How to Feel Stronger, Healthier, and More Energized at Any Age with Dr. Stacy Sims

Speaker A: Welcome to Game Changers with Molly Fletcher. For more than 30 years, I've had a front row seat to greatness. This is where we uncover the mindset, habits and lessons behind high performance from some of the world's top athletes, coaches, leaders and thinkers. Let's get into it.

Speaker B: Foreign.

Speaker A: I've got to tell you, I. I walked into today's conversation thinking that I knew a pretty good bit about health and, and fitness. And then I talked to Dr. Stacy Sims, and I realized that so many of the recommendations that women have been following for decades weren't necessarily built with women in mind. As someone who cares a lot about staying healthy and being active, I've definitely had moments where I've wondered, um, am I doing the right things? Is this working or even thinking, uh, why is it not? If you've ever felt that way too, you're going to get a lot out of this conversation. Dr. Sims is one of the world's leading experts on female physiology and performance. What I love about this conversation is that it's not about another health trend we, or a, uh, quick fix. It's about understanding what your body actually needs to stay strong and energized and healthy over the long haul. We talk about what actually matters most as we age and how to make decisions today that support the life you want to live tomorrow. And I'll be honest, this conversation, it was so helpful to me personally that I really couldn't wait to share it with you too. So if there's a woman in your life who would benefit from hearing this too, send it her way. Let's get into it. This is my conversation with Dr. Stacy Sims. So, Stacy, I love all the things that you do, all the things that you stand for, and you know, you're standing tall and proud for women and, and health. So thank you so much for the work that you do. Super grateful. You know what, what's so interesting to me, what's so fun for me and sort of what also makes me crazy and my other girlfriends that are like in their mid-50s. Right. Is when you feel like you're doing a lot of things right and you're just sort of not maybe seeing or feeling the results. What do you think at the highest level? Right. That, that we're missing as middle age, post menopause women that are trying to be the healthiest version of ourselves and not quite seeing the results.

Speaker B: Yeah. So there's two points of contention here. One, people have this idea that we age in a linear fashion and that our bodies have a slower Decline. And we have a, uh, decline with functionality over the course of decades. But that's not what happens. We see there's a definitive change in metabolism. So the way our body works around age 45, and that's an aging factor. And then we also have to take into account the way that our hormones are shifting. So if we think about puberty and all the things that happen around puberty with our bodies changing and body composition changing, biomechanics changing, uh, and then you get your period and all those things, we're kind of on the reverse of that. So we're starting to see every system of the body being affected. So you have these two points of contention that really affects women differently than men. So when we start going, all the training advice and everything is based on this linear aging pattern and data from men. Unless you have some kind of public burden disease like cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome. That's where all the research in postmenopausal women has been. So when we start talking about us that have been active women the whole time, going, what's going on? Why is my training not working for me? Why my blood lipids changed all of a sudden? Um, my sleep patterns are up. What's going on? We have to look specifically at the female body and go, well, what's going on is that we are completely different than xy.

Speaker A: That was what kind of unlocked some of this for you, right? Was you were like, wait a minute. We're benchmarking against the things we shouldn't be benchmarking against as women. Is that what sort of in part set you on this journey?

Speaker B: Yeah, I think. And the injustice of always kind of being put into the box. I'm so tired of someone telling me, oh, it doesn't matter. You're just the same as men. Um, we can't do research on women. It's too complex. So we just take data from men and generalize without really understanding the implications. And so that made me really frustrated because as an athlete, I want the best protocols to be able to train the best, to be the fittest, to be able to compete at a high level. And I wasn't seeing that happening.

Speaker A: What, what do you. I mean, what are the things that. What's making healthy women unhealthy?

Speaker B: I think a lot of trends, really. So we think about, uh, a lot of the exercise information that's out there. We think about the diet information that's out there. And when we really kind of disseminate it down, there are two issues. One, it comes from a clinical population and then pulled over a healthy population. And we can't really generalize that way. And then when we look at the main area of data, it's coming from male bodies. And when women say, oh, I do really well doing xyz, it's like, what does that mean? How do you know that you're doing well? How do we know that that's optimal for you if you haven't tried doing something that we know works with your circadian rhythm or works with your physiology? But people get so ingrained in what they're doing because they think it's working for them. But I'm always like, well, what does that mean? Are you sleeping really well? Do you have lots of energy? Or are you just going on aesthetics and what it says on the scale?

Speaker A: Well, and it's interesting. Cause I sort of feel like when you get. I'm 54, I mean, you sort of get a little bit older. And like, I do this thing every couple times a year. I do, you know, blood work. And it's like 160 different biomarkers or blood. You know, what are they called that come, you know, the lab to 160 biomarkers, I guess, is what it is, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, that. But it's a lot of data. Right. And so when they're benchmarking that. Am I hearing you say that? When they say sort of this is the normal range, that normal is not necessarily normal for, uh, you know, for a woman. Okay, that is incredibly interesting. Wow.

Speaker B: And the other thing is, when you look at the normal range, they're looking at the general population. So that doesn't fit with an active woman. And I always like to use iron as an example because like four or five years ago, the low end of normal for ferritin was 50. Now it's 20. Because the norms shift with the general population. And the general population is getting sicker. So they're just looking at the bell curve of what's normal. So as a woman who's active, who goes in and goes, my ferritin's at 30. And I feel like crap, they're not going to do anything because you're still in that normal range, but that's not normal for you. So when you're getting all the biomarkers that you're getting, it's looking at your trends over time to say, where am I in my normalcy? For me, and what are some of these changes that I'm seeing? Then you can take action instead of looking at what's normal. Look at where you sit and how you feel.

Speaker A: Yeah, that's really interesting. I mean, I think, in other words, I'm kind of hearing you say, do it consistently and then benchmark a bit against yourself, obviously. But if there's things that are certainly out of whack, we're all just gonna, we'll just gonna call you Stacy. Is that cool? Yeah.

Speaker B: Okay, fair enough.

Speaker A: What health advice should women ignore? Because to your point, I mean, it is so easy to sort of, oh, wow, you know, m. Let me try sporina corral. Let me try wheatgrass shots. Let me try sauna. Let me try cold plunge. Like I'm a glutton for all of that madness, which is sort of exhausting. And then you're sort of like, am I gonna do this for like, however long I need to do this to figure out if it actually moves the needle and are there inside of this. So what advice should we ignore? What advice we pay attention to?

Speaker B: I, uh, always bring it back down to the basics, right? So we look and go, okay, how is your sleep? Because that's the first thing we have to nail. And if your sleep is interrupted, then we have to figure out why. So then I take a step back and go, well, let's look at how you're. You're eating across the day. Like, when are your points of contention of eating? Are you eating more towards the beginning of the day or are you having a little bit throughout the day and more at night? Because that can interrupt your circadian rhythm. And if your circadian rhythm is shifted, then you're not going to have the appropriate times where your melatonin comes up to allow you to get into deep sleep. So it's kind of like, let's look at this 24 hour pattern. Once we now sleep, then we can look at movement. We can look at mindfulness and community engagement and having friends to call and overall, uh, nutrition, like looking at protein and fiber. So just the basics. Once we have the basics nailed, then we can look and say, oh, okay, what are my risk factors? Do I have a family history of cardiovascular disease? Do I have a family history of dementia? Then we can look at some of the biohacking things. If we have cardiovascular disease risk factors, the heat is going to really help because that helps boost your blood volume, it helps with your blood vessels, it helps with your blood pressure, it helps with your, um, your blood glucose levels, all of the things that help improve cardiovascular health. But this is after you've already nailed all the exercise components, right? So we're looking at, what's the extra we can put on? If we have a risk factor for dementia, we know we need to lean into more strength training so that we can improve the neural connectivity in our prefrontal cortex right here, you know, where all your cognitive function is. So there's different points of contention. Once you have the basics, then we have to look at what is specific to me. What am I worried about the most as I'm getting older, to be able to functionally do really well and maintain a health span as I get older.

Speaker A: And so what are the primary sort of buckets, uh, that you look at? And you rattled off a couple, right. You start with sleep, you said. You start with what you're taking in, how you're fueling your body. And, uh, uh, what are the other ones that you would say for women in particular are really important, both for us to be aware of, for us to monitor, for us to track, for us to begin to go, ooh, I think I've got. I may not see it as a problem, but I'm building toward a problem if I don't fix it.

Speaker B: Yeah. Uh, I think part of it also is being muscle centric. So that means that whatever we're doing, we have to think about how am I building and supporting, supporting my muscle, because we lose it pretty rapidly. Uh, we lose power, um, the ability to generate power, which is like our ability to pick things up, hold on to them, lift groceries overhead, our functional strength, that kind of stuff. So we want to look at how are we being muscle centric? Because if we start losing muscle, we're also losing bone. And if we're losing both bone and muscle, then that impedes our capacity being independent as we get older.

Speaker A: Interesting. And so training against that. Right. Like, and I think. And muscle is such a critical thing, isn't it? And I think it always is. Funny to me. I heard you say this on another podcast, right? Like, and I hear this sometimes from. Even my daughters are like, I mean, I want to lift weights, mom, but, like, I don't want to get bulky. And I'm like, you don't have a predisposition to get bulky. You're not going to get bulky. Like, you're down for, you know, getting it done in the gym, right?

Speaker B: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Speaker A: But people think that, don't they?

Speaker B: They do, absolutely. And it's the thing that I really push back against. And Mike, it's, you're not going to get bulky unless you really, really focus on doing that. Like, there's no cardio you're in the gym with a really good periodized program that's geared to building muscle. You're eating in abundance. And it's really hard for women to put on muscle mass. Especially as we get older, we want to focus on strength because if you're focusing on the strengthen, you're also building lean mass. But if we start focusing on the more reps and the hypertrophy or building muscle type of side of things, then we're kind of compromising our strength. And for women, it's about strength and power. We have to maintain that as we get older. And you're not going to get bulky when you're focusing on that side of things. For sure.

Speaker A: When we think about taking advice from a myriad of platforms and from sort of that next great big fad hacker, whatever that we, uh, I know my, my college friends, we get sucked into sometimes, but not anymore because we're all just going to call Stacy, which is great, but. No but is, you know, uh, what role does. I mean, here we are in the middle of all this AI. Unbelievable. There's gifts in it, there's challenges in it, all that. But it can, it can be dangerous for women's health, I would imagine. The temptation, I think is it's available at 2 in the morning and you know, it's fast. What is your take on the role that it can play?

Speaker B: So uh, right now, I think because it's such a wild west, it's pretty risky. Because if we look at the bell curve of information, right, and we're looking at what are our nuances and outliers right now we see that the nuances and outliers in health is women's health, ethnic differences, racial differences, all of the things that are never really in the conversation because the conversation is pulling from that male data, which is the most robust part of research. And it's echo chambering in. And then if they start pulling female data in, you don't really know if the methods are appropriate. Did they combine oral, contraceptive and naturally cycling women? Because that's not appropriate. Are they just pulling women's data out from a study that was with men? Because that's not appropriate. So the methods also is in question, like AI is great for technology and picking up things the human eye can't see. It's great for advancing other techniques that might actually need a little bit more faster processing than what a human can. But right now, when we're looking at the data input and going to any kind of, any data lake right now for Women, the information coming back isn't right. And so that's what the worrying misstep is, is that it's going to perpetuate misinformation. And. And the more that you dig in and pull up this information, the more that those algorithms lean into it, so it just becomes this echo chamber of misinformation.

Speaker A: What's the one thing women think is helping them that's probably actually hurting them?

Speaker B: Oh, gosh. Uh, in what regard? Are we looking at overall health trends or.

Speaker A: You know, that's a really good point. I mean, I guess I would say maybe inside the things they can't see inside of their body, maybe. And then outside. Right, the things that we can see. And then also from just a training perspective and a workout perspective, I mean, I think, you know, I think there's this. As a former athlete, you know, uh, we always spend a lot of time in the gym and not a whole lot of time. I mean, we did cardio, but I think we see so much of that cardio walking and all that, and less sort of throwing some dumbbells around in the gym. But so I guess I would go inside, outside, and then training.

Speaker B: So if we think about inside the body, a lot of women. Well, uh, I'll contextualize it the way that we grew up in and seeing the emphasis of the 90s supermodel. Calories in, calories out, fat burning, all of that is still rife, right? We see this, and as we're seeing the uprise of the misuse of the GLP1 for more aesthetics rather than health, we're being pushed back into that. Skinny is really what we want to aim for. And that is one of the biggest missteps that we have. Because if we start looking at that whole aesthetics, I want to be thin, I, um, want to be lean. If I were to ask women who are in their late 40s, early 50s to give me the results of their DEXA, even though they look lean and fit on the outside, we're going to see, for the most part, low bone density, an increased amount of visceral fat, and, you know, maybe body fat percentage is okay, but the visceral fat is the worrying part, because when we start looking at what's happening is that perpetual idea of calories in, calories out, and I need to be thin, I need to look a certain way. Most women are not eating enough, or they're doing things like fasted training, delaying their food intake. So this has repercussions on our, uh, metabolic health and what we're seeing in the biomarkers in the labs that come out. So if we're looking at a typical woman who's in her mid-50s, 40s, early-50s, and is going, okay, I want to have muscle, I want to look lean, I don't want bulky. So I'm going to follow this whole idea of some calorie restriction. I'm going, uh, to exercise and go get my Smash Sweat fest on. It is not doing well. I shouldn't say it's not doing anything because any exercise and movement is good. But we have to really contextualize and say the bottom line is our circadian rhythm. If we start holding food or withholding food and training, we're actually phase shifting. So that means that it's like that jet lag effect. And if we're phase shifting, then all of our normal processes throughout the day that keep us healthy, like our ability to, um, encounter a stress and have a little bit of a cortisol response that allows us to wake up and counter that stress, it becomes above and beyond what we actually need to do. We see perturbations in our hormone pulses throughout the day, and that leads forward to a, uh, blunted rise of melatonin and interrupted sleep. This is what I was talking about earlier. So if we look and go, well, actually, if we're fueling to help our body manage the stress that we encounter in the day, as well as fueling for our training and recovering from our training, we start to have better metabolic health. We start to see a decrease in visceral fat and an improvement in overall blood markers. So this is the bottom line. There's so much push for women to do fasted training or intermittent fasting. It's like, well, let's just really look at this on a bottom scale. We know from the research that there's no real difference between fed and fasted training with regards to fat oxidation. And people are like, oh, well, if I do fasted training, I'll burn more fat. But, yeah, maybe you'll increase fat oxidation or burning fat during exercise. But post exercise, no, we're not seeing that. We're seeing that if you eat something before training, then it actually holds a greater amount of fat burning for 24 hours afterwards. So there's so much misinformation, and that's different.

Speaker A: That's for women and not men, because

Speaker B: women fuel differently than men. So we tap into blood glucose and fat and men burn through their, their glycogen stores. But we've always been told you burn through all Your glycogen stores first and it's not quite the same. Uh, this is why I'm always leaning in. Let's be muscle centric, right? Because if we are, are thinking about what we're losing, we're trying to lose weight, then we're losing our muscle, we're losing our bone, we're losing our ability to sleep well, we're losing our overall health parameters. But if we lean into being muscle centric, where I want to build muscle, so I need to eat to build and I want to put training stress on, so I need to eat to be able to hit those training stresses. And I want to recover well so that my body builds muscle and bone. So that's the mind shift. I'm really trying to get women to understand.

Speaker A: And so it's interesting because this explains why, you know, when I was thinking 16 hours of fasting, it did nothing for me. Truly.

Speaker B: Yeah, an overnight fast, like stop, uh, eating dinner and then have breakfast. That's perfect. That's perfect. And then you're getting all the benefits.

Speaker A: What's your recommendation on that for women relative to the period of time where they're not taking anything in?

Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, uh, my grandmother would say it's just eating normally. Right. So you have dinner and then you don't have an after dinner snack at 9pm so you have dinner if you want dessert, have a little bit of chocolate or whatever it is. Then if you really need to go brush your teeth so that you don't feel like you need more food and then you have a few hours before bed and then you're not eating from like 7:30 until 7:30 and then your 12 hour overnight fast. Uh, and then you're getting benefits and you can sleep well because your body's not trying to digest food. Uh, and I think there's been so much confusion about what is time restricted eating and it's so easy in the morning because I don't feel hungry. Well yeah, because our hormones are working to kind of dampen that, but we shouldn't lean into that.

Speaker A: So what is your, I mean like there's, I do the mega reformer machine a little bit. I do, you know, hot yoga, lift weights. I don't really do a lot of cardio unless it's pickleball or walking and playing golf. What is your take on, Is it a, uh, uh, do you have a particular, like if you were going to just throw a dart, would you say Molly, like 70% weight restrict, you know, weight restricted training. The other can be cardio like, is there any way that you kind of think about that at a high level for a non superstar physical athlete like yourself? I'm like a flabby lady like me.

Speaker B: I'm training for life. I'm a retired athlete. I just trained for life now. Uh, so it's a combination. It's not one or the other. It's like, I now lean into what is brain health. Because we know that there's a really significant sex difference in brain health as we age. So if we look at what's optimal, we know resistance training. Resistance training, optimal for our brain health, but it also helps with cardiovascular health. So we look at strength training. We can't discount cardio. We need some of that too, for metabolic control and improving some of our heart muscle function, our lung function. But it's not the, uh, I have to do 90 minutes of cardio every day, which is what some people are thinking about when we're talking about, like zone two and stuff. It's like, let's pepper it. We know resistance training is good for neural connection. We know some cardio is good for producing what we call bdnf, which is brain neurotrophic factor, growth hormone for the brain. So I really tried to tell women, it's like, look, let's have three days of focus strength training, and then we can have a little bit of intensity and then soul food. So what you're doing is great. And it's not just like strength training because we also have to think about balance and proprioception. So that's where yoga and Pilates comes in. Because people are very absolute. They're like, just strength training, nothing else. It's like, well, yeah, but you also want to add in balance and proprioception. So that's where Pilates and yoga come in. It's also really good for tendons and ligaments. When you're holding a pose and really getting that isometric contraction through the muscle for our ligaments and tendons. Then we also don't want to discount cardio because that also helps with brain health and metabolic health. But it's like, find your love and passion. If you hate doing cardio, then you're walking the dog and walking golf. That's great. But if you're someone who loves cardio and hates strength, well, we have to rethink that a little bit and lean into some of the things that make us uncomfortable.

Speaker A: What about bone health? I mean, you know, uh, my mother has osteoporosis. Our family history, right. I mean, she's Gotten a little bit sort of smaller as. And so, you know, I just hang from a bar every morning to make sure that I stay tall. No, I'm just kidding. But what, you stretch? Yeah, but what do we. How do we. How can we be remarkably intentional about. I mean, I don't live on a dairy farm, which is what my grandmother would have said, you know, 100 years ago. What can we do now in addition to, like, what you've talked about? Right. Muscle strength supports our bones. Anything else from an intake perspective, food wise, that you would say, wow, this is really helpful for us as women for bone health?

Speaker B: Yeah. There are two things that we are seeing from the research. One's creatine and one is vitamin D. Um, so creatine can come from your creatine containing foods or you can supplement and then vitamin D. Because, like, living down here in the southern hemisphere, we don't get that much sun in the winter. So it's always like, how low are my vitamin D levels getting? And then when it's summer, people are wearing sunscreen and hats and sunglasses or staying inside. So you're still not like, right now, Northern hemisphere, I'm very jealous because it's nice and hot, but everyone's sunscreening up, so that's also a contingent. And then we also want to look at loading the bone differently from strength training. So this is where we look at a little bit of jump training. So there's a couple of research centers in Australia and in the US that's looking at impact loading. And this is just low jumps where you're landing hard. Not like how we learned with plyometrics, where you're landing soft, but it's actually a very low jump and landing hard to pull that impact up through the bone. And it doesn't take a lot. We're looking maybe three minutes total of that impact. So it's over the course of 10 minutes where you have some rest and jumps and stuff. Uh, and that's really helpful in building bone.

Speaker A: What. What are you landing on? What are you landing on? Because, like, my knees from tennis are a disaster. Cement or grass?

Speaker B: Oh, grass is great. Yeah.

Speaker A: Okay. Yeah. I mean, the softer the surface, is that okay?

Speaker B: Yeah. But not a trampoline.

Speaker A: Right? Right.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: Good. So if we only had 30 minutes a day. Right. Like, what's your, uh, to invest in our health? What do you. What's your. How would you recommend women think about those 30 minutes from a physical perspective? Right.

Speaker B: Like, so if we're thinking about 30 minutes, we want to really kind of have the eye of what's beneficial to helping us age well. So we know balance, proprioception, agility, uh, a higher level of physical fitness. So that's where our VO2 max conversations come into play. But it's not about achieving a higher level VO2 max. It's about the intensity and then the strength perspective. So that's grip strength, that's functional strength. So if we were to look at designing a 30 minute program and this is, this is just generic, this isn't what everyone should do. It's just having the idea we want to do some mobility work to open up our hips and our shoulders, get our tendons and ligaments working. We might do some pogos, single leg pogos. So we're getting um, a little bit of impact, but also some agility work. Then we look at some compound movement, strength work. So that could be your squats or your deadlifts or your overhead push or your bench. So some kind of compound movement. And then we finish with a little bit of sprint work. So that could be 20 or 30 seconds on an assault bike with two to three minutes recovery. So it doesn't take a lot of. So you're hitting all of those metrics, right? So those are the things that we're thinking about. And if you do that three times a week, you're golden.

Speaker A: Wow.

Speaker B: Yeah, it doesn't take a lot. It's about the quality, not the volume. And I think we in our age groups, we have that hard time of let's decrease the volume and focus on the quality. Because we've been so entrenched in the 60 minute sweat fest, feeling really smashed when you come out. And that was a good sweaty session. But that's not really ideal when we're looking at how are we aging appropriately.

Speaker A: You know, it's interesting that you say that. Cause I feel like that was some advice I got from the folks when I did some of that blood work is they're like, you actually need to take a couple days off and uh, just stretch and rest and breathe or go for a little short, uh, totally chill walk or whatever. I think you're right. I mean, I see women at this gym that I go to and they're there every single day doing this same. And I'm like, wow. Right. Because there's something to also changing it up and shocking the muscle a little bit I think too. So. Right, well, good. I'm going to stretch tomorrow morning, then I'm going to shut it down.

Speaker B: Good. Do that stretch outside if you can so you get some nature time is so much better, right?

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, totally.

Speaker B: I get the pushback a lot about, well, what if I want to see my friends at this class? I want to go to this class and see my friends. Yeah, that's great. We want to maintain that social connection. But I always tell women, you are paying for the gym, you are paying for the class, so make it work for you. I don't want to take away your friend time because that's really important. Isolation, we know, is a killer. So maintaining those connections, really important. But just take a pause and, you know, for people who love the orange theories and F45s, it's like, yeah, go to the class, but make that class work for you. Have a focus for every time you go.

Speaker A: Right. In other words, two 80% days. I mean, go ahead and just do one at 100 plus or whatever. Crush it and take the next day off. Yeah, yeah, got it. And then meet your friends for coffee. Right? And everybody, every check spot, every box. Check what? What are.

Speaker B: Yeah, every box is checked. Right.

Speaker A: What do you think we're wasting? Like, what would you say is the thing that you see so often that women are, or people in general, from a health and wellness perspective are wasting their money on? Right. That we really don't need to care about, but that we get sucked into and spend money on. And I'm sure we probably don't even have enough time for you to answer that question, but what are your top couple that are just a sure fire that you're seeing all the time and it just got to make you sick?

Speaker B: Shelves and shelves of supplements in someone's house, right?

Speaker A: Oh, I'm in trouble. Yup. 100%. Well, yeah.

Speaker B: I mean, because we look at the supplements and you ask people, like, why are you using it? Often they're using so many different things that effectively either don't do anything or they kind of overlap and do the same thing. So I like to go through people's supplements and ask them why they're using it and is there really data to support it? Because it's such a marketing machine when we talk about supplements and what's appropriate. So that's one of the things. And then the other thing, of course, is all the wearables that women are leaning into to tell them how they slept, what their heart rate variability is, all of these things. Because again, the algorithms are based on male data and it doesn't capture the fact that there are sex differences in beat to beat for women and men. And if we Are lifelong exercisers. Women's hearts remodel differently than men's. So you hear about men in their 40s who have been endurance athletes having incidences of ventricular tachycardia.

Speaker A: Totally.

Speaker B: Atrial fibrillation. Yes. Right, yeah, totally. And it's because, uh, their hearts remodel to differently than women. So for us, if we're lifelong exercisers, our chambers get bigger as well as the muscle around it gets stronger. But for men, it's the muscle around it that gets stronger. So they end up with having an extra nerve to come to stimulate. So this is why we start seeing all these different arrhythmias in men. So when women present with a change in their rhythm, it's perceived as being an arrhythmia. And we're often told, you need to stop doing everything until we figured this out, instead of going, oh, this is the normal rhythm that a woman's heart remodels to. So when we start looking at all the wearables that are looking at our stress resilience and our sleep, again, it's based on male data, male physiology. The touch points of those algorithms are not looking at things like the fact that it's normal for a woman's heart rate variability to change over the course of a menstrual cycle. It doesn't mean that she's broken when it's low. It doesn't mean that she's not stress resilient. It just means that there's been a significant change in her autonomic nervous system based on progesterone. And it's normal. When we get into perimenopause, it goes all over the place because we're having changes in our sex hormones. But the heart rate variability on the wearables are just measuring. Our autonomic nervous system is not taking in all the other factors that contribute to stress resilience. So it's great for men. Like picking the apple. Watch. Picking up, um, the heart rhythms. Fantastic. For men, it's great. But when we start looking at it for women, it's not appropriate. We look at trends over time. Perfect.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: But absolute no.

Speaker A: So all three of my daughters, 23, 22, 22 oura rings, they all wear em. I wear a whoop. I mean, so am I. Is there a wearable? Is there anything that we can lean into consistently that helps us right now?

Speaker B: Not right now, no. I mean, aura's doing a good job with their new women's, um, LLM, where it's retrospectively going back and looking so it can predict some things for you. Whoop is trying to do the same, but it's not quite there yet. They're all retrospectively going back and trying to retrospectively fix to predict. Myself and, uh, a few others are really frustrated with that. We're actually trying to go in and redo the scientific design by creating a large language model that's based specifically on female data to be agnostic so that we can go to all the wearables and say, instead of leaning in retrospectively, why don't you use this corrective factor that's based on female physiology from the get go so that you can give proper insights women? Because that's the only way we're going to fix the whole market is if we go in with a true corrective factor, not trying to retrospectively look to predict.

Speaker A: Amazing. Wow. Wow. So, real quick, uh, kind of a little bit of a fighter if you can tell me if this, if you think this is helpful, overrated. And you can speak to it a little bit too. GLP1s.

Speaker B: So GLP1s are interesting because they've been around for a really long time, for 20 some years and being used appropriately for diabetes. And then it started being used for obesity. And it's a great tool for that. The problem that I see with them, um, is the lifestyle interventions that aren't necessarily being taught when they should be. So leaning into preserving muscle and leaning in to preserve bone and leaning in to understand how to eat in an appropriate fashion. Because the GLP ones, yeah, they're great. They reduce the chatter, they help you get a, uh, control on everything so that you have the opportunity to make wiser choices. When we start looking at the misuse that we see in some of the celebrity sets and some of the, like, lower followers, that's the problem. There was a geneticist on our equivalent over here of NPR who was talking about obesity and he's like, the thing with the GLP1 is that one in eight Americans are using them. But then you have to think who those 1 in 8Americans are. They're not necessarily the people that need it because it's still expensive. It's not that accessible. So there's a lot of misuse going on.

Speaker A: Wow. And one in eight people don't have diabetic, aren't living with diabetes or. Pretty damn right. So that's your answer right there in part. Right. What about peptides? This is like the day with everybody's

Speaker B: talking about these peptides. Um, so GLP1 is peptides. So that's the one that we're like, yep, there's plenty of research. We can look at that. But all the other ones that are being promoted, like biohacking, it's a wild west. We don't have a lot of research on it. We might have a few small trials of five or six men, but that's it. A lot of rat studies, a lot of, um, monkey studies, and a lot of confusion where there is no study at all. Uh, the way that we are understanding they are for research purposes only because they're not been approved. So the controlling factor of what's in them is not as tight as if it was an approved substance. So I'm always like, let's hold on. Let's just put that in the bank for a moment while we do more research and see what kind of dosing is appropriate. Does it actually have any effect or not? Um, and then let's make sure that they're clean because I have young teenagers that are going, oh, should I be using them? Why? You don't need them. We don't have research on them yet.

Speaker A: So, yeah, no, that was always a shock to me when I learned that the supplement market really was so unregulated. And I, I didn't know that, uh, years and years ago. But that's. That's unbelievable. And you, Stacy, you have a newsletter that people can access articles, which is just remarkable. And is that@drstacysims.com is that where people can find. Yeah, that.

Speaker B: Yeah, you can sign up for our newsletter. It's free, so we put one out every, uh, week to two weeks, just kind of keeping on topic and, and trying to answer the questions that we can. So. Yeah, great way.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. And you've got, you have a, you have an online course. Is that what I saw?

Speaker B: So we have a couple of different courses. We have what we call the Micro Learnings, which are small little, um, short hits of like, protein. Protein powders. How do I differentiate what's great for me about iron? Uh, bone. Bone health. Then we also have, um, a larger one. It's a menopause course. So it's a pretty significant. Takes about 70 hours to go through. So it is an intensive course. Um, we have another one called Next Gen, that's all about puberty and keeping girls in sport. Um, and then.

Speaker A: Amen to that, girl.

Speaker B: Yeah. Ah. And I'm working on a book with my co author, Celine Yeager, and it's Longevity for Active Women because, again, you know, we are different and our bodies remodel. Differently than set into a population. And so we're developing a course as well for that.

Speaker A: Well, I loved Roar, your other book. Yes. Fantastic. It's fantastic. So, Stacy, we end with rapid fire. I'm going to hit you with the quick ones, and then we'll roll. Is that cool? Sure. What's the biggest lie women have been told about health and wellness?

Speaker B: Oh, uh, gosh. That they're small men. So it doesn't matter that we don't have enough research.

Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. What's the biggest mistake women make after 40?

Speaker B: Uh, leaning into the idea that they're highly stressed and everything is their problem.

Speaker A: I like it. Going a little off the wellness track there, but that is so true. Yeah. Don't try to solve other people's problems. Right. What's the most overrated wellness trend?

Speaker B: Peptides.

Speaker A: What about the most underrated wellness habit?

Speaker B: Uh, preserving sleep and preserving me time, especially for women. So we tend to put other people first, and then at the end of the day, we're like, oh, uh, I didn't have time to do this, this, this, this, this. So it's like prioritize self and sleep.

Speaker A: You know, I never got that, Stacy, until a couple times where, you know, times in which you just go so hard and you do what you just suggested, and then you just. You're exhausted. I have this thing, I call it the energy audit, where you can get really clear and. And align there. So, last question. Who is a game changer? Who inspires you and why?

Speaker B: Uh, so I. I really would have to say Marcia Stefanik. So Marcia Stefanik was my mentor at, uh, Stanford for, um, my postdoc and became a really good friend. But she was the primary investigator on the west coast for the Women's Health Initiative. So she's seen the whole gamut of everything. And she's still at Stanford. She's like, I still have so much to do, so much research to do. And she's a powerhouse. Pushing forward. So earlier, when the NIH canceled all the funding and it was like, the Women's Health Initiative is over. It's like her whole career over. But she fought to get it back. And she's also fighting the media missteps about the history of the whi. She is so quiet and humble, but is such a powerhouse. And I lean into how she leads and how she teaches and who she is as a person because she has been a game changer in women's health.

Speaker A: Stacy, thank you so much for the work that you do. And I'm certainly gonna look she sounds absolutely remarkable. Thanks for shining a light on her too. Super fun to have you on.

Speaker B: Thanks. It's been great.

Speaker A: Thanks as always for listening to Game Changers with Molly Fletcher. If you like the show, be sure to subscribe on Apple Podcasts. There you can listen to previous episodes and leave us a review which helps other people find out about the show. This episode was edited and mixed by the team at Sound on Sound Off. To learn more about their work, visit soundonsoundoff m.com for more about me, visit mollyfletcher.com until next time, Stay curious, curious and be bold.