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

Women in midlife are being told everywhere to "lift heavy," "stop doing cardio," and "hack your hormones" for better metabolic health. But what is actually TRUE for the menopausal body? In this timely re-release, I'm bringing back one of the most important and misunderstood conversations I've ever had — with exercise physiologist and researcher Dr. Stacy Sims. If you've been confused about how to work out in your 40s, 50s, 60s and beyond, this episode will give you clarity, confidence, and a science-backed plan to finally feel strong in your body again. Stacy and I walk through strength training, sprint intervals, "soul food" cardio, injury prevention, brain health, protein and carb timing, plant-based vs omnivore nutrition, creatine, and how to combine fasting with training in a safe and supportive way. And if you've ever wondered whether Stacy and I actually disagree about fasting — this episode will give you the nuance that short-form content never allows. To view full show notes, resources mentioned, discount codes, transcripts, and more, visit https://drmindypelz.com/ep317/ https://drmindypelz.com/ep316/ Check out our community membership at https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com https://resetacademy.drmindypelz.com/ Please note our medical disclaimer.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Mindy Pelz?

  On this episode of the Resetter Podcast, I am actually reissuing an old interview that I did a few years back with Dr. Stacy Sims. Now, let me tell you why I'm reissuing this, because it keeps coming up. And what is the messaging that you all are receiving from Stacy Sims? If you are a menopausal or post-menopausal 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 Stacy and I had. And before I bring you that conversation, I want to bring up a couple of key points. And I like Stacy. We had a great conversation.

• 0:45Mindy Pelz?

  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.

• 1:29Mindy Pelz?

  If you listen to this and you're like, wait, I do better before I work out if I eat. Then 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.

• 1:55Mindy Pelz?

  So understand that Dr. Stacy 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 layperson, 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

• 2:40Mindy Pelz?

  out of that. That's the lens I'm looking at, whereas Stacy'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 Stacy 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 autophagy. There are lots of different ways to do your fasting window. I've talked about them at nauseam on my podcast and on my live, but pay attention when we

• 3:25Mindy Pelz?

  talk about the coffee, because some of you are gonna 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.

• 4:02Mindy Pelz?

  And also know that there may be some things that will be helpful for you that Stacy says about building muscle and, and being an endurance athlete. All these things could be true at the same time. It's not an and or 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 Stacy'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

• 4:47Mindy Pelz?

  Dr. Stacy 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, Stacy. I'm so happy you're here.

• 5:03Speaker 01

  I'm excited to be here. It's good.

• 5:04Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Great, great conversations. I mean, think about it. How many great conversations have women had in the bathroom, waiting in 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, 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

• 5:45Mindy Pelz?

  woman who's maybe at the tail end of perimenopause, starting to go into those post-menopausal 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?

• 6:05Speaker 01

  That it is not what her forty eight year old body was. Ooh, that's good. And I mean, we go through all the like, I feel like perimenopause every six months is different. Like your body changes rapidly, right? So then 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 thirties. So when looking at someone who's fifty and the tail end of perimenopause, I 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.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  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 of nutrition. So if we're looking at those and we're looking at 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 post-menopause and late perimenopause is strength training, we have to really look at that, like, okay, what time of day are we going to do that? We want to have the have it work with how you feel, right?

• 7:30Speaker 01

  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 twenty to thirty 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 the only 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 have to get people to understand that 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. Like, I'm not going to put you in a three.

• 8:13Speaker 01

  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. Cause I get women saying, well, I don't know how to lift. It's too much and I'm going to get injured. You're right. No, that's not what we're about. We're 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.

• 8:58Speaker 01

  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, growth, being independent as we get older, we have to challenge our

• 9:41Speaker 01

  muscles, specifically our central nervous system for that, that motor pattern. Cause when we're getting into that, that peri-menopause, post-menopause, we're not looking at, at doing the higher reps to build muscle for muscle hypertrophy. Cause we don't have the impetus really for that. What we want is central nervous system. Cause 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. Cause 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 impetus. And that's

• 10:25Speaker 01

  through 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.

• 11:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 11:01Speaker 01

  We're building to be able to be independent when we're eighty, ninety, one hundred.

• 11:07Mindy Pelz?

  I love that. I love that thought. I always tell people that literally every day I think about my ninety year old self. And I'm like, okay, what do I need to do today to make sure that my ninety year old self is who I want, you know, is, is the woman I want her to be. So I, 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, 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

• 11:45Mindy Pelz?

  happens in the morning. So is that, is that accurate? And if you would, if a post-menopausal woman gets more testosterone in the morning, wouldn't that be a better time to actually do strength training?

• 11:59Speaker 01

  Well, testosterone is like all the other sex hormones, it has its own pulse. So we'll have a boost in the morning, kind of to try to counter cortisol. But if you are doing strength training, you get a boost after strength training. If you do true sprint interval training, and we hear this rhetoric about how menopausal and perimenopausal women shouldn't do high intensity work, it's because the 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 fitter and can do it

• 12:42Speaker 01

  again. When we get into peri and post-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 hormones. So it's like, okay, yeah, we need testosterone because it helps counter that exercise stress. It helps drop 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

• 13:25Speaker 01

  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 started 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 are doing the strength training properly, and you're not doing a metabolic stress of ten to twelve reps, but you're actually staying on the lower power end, because it's a central nervous system response, you come out feeling really good and relaxed because you get that growth hormone, that testosterone, and a subsequent

• 14:08Speaker 01

  parasympathetic 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 a 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 central nervous system. So you do a heavy load and then you're like, I have clarity, I can do something else.

• 14:34Mindy Pelz?

  So, okay, so did I just hear then, I'm fifty-four, there would be no need for me to ever do a ten to twelve rep set with my weights. I should always do the heaviest I can possibly lift in five or six reps.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  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 fifty-four.

• 15:00Speaker 01

  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. And 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

• 15:45Speaker 01

  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 and 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 deload? Are we doing five reps? Are we doing three by twos? Are we doing cluster sets? There's so much you can do within the programming there to stay in that bottom part without ever having to get into that 10 to 12 rep range.

• 16:15Mindy Pelz?

  So then where does cardio fit in at all? Cause I, so I will tell you again, through my 54 year old post menopausal lens, I definitely noticed the calm when I do really heavy weightlifting. Like there is this sense of like, whoa, somebody just gave me like a whole bunch of progesterone. 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,

• 17:00Mindy Pelz?

  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, but there's still a different feel I get in my body when I do cardio. So what, what do you recommend for cardio for menopausal women?

• 17:24Speaker 01

  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, when 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 purported 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 race Ironman, Xterra, bikes, 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, I feel fantastic. But that's not optimal for this fifty year old body, right? And it's not optimal for women who are trying

• 18:09Speaker 01

  to lose abdominal adiposity, 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 true sprint interval training, this is thirty 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 thirty seconds, you're blessed.

• 18:47Mindy Pelz?

  I was just gonna say, my trainer, my trainer pops me on that, and I'm like, oh, fuck, we're doing the assault bike again?

• 18:52Speaker 01

  I know. So I make people chase meters. I'm like, how hard can you go for thirty seconds? And you have a couple of friends around, go, go, go, go, go. And you see, and then 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, oh, we'll see. Because usually, it's like, two. And they're like, ah, done. Because it's hard. That's what sprint.

• 19:19Mindy Pelz?

  Right. It's hard.

• 19:20Speaker 01

  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 glut four protein gates, which are,

• 19:33Speaker 01

  The way that carbohydrate and glucose get into the muscle cell without insulin. And it creates it over the course of, you know, 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 and we don't have to rely much on insulin. When we look at high intensity interval training, which is a step down from the intensity, where the intervals are one to four minutes at eighty to ninety percent. And with variable recovery, this is more of a mitochondrial response where we're looking

• 20:14Speaker 01

  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 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 Yeah. If we're doing that long, slow stuff all of the time, it's not a hard enough exercise stress to create these adaptations that we need to have that estrogen, progesterone, and to some extent testosterone used to do for us. So this is why I keep

• 20:59Speaker 01

  Right. Well, we're looking for that external stress that is above and beyond what the body can usually, you know, 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 and post menopause. Yes, they do. Yes, they do. Yeah, you know, when you go out on your long, on your long, um, ruck or like me going for a long ride. That's our soul food, 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 backgrounds. But if someone

• 21:41Speaker 01

  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 ruck, because that's contraindative to what we want for the body.

• 21:53Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, so let me sum that 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 your hiking and your walking and your riding come in. And they all are, we all call them exercise. But for the postmenopausal woman, they all serve a different purpose.

• 22:30Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly.

• 22:33Mindy Pelz?

  So where does something like yoga fit in? Or Pilates, you know, or anything like that?

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, I put that as like you're part of the soul food, because there's some people will love yoga and love the power yoga and the feeling from it. From Pilates, it's not pure strength training, but it's more the proprioception and the balance. Doing plyos 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 core 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, we talk and listen to a lot of stuff that Lisa said, we have to look at exercise and the

• 23:22Speaker 01

  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 Sudoku, except you're exercise. If we're doing that high intensity work, that that actually produces more B D N F or brain neurotrophic factor than moderate intensity or low intensity. And we're trying to increase the volume and the tissue health of our brain. So if we're doing both of those, then we are really benefiting our brain health, attenuating dementia, attenuating Alzheimer's, kind of countering that amygdala change that happens with menopause.

• 24:06Speaker 01

  Because you're creating that stress and the brain is responding to it as well.

• 24:11Mindy Pelz?

  That, you know, she brought in our conversation, she she and I talked about this grandmother hypothesis. And you you've heard her talk about that?

• 24:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's really interesting.

• 24:21Mindy Pelz?

  So I'm I'm really fascinated. It's really interesting. So I actually have, I have a team of researchers that I will ask to go like scour PubMed and find me research. So I was like, go find me stuff on this grandmother hypothesis after I talked 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 post-menopausal 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 gatherers

• 25:06Mindy Pelz?

  were out trying to get a kill. So in that, there has to be a fitness benefit that we see in those post-menopausal 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.

• 25:42Mindy Pelz?

  Do you see where I'm going with this?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. And we also look at 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 a given 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,

• 26:21Speaker 01

  right? So we see that metabolism and everything has created this, let's go slow and long and have lots of endurance. Um, 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 long 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.

• 27:05Speaker 01

  And this is where if we look at 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 of what age. Right. It's lactate. 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 and 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, neuropathways and attenuating Alzheimer's.

• 27:49Speaker 01

  We have to also look at the fact that we want to produce lactate to keep glial cells, the 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 if I sit down to watch the evening news. I have diabetes, I have

• 28:33Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 28:34Speaker 01

  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 and we understand the body is very plastic, we have neuroplasticity, we have skeletal and muscle plasticity, let's create those adaptive changes that allow us to have better metabolism to keep moving forward, to maintain our power, our speed, maintain our balance, maintain our bone strength. Because we look at history to learn from it, but I don't think people do. A lot of people are looking at history and saying, hey, this is what we have to do. This is what's coming up. It's like, well, actually, no. Look at history, learn from it.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  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 healthcare system.

• 29:25Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, yeah, 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 you sat in your rocking chair, right? And you just You know? That's right. Like, no. I mean, that's, that's my mother. My mother is eighty-four. 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 one hundred

• 30:09Mindy Pelz?

  and eighty 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 thirties, I was exercising to look good, in my fifties, I'm exercising to make sure that I'm thinking properly.

• 30:37Speaker 01

  Right. Exactly. Because what's the, 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 was like, yeah, that's right.

• 30:49Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, I love that.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  It's totally it.

• 30:51Mindy Pelz?

  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.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 31:08Mindy Pelz?

  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 gonna go to the gym, I'm gonna start lifting heavy weights, and I'm gonna start sprinting up a hill. How does she make sure she doesn't injure herself?

• 31:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, soft tissue injuries, big, huge thing. Plantar fasciitis and frozen shoulder are the two biggest issues, right? Because they're all soft tissue tendon stuff. And we know how estrogen affects that. So, one of my good friends is Kelly Starrett, and he started mobility WOD 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, it's a kind of like a theraband, but you have the ability to wrap around the joints of, of interest and do range of motion stuff with that wrapped and then remove

• 32:15Speaker 01

  it and do range of motion again. And it's, it's a, a blood flow response that then increases the actual blood flow to the joint. So you have better range of motion so that it reduces the friction and that cartilage issue as well as enhances the, the, um, 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 proprioception for squats. If we're going to do sprints, we have to do really, really good sound warmup through mobility. So mobility

• 32:58Speaker 01

  becomes a key functionality. So this is your foam roller, this your looking at range of 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 and around the joints. Um, and this is how we look at avoiding soft tissue injuries. And then if you do have a tissue injury like plantar fascia, then there are specific things you can do with, um, voodoo floss and with different

• 33:40Speaker 01

  types of massage to really enhance the blood flow to those tissues.

• 33:46Mindy Pelz?

  Is that, is that like BFR bands or Katsu bands? I've seen both of those. Or is voodoo flossing something different?

• 33:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a brand name. It looks very similar.

• 33:55Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, okay.

• 33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, looks really similar.

• 33:57Mindy Pelz?

  I'll go look it up. Yeah, you know, and, and I love that idea because I do think if we're gonna 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.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:16Mindy Pelz?

  So we, you know, that's really, it's interesting to, to know that there are some other ways we can look at it. And what I also heard and what you said was foam rolling, stretching, warming up becomes more important in these menopausal years than perhaps it did in our twenties and thirties.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it used to be get up off, get up off the couch, run out the front door 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.

• 34:45Mindy Pelz?

  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 be, it becomes more preferential for 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

• 35:23Mindy Pelz?

  a place for fasting in the menopausal experience because ketones can help supercharge 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, letting cortisol get so high that it tanks all the other hormones? What are your thoughts?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  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

• 36:18Speaker 01

  The way that I come from it is looking at chronobiology like we started the conversation. And if we look, you know, cortisol peaks a half an hour after 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 within a half an hour to drop that cortisol, stimulate the hypothalamus, go through the day eating really good quality foods, making sure you put a precedence on protein. And then you don't eat after dinner.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  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 cultural 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

• 37:47Speaker 01

  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 looking, the research is coming out about fasting and stuff in postmenopausal 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.

• 38:25Speaker 01

  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 ketones 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 if 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.

• 39:08Speaker 01

  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 a regular basis 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 active population and looking at brain metabolism and longevity and body comp through that exercise stress as well as the fueling.

• 39:46Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 39:47Speaker 01

  And then you're looking at it from your practice and the general pop who doesn't really exercise, right? And so we're looking at two different populations that we want to have the same outcome, but our methods of getting people there are a little bit different.

• 40:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, really brilliant, really brilliantly said. And you know, again, to let the, you know, 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, it, 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.

• 40:42Mindy Pelz?

  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 fasts 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.

• 41:24Mindy Pelz?

  They're all just tools that we get to pull out when we need them to push ourselves out of, out of apathy. Really, so that we, we, we age better than we've been aging before.

• 41:40Speaker 01

  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 what's on the table, right? We have some menopause hormone therapy over here. We have exercise over here. We have different metabolic control here and we want to strategically use them when we need to.

• 42:13Mindy Pelz?

  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's better than the screwdriver. I, 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, we're, we're saying this is good and this is bad.

• 42:57Mindy Pelz?

  And yet they're all just tools, which is, which is beautiful.

• 43:01Speaker 01

  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. I'm like, oh, wait a 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 to have with your oncologist, not through social media with me. So again, we have those different populations, right? So it's like,

• 43:38Mindy Pelz?

  Yes.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Let's stick to this lane. I'm generalizing for the healthy woman who exercises. And there are nuances here and there are nuances there. But I can't explain all of that in a 20 second reel.

• 43:51Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah. Oh, my God. I love you. This is, I actually, you can watch my Instagram and Facebook over the next couple of 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,

• 44:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 44:36Mindy Pelz?

  Right?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  Now I have this image of like, the short reel and a woman who's just off the couch, goes to the gym, tries to deadlift 200 pounds with a voodoo flask band, not eating. And then that's, that's all, those are all short reels, right there.

• 44:51Mindy Pelz?

  That's right. That's what's going to come out of the reels from this podcast. We're gonna, that's exactly what's gonna happen.

• 45:00Mindy Pelz?

  That was so good. 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 reels on you, because I came from the era in my younger self where, do you remember that book called Body for Life?

• 45:24Speaker 01

  Yes, I do.

• 45:26Mindy Pelz?

  And the guy gave away, he gave away like a million dollars for the people who 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 30s. 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. So, can you talk about proper nutrition going into a workout? And then, what's our recovery meal look like as well?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  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 are like, I don't really have an issue. What are you talking about? But as we get older, our bodies become more sensitive to things. So, eating beforehand is really important. I'm not saying a full 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.

• 46:42Speaker 01

  And the hypothalamus doesn't go, oh shit, we gotta 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, it 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 impulses, our estrogen progesterone impulses, because we're flatlining. 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.

• 47:27Speaker 01

  So you bring 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 thirty to forty minutes afterwards, we want to have a good hit of protein with a bit of carbohydrate. Protein more important. So after strength training, um, we need about forty grams as women who are peri-postmenopause. Because we're more what we call anabolic resistant to exercise and food. So we don't get same signaling with that twenty to twenty-five grams.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  We need more protein and the protein is important because not only does it come, allow the muscle to be flooded with leucine, which increases the triggering for building lean mass. But we also have an increased amount of amino acids circulating, which helps with metabolism, 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 when we're looking at it from that whole recovery standpoint, okay, we need some fuel. We want to go into hypothalamus is working so we can fuel our workouts properly. And then we need to refuel afterwards

• 48:48Speaker 01

  to get adaptation going to help with brain function to keep those signalings going. And then we can move on with the rest of our day.

• 48:56Mindy Pelz?

  Okay. So how long before? So that, just so I can recap, like forty, you said forty grams of carbohydrates and fifteen to twenty grams of protein beforehand. Was that right?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Thirty grams before fifteen ish of yeah, and I mean,

• 49:13Mindy Pelz?

  Okay.

• 49:14Speaker 01

  Within the hour, but if you're someone who gets up and goes to the gym at five thirty in the morning, I don't want you getting up to have food at four thirty. You could have it on your drive to the gym, right? Just as long as you have something in, yeah.

• 49:27Mindy Pelz?

  And then afterwards, the key really is bumping up to this forty grams of protein. And what did you said thirty grams of carbohydrates, which

• 49:37Speaker 01

  Actually, it's not, it's not that, it depends on what you did. If you're just doing strength training, then you could have your forty grams within that thirty to forty 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 depleting type work, then you do need to look at getting the forty grams and probably around forty to fifty grams of carbohydrate. So it's almost a one to one ratio of 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 intake.

• 50:22Mindy Pelz?

  Okay, yeah, I've I I go to the gym and if I have to run errands afterwards, I have like a 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, you're 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 postmenopausal women that are plant based that are really healthy. So you're plant based, talk about this.

• 51:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean, I've been plant based since I was Fifteen, way before the trends. Oh, wow. Uh, 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. 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. Oh, yeah. Um. Love it. And environmental stuff. So, yeah, all the stuff that's trendy now is kind of why I went when I was fifteen with the pig slaughterhouse trip.

• 51:46Speaker 01

  Um, but throughout my academic and athletic career, you know, looking at protein, protein intake hasn't really come up until about the past ten to fifteen years. And we're starting to see more and 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-exercise, it's the leucine content that's really important. So we need to get around three grams of leucine. And we see that's around thirty to forty grams of whey protein. And you can get that equivalent if you're looking at pea protein isolate with uh, maybe some hemp.

• 52:28Speaker 01

  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 in 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 edenaki, and you can get forty to sixty grams of protein right there. So there's ways of doing it when you are plant-based, but you kind of have to think outside of the box.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  But it's becoming much, much easier now with the awareness of all the environmental factors and health factors. So easier now than it was when I was fifteen, that's for sure.

• 53:21Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, so I love this conversation because it's funny, we have a fasting group on Facebook called the Resetter Collaborative, and it's of like over 100,000 people that, and they're very active. And 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?

• 53:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:50Mindy Pelz?

  We cannot lose sight of, 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, of interest. And so I actually am putting out 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 hired a plant-based chef, and I hired an omnivore chef. And they're

• 54:31Mindy Pelz?

  both have their expertise. And I was like, okay, make me some recipes. And they're incredible recipes, and there's room for both.

• 54:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:40Mindy Pelz?

  So I think that fact that you're out there talking about muscle and fitness and you're 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,

• 54:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 54:59Mindy Pelz?

  Get a good variety of these proteins.

• 55:02Speaker 01

  Absolutely. And it falls into the whole gut microbiome thing, and the fiber thing that we see as one of the biggest changing factors in about three to four years before that one point in time menopause. Like, there's a lot of research coming out because 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 I see the carnivorous diet, I'm like, oh, my gosh, what? Like, the first thing to go is your gut microbiome. Come on, people, let's be real.

• 55:31Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And you don't want to like get 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 about 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. And 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 of someone who eats meat, here's a day with someone who eats dairy and eggs.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  And they all end up being between 150 and 160 grams of protein, sitting right in that 2,200 to 2,500 calorie. And people are like, oh, my gosh, really? We can do this? I'm like, yes, we can do this. It's just being aware.

• 56:26Mindy Pelz?

  I love that.

• 56:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 56:29Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, my God, I love that. Okay, so just so we're the plant-based people know, what are some of the leucine-rich plants that if you want to trigger that leucine, get that leucine amount?

• 56:40Speaker 01

  So interesting, we look at edenomy and green peas. So those two are really high. And people are like, what? It's like, yeah. And we look at spirulina, so blue and green spirulina, like ounce to ounce, is 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.

• 57:18Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I mean, well, the smoothie is 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?

• 57:32Speaker 01

  I do because it's been taken out of context. Because if we look at like phytoestrogens and all the good things that happen and the Japanese culture of longevity, it's not just the soy. It's how they live, 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-processed that there's lots of side effects. If you're not

• 57:55Mindy Pelz?

  Right.

• 57:56Speaker 01

  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, um, aspect of it.

• 58:07Mindy Pelz?

  Oh, yes.

• 58:08Speaker 01

  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, I was like, it takes fifty grams of soy protein powder to match twenty grams of whey, but it only takes thirty grams of pea protein isolate to match that twenty grams of whey.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  And the thing with PIs, it's just on the cusp of having enough leucine. So all you have to do is add maybe another half a tablespoon and then boom, you've hit that, that leucine context. But with

• 59:03Mindy Pelz?

  Beautiful.

• 59:04Speaker 01

  it's so much more. So again, it's, I feel like

• 59:07Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 59:08Speaker 01

  need to write a book about all of this, but I think it would take too much

• 59:11Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, right.

• 59:12Speaker 01

  We'll just have conversations.

• 59:13Mindy Pelz?

  Yeah, I was just gonna say, what would the book could be called, like, The Nuance of Menopausal Nutrition? And like, here's all the things that you really, you really need to know. So, um, okay, I wanna go, I wanna go back to the timing for a minute because I brought Sachin Panda on to my podcast and, uh, we talked specifically about when you should eat, like, that first part of your meal. And so the question, he's, 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.

• 59:56Mindy Pelz?

  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, your eating window. So how do you feel about that theory of like matching your eating with light? And what, 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?

• 1:00:35Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I look at, like I said, physiologists look at cortisol and when they peak. And if you're looking at that cortisol peak, that's half an hour after you wake up. And for women who are already 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. 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 peri and postmenopausal

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  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 if we're 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 Satya's 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 in both men and women, those who have their eating window by eight AM and then they stop by like four, so eight to four,

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  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 obesogenic outcomes because they're fighting their circadian rhythm and all the nuances. Because circadian rhythm isn't just a whole body thing. All your cells 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,

• 1:02:43Speaker 01

  end up with better health outcomes than those who delay and eat, you know, well into the evening, they 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?

• 1:03:08Mindy Pelz?

  You're doing, you're doing amazing being jet lagged.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there you go.

• 1:03:12Mindy Pelz?

  So could it be as simple, could it be as simple as putting some protein powder in your coffee if you don't love breakfast?

• 1:03:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:03:21Mindy Pelz?

  Like if you don't gravitate towards food?

• 1:03:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't, I don't really get hungry till eleven or twelve, 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, I'm getting some protein. Brain's like, yeah, there's some fuel coming in and then I have something to wake me up.

• 1:03:42Mindy Pelz?

  Yep.

• 1:03:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, it doesn't have to be a lot. But it is enough to get the signaling going that there's stuff coming in.

• 1:03:50Mindy Pelz?

  I I've done all kinds of weird things in my coffee and um and people always ask me, are you still fasted? And 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 autophagy. 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 gym.

• 1:04:32Mindy Pelz?

  So so I think, again, it's like, I love the idea of N of one. Like, be your own N of one, 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 habit is the one you can stick to. So it's like, once you find your rhythm, now all of a sudden it works. So one last, one last, one last thought was creatine. Everybody's talking about creatine. What do you think of that?

• 1:05:05Speaker 01

  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, heart function and brain function. And there is a new website, Creatine for Health, that posts 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.

• 1:05:46Speaker 01

  And in particular, again, it comes back like I'm interested in brain health and it's so important for brain health.

• 1:05:52Mindy Pelz?

  And you can put it in your coffee.

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  You can. You definitely can.

• 1:05:58Mindy Pelz?

  That's why I brought it up. And 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.

• 1:06:08Speaker 01

  It's been fun.

• 1:06:09Mindy Pelz?

  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. And because I again, I've been 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.

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Yes. Thanks for having me. It's been fun. Yeah. Awesome.

• 1:06:41Mindy Pelz?

  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 know that you are actually healthy? Do you have a measurement of that?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  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. And 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

• 1:07:39Speaker 01

  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 the hemisphere summer, southern hemisphere winter, is to get everything back in line. So I can wake up feeling that way again.

• 1:07:57Mindy Pelz?

  Oh my gosh, I am so with you. I hit a real wall about a couple, well, 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 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.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  Yep. So we need to check in.

• 1:08:40Mindy Pelz?

  Yes, we need, we need a check in. We can hold each other accountable.

• 1:08:44Speaker 01

  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 all of a sudden you're 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.

• 1:09:00Mindy Pelz?

  Yes. 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 I love that.

• 1:09:25Speaker 01

  Yep. So check in. I'll be pinging you, you ping me. How's it going? Yeah, okay.

• 1:09:29Mindy Pelz?

  Perfect. I love it. I love it. Will 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?

• 1:09:40Speaker 01

  Social handles, Dr. Stacy Sims on Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which, you know.

• 1:09:49Speaker 01

  And then our website, this is Dr.

• 1:09:51Mindy Pelz?

  There's luck on there.

• 1:09:52Speaker 01

  I know. Not a fan of TikTok, but I've been told we need to be on it.

• 1:09:56Mindy Pelz?

  Me neither.

• 1:09:58Speaker 01

  Yeah. And then our website, just the Dr. Stacey Sims website, it's updates for everything that I'm involved in and doing and all the things, all the things in one spot.

• 1:10:09Mindy Pelz?

  Well, Stacy, thank you. Thank you so much. And 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 going to send them this episode so that we can have get off the 90 second reel and get into a deeper conversation. So thank you. Appreciate you.

• 1:10:32Speaker 01

  You too. Thanks so much.

• 1:10:33Mindy Pelz?

  Good luck. Good luck. Yeah. Good luck on your recovery. I will hold you accountable.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  Okay, sounds good.

• 1:10:41Mindy Pelz?

  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.