join me inside my reset academy. You can go to resetacademy.dotdoctormidipels.com and find all the ways you can sign up there. I will tell you my absolute favorite thing we do in this community are the Saturday morning coffee chats where two Saturdays a month you will find me not only working out with you all, but leading you through whatever is burning on my heart and opening up community discussion around how as women we can use our metapuzzle experience to come together and how we can use it to not only better ourselves, but better everyone around us. So excited to see you inside my reset academy. On this episode of the resetter podcast, I am actually re-issuing an old interview that I did a few years back with Dr. Stacey Sims. Now let me tell you why I'm re-issuing this because it keeps coming up. And what is the messaging that you all are receiving from Stacey Sims if you are a metapuzzle or post-metapuzzle woman is you should not fast. And there's a lot of nuance for you to know and I want you to hear it directly from a conversation that Stacey and I had. And before I bring you that conversation, I want to bring up a couple of key points. And I like Stacey. We had a great conversation. It's funny how everybody wants to pit us against each other, but we actually had more in common than we had separate. So the first thing that I want to say is the most important blood marker for any woman's hormonal health is hemoglobin A1c. However you get your hemoglobin A1c down is incredibly important. I find that it's through fasting and eating good quality food and learning how to metabolically switch from your sugar burner to fat burner system that will get that hemoglobin A1c down the quickest. Okay, second thing is you're going to hear a lot about timing of food. You control your fasting and eating window. If you listen to this and you're like, wait, I do better before I work out if I eat than eat before you work out. I think that's phenomenal. But if you want to benefit from ketones and autophagy and resetting your gut and resetting your dopamine system and if you want accelerated weight loss, fasting is the most proficient tool at doing that free tool. So understand that Dr. Stacey Sims is an expert in not just female physiology but for endurance athletes. That is her slant is how do we prepare the woman who's going to work out and maybe do an intense weightlifting session in the gym or is training for a century bike ride, which is her passion that there may be different rules for that woman than the rules that I'm teaching you because the lens in which I'm looking at this is through the lay person, the woman who's really wants to lose weight, menopause just totally stuck her in a poor weight gain moment and she's trying to get out of that. That's the lens I'm looking at, whereas Stacey's looking at the lens of the endurance athlete. So you get to choose when you're listening to this interview how you see that. Okay, third thing is that you'll notice in this interview that Stacey has a protein rich coffee. It even became a thing on socials. I saw that a bunch of people were showing her coffee. You could do a protein rich coffee before a workout and stay in ketosis going into that workout, but you may have kicked yourself out of a topology. There are lots of different ways to do your fasting window. I've talked about them at Nazia on my podcast and on my live, but pay attention when we talk about the coffee because some of you are going to like that option. And the last thing I'll tell you is ultimately you decide the course of your health. I am very clear that fasting is amazing for menopausal women. I have a lot of nuance on that. I've written a whole book on it for the post-menopausal woman that's coming out on December 16th. It's called Age Like a Girl. So if you want to know how to use fasting and ketones to improve mental clarity, to build confidence, to get more energy, please dive into that book. And also know that there may be some things that will be helpful for you that Stacey says about building muscle and being an endurance athlete. All these things could be true at the same time. It's not an and-or, and ultimately the person that chooses your health is you. So as you're listening to this sit with it and decide what feels right for you. I'm not teaching you to believe everything I'm saying. I don't think Stacey's teaching you to believe everything you're saying. We're both bringing an opinion and now you get to decide and you get to try it out for you. And I think that is the most important thing that either of us could say. So here you go. Here was my interview with Dr. Stacey Sims about fasting, menopause, and exercise. Welcome to my online home. I'm so happy to have you here. And I'm so excited for this conversation. So thank you Stacey. I'm so happy you're here. That was so great. Great conversations. I mean think about it. How many great conversations have women had in the bathroom? Waiting at line in the bathroom or when everybody's in the stall together. So great conversations can be had, you know, pretty much anywhere. So no worries on that. Here's where there's a lot to unpack. And I want to start with this idea. And it's such, it's so in the zeitgeist right now that women are supposed to be the going through menopause are supposed to be leaning into more strength training. So what I would love to do is start off with like if you were talking to a 50 year old woman who's maybe at the tail end of Perry menopause starting to go into those postmenopausal years, she's been through it all the whole transitional experience. What would you tell her about working out? What are some of like the tried and true principles that she needs to know about her 50 year old body? That it is not what her 48 year old body was. Oh, that's good. And I mean we go through all the like I feel like Perry menopause every six months is different like your body changes so badly, right? So that when you get to the tail end of it and you're starting to come out the other side, it's completely different than what you've just experienced, which is completely different from what your body was when you're like in your 30s. So when I'm looking at someone who's 15, the tail end of a Perry menopause always pull out the big rocks. I'm like, okay, so the three big rocks I always look at is sleep and sleep quality because that's super important. We don't get any kind of metabolic or psychological or any kind of health control unless we have really good sound sleep. Then we look at physical and mental movement and that's where strength training comes in and then the third one is the big rock with nutrition. So if we're looking at those and we're looking at sleep, part of sleep is circadian rhythm, right? So we need to look at if we're exercising, if we're eating and how we're working our circadian rhythm, if the big rock of exercise for postmenopause and late Perry menopause is strength training, we have to really look at that. Like, okay, what time of day we're going to do that? We want to have the work with how you feel, right? Some people feel fantastic when they first wake up. Yeah, that's great. But if you're someone who gets more energy and motivation as the day goes on, well, maybe you want to try to fit in your 20 to 30 minutes later in the day. So we have to really look at how does your your life work? And then of course you have all your other commitments over it. So if you're a night person and early time you have to work out is in the morning, then we have to work with that too. But it's really trying to find that and understanding that strength training isn't something that you're just going to do a six week block of and then be great at it, right? So I get people to understand. If you don't have a history of strength training, I'm not going to throw you in the gym and tell you to do deadlifts right away. I'm not going to put you in a three five. Yeah. We want to phase you in. And that phase in could be up to six months of doing higher rep lower weight body weight movement, that kind of stuff. So you understand where your limitations are. If one side's weaker or the other, what your range of mobility is, what your confidence is, and we slowly build load over time. Because I get women saying, well, I don't know how to lift. It's too much. And I'm going to get into right now. That's not worth about looking at. Are you going to be lifting when you're 80? Because that's my goal. I want everyone, every woman to have some strength training when they're 80, 90 onwards. So we have to look right now. If you have a long training history, sweet, let's go in the gym. We're going to do some cluster sets. We're going to set it all up. So we're going to lift heavier loads and really get into that central nervous system response. But if you've never done any of that, then maybe we start with three times a week body weight stuff. And then we add load with backpack. And then we look at using some kettlebells. And we slowly build as people get more and more confident. But I think that critical point here is we've all grown up with the strength training is bad because it gets you bulky. And you know, you want to do calories in calories out. How much cardio can you do? And I really want to try to get women to change that narrative and understand this strength training isn't just an exercise. It's a way of life. Because if we're thinking about lifting loads, groceries, being independent as we get older, we have to challenge our muscles, specifically our central nervous system for that motor pattern. Because when we're getting into that that parryment of pause, postment of pause, we're not looking at doing the higher reps to build muscle for muscle, but hypertrophy. Because we don't have the impetus really for what we want is central nervous system. Because if we're looking earlier days and we had lots of estrogen, then we had an impetus for really strong muscle contractions, really fast muscle contractions for speed and power. And we also had an impetus for building lean mass because estrogen is tied to all of those factors. When we lose it, we need to find that external stress that's going to create that same invitation. And that's to the central nervous system. So if we're looking at lifting heavy loads that we're failing by the fifth rep or we're failing by the sixth rep, then we're really instigating central nervous system to say, hey, wait, I need to have more nerve patterns and nerve conduction to be able to stimulate these muscle fibers and to actually create more muscle fibers to lift this load. So we're taking estrogen out of the equation and we're creating a new response to get that strength and build that mass. So that's how we look at it. Yep. We're building to be able to be independent when we're 80, 90, 100. I love that. I love that thought. I always tell people that literally every day, I think about my 90 year old self. I'm like, okay, what do I need to do today to make sure that my 90 year old self is who I want, you know, is the woman I want her to be? So I love that. Look at it. Look at it through the lens of functionality. So, okay, so I have two questions on what you said. One is if we look at the patterns of testosterone, from what I can tell is that and it may be more nuanced for the menopausal woman. So this is why I want to bring this up is that the the biggest increase in testosterone happens in the morning. So is that is that accurate? And if you would if a postmenopausal woman gets more testosterone in the morning, wouldn't that be a better time to actually do straight training? Well, testosterone is like all the other sex hormones is it has its own pulse. So we'll have a boost in the morning kind of try to counter cortisol. But if you are doing straight training, you get a boost after straight training. If you do true sprint interval training and we hear this rhetoric about how menopausal and perimenopausal woman shouldn't do high intensity work. So because a carry through isn't there. If you're doing it properly, then you have a boost of testosterone and growth hormone after that exercise. Because we have to look at exercise in itself is a stress and your body responds to that stress in particular ways to overcome it so that it gets stronger and better you can do it again. When we get into perimenopausal menopause and we don't have all the the pulse signaling from estrogen and at some points progesterone, luteinizing hormone, it tends to look at what are my available sex hormones and what are my available steroid hormone. So it's like, okay, yeah, we need testosterone because it helps counter that exercise stress. It helps stop cortisol. We need growth hormone because we've just broken down all of this tissue. So we need to stimulate that to repair and testosterone growth hormone kind of go hand in hand. So we're looking at the pulse of these hormones. It's not just we see that it peaks in the morning and then kind of wanes off and then peaks again. There's ways of increasing the pulse of those hormones depending on what you're doing. So that's why like when we start this conversation it's like understanding the woman and where she has the most energy. So we can maximize those different pulses. A lot of women think that when they go to the gym they have to come out feeling smashed. A lot of times if you do the strength training properly and you're not doing a metabolic stress of 10 to 12 reps but you're actually staying on the lower power end because it's essential nervous system response. You come out feeling really good and relaxed because you get that growth hormone, that testosterone and a subsequent parasite response. So you don't come out feeling smashed. You come out feeling like, yeah, I feel worked but I feel really good. And that's where we find like low energy. This is way of increasing that energy and feeling like, yeah, it's more because it's the brain effect, right? So you're like waking up the brain from the system. So you do a heavy load and then you're like, I have clarity. I can do something else. So okay, so did I just hear then I'm 54? There would be no need for me to ever do a 10 to 12 rep set with my weights. I should always do the heaviest I can possibly lift in five or six reps. Yeah, but we have to periodize that too. So when we're looking at what's the best like optimal range for you, you know, so you're 54. You want to have the base of it in that lower rep range, right? So you don't ever want to go over eight. What I try to get people to understand now because looking at something like one repetition maximum is too hard to figure out and your one rep max changes depending on how strong you feel. So I say, okay, you want to go in and you want to look at doing your weights with two reps in reserve. So that means you do enough of a load so that you could possibly eke out two more reps at the end with good form. That's it. So you know, that could be six reps. It could be eight reps, but don't go over the eight. And this is how we can really load it and keep it in that power based range based on how you're feeling in the day and what you can do. So we look at starting weight and then we can go into different like macro cycles, micro cycles. What are you doing in the week? What are you doing over four weeks? How much loading? Are you, where's your D load? Are we doing five reps or we doing three by two? So are we doing cluster sets? There's so much you can do within the programming there. Just stay in that bottom column without ever having to get into that 10 to 12 rep range. So then where does cardio fit in at all? Because I, so I will tell you again, through my 54-year-old post-metaposal lens, I definitely noticed the calm when I do really heavy weight lifting. Like, there is this sense of like, whoa, somebody just gave me like a whole bunch of pergastrode. Is that what it feels like? It's like a chill pill. It feels incredible. But then when my brain is racing, if I go for a walk, I love to run. I was a competitive tennis player, so I love to go run. And it just is my mood. It enhances my mood and brightens my brain. And I think that in the cultural conversation around strength training, we've sort of lost, well, what does cardio look like to benefit the menopausal woman? And for me, I've gone from running long distance to walking long distance to hiking to rucking to, but there's still a different feel I get in my body when I do cardio. So what do you recommend for cardio for menopausal women? Yeah, so we look at polarizing your training. So we hear all that rhetoric about the zone two stuff. And to me, I'm like, no, we look at the basic physiology between men and women. Women don't need to do a whole bunch of zone two to get the benefits that is reported for zone two of increasing free fatty acid use, mitochondrial use, all that kind of stuff. I tell women, zone two is your soul food. Like I come from an endurance background. I'm an exterra bike. Everything, right? So I get a bike, I go out, I go out for hours. I love it. That's my soul food. I get lost. I come back at the old fantastic, but that's not optimal for this 50 year old body, right? And it's not optimal for women who are trying to lose abdominal at a positive, who are trying to get better insulin control, who are trying to change body composition. We need to look at that high intensity work. The stuff that we've been pushed away from doing, just from a cultural nuance, the way we've grown up. So when we're looking at truths for interval training, this is 30 seconds or less as hard as you can possibly go like, full on, full out. The best way I can teach someone to do that is on an assault bike, where you're looking at arms and legs against resistance, like everyone hates the assault bike, but 30 seconds, you're like, I was just saying my trainer, my trainer pops me on that and I'm like, oh, fuck, we're doing the assault bike again. I know. So I make people chase meters. I'm like, how hard can you go for 30 seconds? And you have a couple of friends around. Go, go, go, go, and you see in the next one, which is three or four minutes later, because you want three to four minutes recoveries, you're chasing the meters, try to push a little bit harder. Most people are like, oh, I can do three to five or eight of those. It's like, we'll see, because usually it's like two and they're like, oh, done. Because it's hard. That's what sprinting. Right. It's hard. Yeah. So when you're doing that, you're creating an epigenetic change within the muscle to open up more of what we call the glute four protein gates, which are the way that carbohydrate and glucose get into the muscle cell without insulin. And it creates a over a course of three to four weeks of doing this kind of work. Now all of a sudden, you have better insulin control because your body has said, hey, skeletal muscle is more sensitive to carbohydrate. We have more of these proteins that translocate to bring carbohydrate in. We don't have to rely much on insulin. When we look at high intensity interval training, which is to step down from the intensity where the intervals are one to four minutes at 80 to 90 percent. With variable recovery, this is more of a mitochondrial response where we're looking at increasing the capacity of the mitochondria to use carbohydrate and use free fatty acids to reduce those free fatty acids that are circulating that get wrapped up by the liver and stored as a visceral fat. So this is how we're reducing the conversation of the visceral fat in the body. So the combination of the two is really, really important for metabolic health and body content. If we're doing that long slow stuff all over the time, it's not a hard enough exercise stress to create these adaptations that we need to have that estrogen, progesterone, and semiccentestosterone used to do for us. So this is why I keep we're looking for that external stress that is above and beyond what the body can usually understand so that it creates all these new feedback pathways to benefit our metabolic and our psychological and all of these responses that go to shit when we hit peri-imposment and then they do. Yes, they do. Yeah, you know, when you go out on your long, on your long rock or like me going for a long ride, that's our sulfide, right? Because that's how we just get rid of the stress and we get that elated feeling of calmness and that's endemic because of the background. But if someone hasn't been doing that, I'm not going to say, okay, now on the weekend, let's go for a four hour ride or three hour rock because that's contract, right? You're indicative to what we want for the body. Okay, so let me sum the up then. What I heard is there's three categories of exercise that we've talked about right now. When you're doing strength training, you want to do heavy, less reps. When you're doing cardio, you really want to do sprints that push you in short intervals. And when you just want to feed your calm your mind and feed your soul, I love the way you said that. That's where you're hiking and you're walking and you're riding. Come in and they're they all are we all call them exercise. But for the post met or the metaposal woman, they all serve a different purpose. Exactly, exactly. So where does something like yoga fit in or Pilates, you know, or anything like that? Yeah, I put that as like your part of the soul food because there's some people who love yoga and love the power yoga and the balance from it from Pilates. It's not pure strength training, but it's more the proprioception and the balance. Doing plios on the jump board is not true plyometrics. So because it's not loading the bone in different metrics, but it is good. It's a complementary aspect for more strength functionality. So there's definitely a time and a place for it to fit in. But again, it shouldn't be the bread and butter of it all because the other thing is brain health. Like if we talk and listen to a lot of stuff, at least I said, we have to look at exercise and the way that it affects our brain and brain function. So if we're looking at neural pathways, this is where that heavy lifting comes into play because if you're using central nervous system response, you're creating new neural pathways. So it's like doing seducu except your exercise. If we're doing that high intensity work, that actually produces more BD and F or brain neurotrophic factor than moderate and tensi or low intensity. And we're trying to increase the volume and the tissue health of our brain. So we're doing both of those. And we are really benefiting our brain health, attenuating dementia, attenuating Alzheimer's, kind of countering that amygdala change that happens with menopause because you're creating that stress and the brain is responding to it as well. You know, she brought in our conversation, she and I talked about this grandmother hypothesis. And you've heard her talk about that. Yeah, yeah. It's really interesting. So I'm really fast. It's really interesting. So actually I have a team of researchers that I will ask to go like scour pub med and find me research. So I was like, go find me stuff on this grandmother hypothesis after I talk to her. And you know, the way I think about things is everything in the body makes sense once you understand it. And so in the grandmother hypothesis, there were two things that really were brought to my attention. One is that the postmenopausal woman was meant to go out and forage. This is what Lisa and this Lisa explained this when I brought her on is actually meant to go out and forage for food to bring back to the cave while the hunter and gathers were out trying to get a kill. So in that, there has to be a fitness benefit that we see in those postmenopausal years that our body is moving towards a different type of fitness because our brain changes so we can take care of the culture. That's what Lisa brought to us. But this fact that we were meant to go out and forage and pull tubers out of the ground, that's the, you know, the part of the grandmother hypothesis means there must be something that our body was meant to do differently from a fitness level. Did you see where I'm going with this? Yeah. And we also look at it. It's like, when we look at the human body itself, it was designed to move, right? It's designed to have bursts of activity and to also go long and slow. But our society has globalized this whole sedentary aspect. And when we look over the course of generations, it's an epigenetic change where now we're seeing things like obesity is just to give in in certain family streams because of these genetic changes. So when we're looking at history and we're looking at how the metabolism everything has changed, yes, right? So we see that metabolism and everything has created this. Let's go slow and long and have lots of endurance. Part of the grandmother hypothesis and we look at biomechanics and we look at when you take those hormones away, yes, we're really good at fat burning, going along and slow. But we don't have to be that way because more looking at the highest and fastest growing population in like ultra endurance are women who are 40 plus because they're naturally falling into this go-long and slow. But we lose fast twitch fibers quickly as we age, both men and women, but for women, we end up losing more because we start with less. And this is where if we're using exercise as a creation of a different type of response, lactate metabolism is really, really important. So if we look historically, we would get lactate from sprints we'd have to do to get away from animals or, you know, even regardless what age. And that's really important for brain and heart health because that's a metabolite that the brain and the heart really use. So we look at some of the sex differences that are coming up in things like Alzheimer's. It has to do with the plaque development and lactate metabolism. So if we're looking at doing sprint stuff for, you know, neuropath ways and it's chaininguating Alzheimer's, we have to also look at the fact that we want to produce lactate to keep glial cell neurons working to keep the brain conversation going. So this is where we're looking historically, yes, the grandmother hypothesis makes sense. But as we go through what's happened from a global standpoint of sedentaryism and the more we know about aging, we don't have to age in the sedentary fashion to create all these health issues that keep coming up that are such a burden on the public health system and burden on insurance, right? And we see it all the time. I come back to the States. I feel like I have everything by sit down and watch the evening news. I have diabetes. I have, I have all this stuff, right? Because that's what's being thrown at us. But if we step back and say, you know what, if we understand physiology, we understand the body is very plastic. We have neuroplasts, stew, we have skeletal and muscle plasticity. Let's create this adaptive changes that allow us to have better metabolism to keep moving forward to maintain our power or speed, maintain our balance, maintain our bone strength. Because we look at history to learn from it, but I don't think you do. A lot of it's looking at history and saying, hey, this is what we have to do. This is what's coming up. It's like, well, actually, now look at history, learn from it. And now we have all this other evidence and information that we can apply to have better longevity and like not be the burden on the public health care system. Yeah. Yeah. I, I, I am so with you on that one because this idea that as we age, we slow down and diseases kick in. A, that's a horrible life to live, but then B, it is a burden on our healthcare system. So I do what's interesting about this flip on the conversation that you and I are having and many other people around menopause is that the old thought was, oh, you, you, you went through menopause and then you just rested and sat in your rocking chair, right? And you just came back and you know, that's right. Like, no, I mean, that's, that's my mother. My mother is 84. That's her. Like, she doesn't have an athletic bone in her body. And yet what I'm hearing is now we're saying the 180 degree opposite, which is you're losing these hormones, but you can use exercise to actually make this transition smoother, bring them back a little bit like testosterone and growth hormone. And that is ultimately going to have a brain effect. And so if maybe in my 30s, I was exercising to look good in my 50s, I'm exercising to make sure that I'm thinking properly. Right. Exactly. Because what's the thing that's been going around? You want to be the oldest person in the weight room, not the youngest person in the assisted care? I said, yeah, that's right. I love that. It's totally. Oh my god, that's so good. That's good. So, okay, so then the, you know, before we go into the fasting conversation, I would say the other challenge that we're seeing a lot in our community, I'm sure you're seeing it in yours, is that as collagen goes down, injuries become more prolific. Yeah. And we're now living in a time where we're getting a lot of new information coming out about some of the musculoskeletal injuries, frozen shoulder being the biggest. So is there anything a woman can do if she's listening to this? And she's like, okay, I'm going to go to the gym. I'm going to start lifting heavy weights and I'm going to start sprinting up a hill. How does she make sure she doesn't injure herself? Yeah, soft tissue injuries, big, huge thing, planner, fasciitis and frozen shoulder are the two biggest issues, right? Because they're all soft, yeah, too, too, tendon stuff. Now, we know how estrogen affects that. So one of my good friends is Kelly star it and he started mobility, wad stuff and now has the ready state and he's looked a lot into tissue health. So I've turned to him and his wife, Juliette, to understand a little bit more about tissue health. So we're looking at a little bit of blood flow restriction through what they call voodoo flossing. So it's a kind of like a therapy band, but you have the ability to wrap around the joints of interest and do range of motion stuff with that wrapped and then remove it and do range of motion again and it's a blood flow response that then increases the actual blood flow to the joints. So you have better range of motion so that it reduces the friction and that cartilage issue as well as enhances the I guess the responses within the tendon because now you have more blood flow there. So I have women really like if you have arthritic onset of arthritis in your knees then we do voodoo flossing before squats or maybe we actually keep the band on as a proprioception for squats. If we're going to do sprints we have to do a really really good sound warm up through mobility. So mobility becomes a key functionality. So this is your foam roller, this is your looking at ring motion. It's not your static stretching, it's actually getting into the full joint and joint capsule. So there are different techniques to really like hold the joint capsule, get more blood flow around it to enhance the tissue health in around the joints. And this is how we look at avoiding soft tissue injuries. And then if you do have tissue injury like planar fascia then there are specific things you can do with voodoo floss and with different types of massage to really enhance the blood flow to those tissues. Is that like BFR bands or Katsu bands? I've seen both of those or as voodoo floss something different. Yeah that's a brand name. It looks very similar. Oh okay. Yeah looks really similar. I'll go look it up. Yeah. You know and I love that idea because I do think if we're going to start to have a whole culture going through menopause and strength training we don't want to end up with a whole culture of injured women. And if it gets too many injuries then all of a sudden now women are like forget it I'm going back to the couch. Yeah. So we you know that's really it's interesting to know that there are some other ways we can look at it. And what I also heard in what you said was foam rolling stretching warming up becomes more important in these menopausal years than perhaps it did in our 20s and 30s. Yeah it used to be get up off get up off the couch for an upfront four and go but now it's like oh 15 minutes of mobility. And then I go do my sprints and then I come back and do some more mobility. Yeah. So okay now going back to the grandmother effect and this is really you and I talked about this before we started recording. I've been really one of the things Lisa said that has my brain really fascinated is that as women go through menopause our brains become less sensitive to glucose and they become it becomes more preferential for more more receptive I should say I want to be really careful with the words I use to ketones. So of course my fasting brain was like well that's interesting so then there is a place for fasting in the menopausal experience because ketones can help super charge our brains and that's honestly what we see in our in our community. So many women start fasting and they're like they drop weight and their brain comes back online. And then on the flip side of that I've heard you talk about how it's hard on the menopausal body because of the cortisol stimulation of fasting. So what I'd love to chat about is is there a middle ground here between getting our brain some ketones and not tanking and letting cortisol get so high that it tanks all the other hormones. Yeah. So I come from it from like my lane is the active woman right so I know that most women are under fueled anyway. And the way that I come from it is looking at chronobiology like we started conversation. And if we look you know cortisol peaks a half an hour if you wake up and then it dips and you have these pulses throughout the day. So we need to have fuel available to kind of stimulate the hypothalamus to say hey you know what there's nutrition coming in and we can have better appetite hormone control and we can drop cortisol. What I do tell women is that we have to go back to quote normal eating where you have breakfast with an active partner to drop that cortisol stimulate the hypothalamus go through the day eating really good quality foods making sure you put a precedent some protein and then you don't eat after dinner. So you have that overnight quote fast which is just normal eating. So we're looking at that overnight fast your body has an opportunity to repair you're developing some ketones. And then when we get into that whole brain health conversation where I'm looking at it at the new research and stuff that's coming out about Alzheimer's and dementia. And primarily you know lots of my friends parents are experiencing it. My grandparents had dementia so really interested. And we're seeing this culture at first right. So if we're looking at the population that's being studied right now with dementia and brain fog it's the women that were not challenged because they weren't allowed or they weren't really proficient to go out and become doctors and lawyers and neuroscientists and all the kind of brainstem jobs that are available now. And they were not encouraged to exercise. So now we're right. The research is coming out about fasting and stuff in post-minopausal women is a cultural nuance because they haven't had the same brain exposure challenges that we've had because of our availability. So we start looking specifically at brain metabolism and trying to get rid of or stop the plaque development in Alzheimer's. This is where they start looking specifically at lactate metabolism to improve glial cell conversations. And lactate is the byproduct of a lot of glucose metabolism. And this is where looking at the high intensity work comes into play. When we look at the conditions as well for women who are not exercising and not producing lactate and because we have this glucose misstep then that's where the ketones come into play. So we're looking at a non-active population. Then yes we can look at using fasting strategically for resetting our circadian rhythm and improving some of the brain metabolism. But in my pop of active women we need to change up the activity and make sure that we are working with our hormone pulses. We're producing lactate on irregular diseases to affect the brain metabolism in a way that a non-exercising population would use with ketones. So this is where you and I have very similar ideas around what we want to do with metabolism but our populations are different because I'm working within that population and looking at brain metabolism and longevity and body comp through that exercise stress as well as the fueling. And then you're looking at it from your practice and the general pop who doesn't really exercise. And so we're looking at two different that we want to have the same outcome but our methods of getting people there are a little bit different. Yeah really brilliantly said. And you know again to let the listeners in on what you and I talked about ahead of time is you know part of the reason we're having this conversation is because we have so many women that both follow us and what they're hearing is you're saying don't fast and I'm saying do fast. And what I hate about social media is you need a conversation like this to understand that there's more nuance to this. And what you and I are both in alignment on is when you put yourself in states of hard and you push yourself you will see your aging brain perform differently and that is a beautiful thing over time. What I and correct me if I'm wrong and but what I also hear from you is so if I have a woman who's completely sedentary she's never worked out before and this is one that I've been really thinking about as this exercise conversation has come back online then short I'm a I'm a fan of cycling fasting that was the whole purpose of fast like a girl was like don't fast the same way all the time look at the look at it as tools there are six different levels of fast that I saw in the research and I saw my clinic and online that worked but just like you have a dumbbell and you have a sprint and you have the voodoo bands and all this they're all just tools that we get to pull out when we need them to push ourselves out out of apathy really so that we age better than we've been aging before. Yeah and like you said the problem with social media is they put everything into one bowl and mix it and so they're like oh you're a woman of a certain age you need to fast you need to exercise you need to do this and that and they don't mix because that's like taking the whole table dumping it in and saying all my tools are together why am I not fixed it's like no we look at it let's go on the table right we have some menopause hormone therapy over here we have exercises over here we have different metabolic control here and we want to strategically use them when we need to they I'm so happy we're having this conversation because that's exactly what I've been saying to my people is like we got it we can't take the tools like this is the way I look at it if I had a toolbox and I was repairing my room and and I took the toolbox into the room I wouldn't pull the hammer out and the screwdriver and be like well the hammer is better than the screwdriver right I wouldn't put those two next to each other I would say okay there's a time to use the hammer and there's a time to use the screwdriver I should probably figure out what those times look like but just the sheer aspect of reels and shorts and the attention span of the public we have all these tools that we are putting or we're saying this is good and this is bad right and yet they're all just tools yeah which is which is beautiful I'll get questions from breast cancer patients and they're like my oncologist told me I should fast but I exercise and I hear from you that I shouldn't fast and I go away to second that's another population that's different we want to use exercise during chemotherapy and radiotherapy as maintenance and keeping things going but fasting can be really powerful when we're looking at attenuating some of the cellular mechanisms that happen with cancer but that's a conversation having your oncologist not through social media with me so again we have those different problems right so it's like yes let's stick to this late I'm generalizing for the healthy woman who exercises and there are nuances here and there are nuances there but I can explain all that in a 22nd real yeah oh my god I love you this is I actually you can watch my Instagram and Facebook over the next couple days I just put out a video or I'm putting out a video where I'm like I think we need a user's guide on how to navigate health information on social media and and the very first thing I said is you need to understand there's short form content and there's long form content and if you're going to build your health strategies around short form content you're really in for suffering because it's just little snippets of information head on over to somebody's podcast their YouTube their book like listen to the longer conversation so you actually get more context to this information so that right it's crazy like the short real and a woman who's just off the couch goes to the gym tries to deadlift 200 pounds with a voodoo class band not eating that's right those real short reals right there that's what's gonna come out of the reals from this podcast we're gonna that's exactly what's gonna happen so okay so then this leads me to the thought which is do you eat before you work out and now I will tell you you actually have changed my mind on that watching the you know the reals on you because I came from the era in my younger self where do you remember that book called Body for Life yes I do and the guy gave away he gave away like a million dollars for the people who lose the could lose the most weight and his number one strategy is workout on an empty stomach because it forces your body to go fine and it worked in my thirties and then when I started to try to lift heavier weights I was like oh this is not working to go in in a fasted state right so can you talk about proper nutrition going into a workout and then what's our recovery meal look like as well yeah so as you know when we have our hormones working for us we can get away with a lot that's why we look at all these trends and people I don't really have an issue what are you talking about does we get older our bodies become more sensitive to things so eating it beforehand is really important I'm not saying a whole meal we look at the research and we see that 30 grams of carbohydrate with 15 to 20 grams of protein before a session that has cardio and strength is optimal because what we're doing is we are now telling the hypothalamus which is really where our energy systems are that there's some nutrition coming in so that we can raise our blood sugar we have enough nutrition coming in so that we can hit intensities and the hypothalamus doesn't go oh shit we got to start conserving because here's this big stress coming in we don't have any fuel so let's start turning the thyroid and everything down so we need that and as we get older becomes really important because again the first thing that goes as we get older exercising facet is lean mass and we know that it's so incredibly hard to build and maintain lean mass not only that since we are losing our hormone pulses our estrogen, progesterone pulses because work flat lining the hypothalamus is in a little bit of a dysfunctional state because it's like hey wait I don't have to create this pulse every day but I still have that stimulus for it so you're bringing food in to also let the hypothalamus read and work a bit better so if we are having that little bit of nutrition before we go to the gym brain is on fire central nervous system is working we can get more out of that workout and then within 30 to 40 minutes afterwards we want to have a good hit protein with a bit of carbohydrate protein more important so after strength training we need about 40 grams as women who are a peripostitopos because we're more what we call anabolic high-resistant to exercise and foods we don't get same signaling with that 20 to 25 grams we need more protein and the protein is important because not only does it come allow the muscle to be flooded with losing which increases the triggering for building lean mass but we also have an increased amount of amino acids circulating which helps with metabolism it helps with the brain to recover and to really help with that testosterone and growth hormone response because it needs amino acids to actually function so we're looking at it from that whole recovery standpoint okay we need some fuel we want to go in type thalamus is being so we can fuel our workouts properly and then we need to refuel afterwards to get adaptation going to help with brain function to keep those signaling going and then we can move on with the rest of our day okay so how long before so that just so I can recap like Ford you said 40 grams of carbohydrates and 15 to 20 grams of protein beforehand was that right 30 grams before 15 ish of yeah and I mean okay within the hour but if you're someone who gets up and goes to the gym at 5 30 in the morning I don't want you getting up to have food at 4 30 you could have it on your drive to the gym right just as long as you have sitting in yeah and then afterwards the key really is bumping up to this 40 grams of protein and what did you said 30 grams of carbohydrates with it's not it's not that it depends on what you did if you're just doing strength training then you'd have your 40 grams within that 30 to 40 minutes and then your real meal up to two hours later and that takes care of the carbohydrate aspect if you've done like a high intensity session and you've done a lot of fuel the pleating type work then you do need to look at getting the 40 grams and probably around 40 to 50 grams of carbohydrate so it's almost a one-to-one ratio to this exercise and I mean some people split their breakfast as well so they'll have some before and then the rest after so it's not increasing total calorie content which people get worried about it's just really manipulating your food you take okay yeah I've I go to the gym and if I have to run errands afterwards I have like a pack of beef sticks that I keep in my car that like the pale and I'm like okay I'll just eat a bunch of beef sticks to try to get to that protein level which actually brings me to the next question which is what do we do with our plant-based friends like where does where does plant-based is there a room for your plant-based amazing okay tell us because I I am like a believer that there's a win in all of this we have to pull these pieces out and have deeper conversations about them and I've seen a lot of post-menopausal women that are plant-based that are really healthy so your plant-based talk about this yeah so I mean I've been plant-based since I was 15 now way before the trends oh wow my high school biology teacher took us on a field trip to a pig slaughterhouse and that kind of did it for me you were done yeah I was done and growing up in San Francisco in all the kind of like I went to high school outside of the hate so there's lots of hippie influences oh yeah that's my love it an environmental stuff so yeah all the stuff that's trendy now is kind of what I went when I was 15 with the pig slaughterhouse trip but throughout my academic and athletic career you know looking at protein protein intake hasn't really come up until about the past 10 to 15 years and we're starting to see more more of plant-based stuff out and it's not about mixing amino acids it's about maximizing your protein intake so when we're talking about plant-based post-sector so it's it's a losing content that's really important so we need to get around three grams of losing and we see that's around 30 to 40 grams of way protein and you can get that equivalent if you're losing it pea protein isolate with maybe some hemp or if you're not someone who's going down the powdered route then we can look at things like chia seeds and nuts and oats soaked together with goat milk or almond milk and so there's ways of building that protein intake with plant-based foods that are high protein but a lot of times we don't think about things like you can have a whole plate mixed of grains and nuts and seeds and green peas and edna and you can get 40 to 60 grams of protein right there so there's ways to bring it when you are plant-based but you kind of have to think outside of the box but it's becoming much much easier now with the awareness of all the environmental factors and health factors easier now than it was when I was 15 that's for sure yeah so I'd love this conversation because it's funny we have a fasting group on Facebook called the resetter collaborative and it's of like over a hundred thousand people that and they're very active and the the thing that shocks me is the carnivores and the plant-based people they fight with each other all the time and I when I look at food through a hormonal lens I'm like okay fiber is so important like it helps us right yeah yeah and nuts and seeds like so important so if I'm over here focused on all this meat where am I making room for enough fiber from a hormonal lens super important but then when you come over and you look at the omnivores you know they're like well how are you getting all your amino acids and so you end up you know in this conflict of interest and so I actually am putting on another book it's a it's I call it a food book in the fall and it's called eat like a girl and I hired two chefs I heard a plant-based chef and I heard an omnivore chef and they're both have their expertise and I was like okay make me some recipes and they're incredible recipes and there's room for both yeah so I think that fact that you're out there talking about muscle and fitness in your plant-based is really important to highlight it's just what I heard from you is you need to be very aware of the combination you're putting together is that is that what I heard in your statement like yeah yeah a good variety of these proteins absolutely and it falls into the whole gut microbiome thing the fiber thing that we see as one of the biggest changing factors in about three to four years before that one-point-time minipause like there's a lot of research coming out as you're losing hormones you're losing a lot of the diversity of the gut microbiome and the way you counter that is with fiber so see the carnivorous diet I'm like oh my gosh what like the first thing that goes you've got microbiome come on people let's be real yeah and you don't want to right into the full nuance of just full plant-based and then nothing either right because then you can get into being too full before you get everything so that's why when I talk to plant-based you have to be very conscious of what you're eating and how it fits together so that you're giving everything that you need but you don't end up being too full before you get what you need so I've written like in some of our groups like with Haley Babcock and our Haley Happens Fitness we get these conversations all the time so I'm like okay here's a day in the life of a vegan here's the day in the life as someone who eats meat here's a day when someone who eats dairy and eggs and they all end up being between 150 and 160 grams of protein sitting right in that 2200 to 2500 and people like oh my gosh really we can do this make yes we can do this it's just being aware I love that yeah oh my god I love that okay so just so were the plant-based people know what are some of the leucine rich plants that if you want to trigger that leucine get that leucine in the mountain so interesting we look at Ednaumian green peas so those two are really high and people I was like yeah and we look at spirulina so blue and green spirulina like ounce to ounce the highest plant-based protein almost complete protein that you can get plus it has iron so if you're looking at making a smoothie okay well you know what if you put in frozen green peas and you put in some chia seeds and you put in some blue spirulina plus some berries you don't even taste the green peas and all of a sudden here's your 40 grams of leucine rich protein yeah I mean well you the smoothies great because you can hide anything in it like you know just put enough enough flavor in it and you can get all the good things and not even taste it do you think we got the conversation on soy wrong I do because it's been taken out of context because if we look at like phytoester and all the good things that happen and the Japanese culture of longevity it's not just the soy it's how they live yeah it's the other things they eat and then when you bring it over to the western diet and you start adding soy it's so ultra-process that there's lots of side effects if you're not sensitive to some of the side effects then yeah implement it but for me like I can't do tofu but I can do tempeh because of the fermentation problem from aspect of it like I would yes yeah I wouldn't use soy milk because it's it gives me too many of the negative side effects but other people don't so the western idea of soy is very nuanced as well because unless you are really following the ethos of of the Japanese lifestyle and all the benefits it has then you could potentially have issues with soy when I look at soy as a protein source as like it takes 50 grams of soy protein powder to match 20 grams of way but it only takes 30 grams of pea protein isolate to match that 20 grams of way and the thing with the ice just on the cusp of having enough loosing so all you have to do is add maybe another half a tablespoon and then boom you've hit that so that loosing context but with beautiful it's so much more so again it's I feel like yeah you need to write a book about all of this but I think it would take too much time yeah it's right we'll just have conversation yeah I just can say what would the book could be called like the nuance of menopausal nutrition you know like there's all the things that you really you really need to know so um okay I want to go I want to go back to the timing for a minute because I brought Sachin Panda onto my podcast and we talked specifically about when you should eat like that first part of your meal and so the question he said you wait an hour and what you said is within the first half hour so just so because this is shows up all the time because we talk about fasting windows and eating windows within my community and I'm like you get to choose where your eating window goes like fasting doesn't mean you skip breakfast in my opinion the best thing to do is eat in the light and when it gets dark out don't eat and make that middle and you you sort of said this earlier on make that middle part of your day you're eating window so how do you feel about that theory of like matching your eating with light and I'm sure you're aware that you know it's not that far off from eat within the first half hour but he basically says don't eat within the first hour so do we have any way of rectifying those two statements yeah so I look at like I said physiologists look at cortisol and with they peak and if you're looking at that cortisol peak that's a half an hour after you wake up and for women who are early sympathetically driven and we're looking at lowering cortisol you want to counter it and the way you do that is with some protein carbohydrate and so that's why I'm like you want to eat within that first half an hour to really bring that down and if you're a coffee drinker then you definitely want to have some food with it right because if you're drinking coffee within that half an hour then you're just going to perpetuate the breakdown effects of cortisol so when we talk about cortisol and the way that it nuances especially in pairing postman-aposal women and that increase in that baseline amount of cortisol we want to do what we can with our circadian rhythm and we can do that with food so for looking at food and looking at dropping that cortisol to get less of a response over time then we want to use food to do that so that's how I look at it when we're looking at what such and saying he's looking at you know primarily male data and the difference in the sensitivity of cortisol and when we look at population research we see both men and women those who have their eating window by 8 a.m. and then they stop by like four so eight to four end up with all the health benefits that we see with the fasting research but for those who delay their fast till noon and then their eating windows from like noon to eight they end up with more obesity genic outcomes because they're fighting their circadian rhythm and all the nuances because circadian rhythm isn't just a whole body thing all yourselves have its own circadian rhythm so if you're not working with that then you end up with a whole misstep so when we're looking at how you're saying eat during the light we see in that population research that yes those who are eating in the day who are working with their circadian rhythm and able to fuel for the stressors of the day end up with better health outcomes than those who delay and eat you know well into the evening the interrupt sleep and they have no benefit of withholding food so again I come back to physiology circadian rhythm what are we looking cellular circadian versus total body circadian and I say that as I'm completely jet lagged from flying across the world right you're doing you're doing amazing being jet lagged yeah there you go so could it be a simple could it be as simple as putting some protein powder in your coffee if you don't love breakfast yeah if you don't gravitate towards food yeah I know I don't really get hungry till 11 or 12 but I get up at six so I'm like okay well I have a cold brew coffee with a scoop of protein powder and some almond milk in there so I'm getting some carbohydrate and getting some protein brains like yeah there's some fuel coming in and then I have something to wake me up yeah it doesn't have to be a lot but it is enough to get the signaling going that there's stuff coming in I've done all kinds of weird things in my coffee and and people always ask me are you still fasted and I always say yes in it depends on how you look at the fasted state so and it depends what you're trying to do in the fasted state so you could put protein in and maybe you turn off a topogy and that's okay because today's your strength training day and you want to lean more into mTOR and more into protein so you put a ton of protein put tons of collagen in put some MCT oil in your coffee you have a little meal there and you may actually still be in a mild ketogenic state and that might actually work for you to go lift in the gem so so I think again it's like I love the idea of N of 1 like be your own N of 1 like take these principles and find out play with them and find out what works for you and then you'll get into a rhythm and then you know the other concept is the best health health habit is the one you can stick to so it's like once you find your rhythm now all the sonate works right right one last one last one last thought was creatine everybody's talking about creatine what do you think of that it's great it's great it's one of the most studied supplements and it's so important for women I mean we have 70% of the stores that men have anyway and we do produce some in the liver but when we look at a lot of the clinical research that comes out from a health standpoint it's so important for muscle function gut function hard function in brain function and there is a new website creatine for health that post all the most recent studies on it and it's everything from pregnant women all the way through old age and creatine like so important to improve all the fast energetics and in particular again it comes back like I'm interested in brain health and it's so important for brain health and you can put it in your coffee you can you definitely can that's why I brought it up in the I mean there's a lot that can go in your coffee that really works and brings all these principles together so well I this is great it's been awesome and I just yeah I love geeking out with you and I think people who have been following both you and I hopefully will now have some answers as to where we agree yeah because I again I've been watching your stuff I'm like we're not saying different things you're just taking them out of context we're actually saying very similar things we just need to put them into a greater conversation and hopefully this did that yeah so yeah awesome yeah yeah thank you so okay my last question that I've been asking everybody this season is what is your definition of health and how do you know like how do you feel with know that you are actually healthy do you have a measurement of that oh I like full disclosure I am not in a healthy state this year because I've been so super busy so I feel very flat and tired all the time for me definition of health is waking up and having that that energy to take on a new challenge every day right and loving that feeling and that can come through so many different avenues it can come through the physicality come through conversations it can come through good sleep a good adventure turning your brain down all of those things and when you have that ultimate feeling of peace and energy when you wake up that's to me is what healthy is but I've been so disjointed with so many different things going on that I'm like I miss that feeling so that's my priority over what didn't him a spear summer southern hemisphere winter is it get everything back in line so I can wake up feeling that way again oh my gosh I am so with you I I hit a real wall about a couple well I mean it's been hitting for a while but like a month ago I had this insight for my own self that I've actually given up my health to teach the world how to be healthy which I hear is a little bit of what you have done as well and there's a moment where you have to just say no to everything so that you can get take your health back and I'm on that same journey right now for July and August and a good portion of September I'm just powering down and making myself a priority so I hear you sister like I'm yeah really in that same place yeah so we need yes we need we need a check in we can hold each other accountable sounds good but yeah it's hard when all the people are asking questions and you're so passionate about what you do and you want to help people but then I'll also like wait my whole battery is drained I don't even have the energy to go I have a conversation with my loved ones because I don't want to talk yes yeah yes yes god it's like I feel like you know you know what I've been going through that same thing and finally I just said there's no no amount of anything you could throw at me that would want to take me away from rebuilding my health at this moment because you know if you and I aren't healthy we can't deliver a message so yeah yeah so check in yeah I'll be picking you you ping me how's it going yeah okay perfect I love it I love it we'll do well thank you and how do people find you so if people you know don't know who you are and what you're up to how can my audience find you um social handles dr stacy sims on facebook instagram and tiktok which you know and then our website this is doctor's like on there not a fan of tiktok but I've been told we need to be on it me neither yeah and then our website just the dr stacy sims website updates for everything that I'm involved in and doing and all the things all the things in one spot well stacy thank you thank you so much and um I really enjoyed this conversation I feel like now when we get comments of people saying like well stacy says don't fast I'm gonna send them this episode um so that we can have get off the 90 second reel uh and get into a deeper conversation yeah thank you appreciate you you too thanks so much good luck good luck yeah good luck on your recovery I will hold you accountable okay sounds good thank you so much for joining me in today's episode I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you if you enjoyed it we'd love to know about it so please leave us a review share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is