Pod Insights Habits and Hustle Episode 468: Dr. Stacy Sims: Why Ozempic Destroys Muscle + The Truth About Peptides and Cold Plunges About this episode Is Ozempic the miracle weight loss drug everyone claims, or are we creating a generation of "sarcopenic, chalky skeletons"? In this Fitness Fridya episode, Dr. Stacy Sims and I dive into the truth.
We discuss the peptide craze, exploring why BPC-157 might be the only one worth considering, and why WADA banning it actually proves it works. Plus, Dr. Sims settles the sauna debate once and for all - explaining why infrared saunas are basically expensive cold rooms and why Finnish saunas deliver real results for women's hormones and metabolism.
Dr. Stacy Sims is an international exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who specializes in sex differences in training, nutrition, and environmental conditions. She's the author of "Roar" and "Next Level" and has spent decades researching how women's unique physiology requires different approaches to health and fitness.
What we discuss:
The Truth About Peptides and BPC-157
Ozempic's Hidden Dangers: Muscle and Bone Loss
When Ozempic Makes Sense (And When It Doesn't)
Microdosing GLP-1s: Health Hack or Dangerous Trend?
Combining Ozempic with Strength Training
Training in Your 20s and 30s vs. Later Years
Dr. Sims' Daily Routine and Non-Negotiables
Most Underrated Health Tip: Trusting Your Intuition
Saunas vs. Cold Plunges for Women
Why Ice Baths Spike Women's Cortisol
The Infrared Sauna Myth
Finnish Saunas: The Real Deal for Women's Health
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Find more from Dr. Stacy Sims:
Website: https://www.drstacysims.com/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/drstacysims
Find more from Jen:
Website: https://www.jennifercohen.com/
Instagram: @therealjencohen
Books: https://www.jennifercohen.com/books
Speaking: https://www.jennifercohen.com/speaking-engagements
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:01 Speaker 00 Hi guys, this is Tony Robbins. You're listening to Habits and Hustle. Crush it.
0:08 Jen Cohen? Hey friends, you're listening to Fitness Friday on the Habits and Hustle Podcast, where myself and my friends share quick and very actionable advice for you becoming your healthiest self. So stay tuned and let me know how you leveled up.
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1:57 Jen Cohen? What's your take on peptides? Do you believe in them?
2:00 Speaker 02 Some of them for specific healing properties. So if you look at the BPC 157, which is your, right?
2:08 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
2:08 Speaker 02 So if you're looking at that for tissue healing, there's a lot of rodent data out there and a little bit of human research out there that shows it's beneficial. But when you look at something like WADA and Informed Sports saying it's a banned substance, you know, there's something there makes it work. As for the other peptides, they're kind of like floating out there with not a lot of science behind it. Yeah. So that's another one to be a case by case. It's like, why do you want to use it? What do you think you need it for? What are the other things that we can do to invoke the same change? But for tissue healing, yeah, maybe we'll look at the BPC.
2:48 Jen Cohen? Right. That's the most benign one of the ones that
2:52 Speaker 02 Exactly.
2:53 Jen Cohen? that we're talking about. I need to ask you about Ozempic, right? Because it would be remiss if I didn't. What is your take on the Ozempic craze?
3:02 Speaker 02 Yeah, I think I got slammed from another podcast about talking about this, but I'm going to say it again anyway. So when we look at Ozempic,
3:12 Speaker 02 we, there's a little bit of a disconnect. It's starting to get a little bit better because there's more education around it. When it first came out, there was no way that there was enough education to tell people that when you start using it, the very first thing to go is lean mass and bone. So you're going to become a very sarcopenic, chalky skeleton type person, and you're going to be on this stuff for life. And we start looking at Ozempic as a tool in the toolbox for losing a significant amount of weight, not our vanity pounds of 10 to 15 pounds, but that significant amount of weight that plagues two thirds of American population. Yes, it can be a tool. It can help with appetite control to dampen the noise, the food noise
3:54 Speaker 02 that happens so much around the ultra-processed food and the cravings, and gives you the opportunity to put healthier habits into play, like learning how to lift, what are wise food choices. So you finally can dampen that crazy food noise to put in strategies to help maintain weight loss and to build lean mass. That's how I view Ozempic is having a role in trying to combat some of the obesity epidemic. I have problems when women who come to me and go, how can I microdose Ozempic because I want to lose my 10 to 15 vanity pounds? Like, no, we don't do that. There are other things and maybe you are learning to live with an extra five pounds on your body, which is probably beneficial as you get older because
4:37 Speaker 02 we want a little bit more weight as we get older. So we don't have enough reserve if we get sick. So there's nuances within it as well. I feel for people who really need it for diabetic control because of everyone now using it for weight loss. I'm interested in the research that's coming out about Parkinson's and Alzheimer's and about Ozempic and the GLP-1s helping with that. So that's early day research. So right now it's a tool in the toolbox and we have to really look at lifestyle to accelerate that tool.
5:09 Jen Cohen? You know, it's funny you mentioned the microdosing, right? That was my next part of the question because that's what I'm noticing a lot of people who like people who are doing that, people in the health and wellness longevity space claim that the microdosing is really good for inflammation and all these other health benefits. And so they're microdosing and these are people who don't need to lose any weight, really. Maybe like you said, five pounds here and there. What do you say about that? Like, do you believe the microdosing for the inflammation and all these other longevity reasons? Is there any truth to that at all? Or is it just people just having misinformation and just jumping on the bandwagon because they're a little thinner?
5:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, I, part of it's misinformation and part of it is people have become inherently lazy and don't want to, and I say that and I'll take full ownership of that statement.
6:05 Jen Cohen? I.
6:06 Speaker 02 Because when we look at exercise, regardless of intensity, duration, mode, whatever it is, it's a super powerful stress that gets put on the body and the body responds in kind. So yes, you're going to have inflammation after exercise, but the subsequent response is your body up-regulates its anti-inflammatory and antioxidant responses. So the chronic use of exercise improves oxidation and inflammation. It also improves autophagy. So all the things that people are talking about by using pharmaceuticals for longevity or trying to biohack by using microdoses of this and peptides and stuff, you can use exercise.
6:47 Speaker 02 And it's just understanding what kind and dosage is not the blanket ACSM 150 minutes of moderate to vigorous activity, which is based on male data, right? So we have to be very nuanced in what we're talking about.
7:00 Jen Cohen? You know, also with, when it comes to Ozempic, if someone were to compound that with strength training, would that offset the problem of bone density loss and the muscle mass? Would it actually balance itself out?
7:16 Speaker 02 You have to be very dedicated to the strength training and eating protein. Because when we look at protein, protein and a high protein diet induces satiation and increases our natural production of our GLP-1s. So if we are looking at using Ozempic as well as strength training and high protein, you're going to get better body composition, better appetite control, better appetite hormone regulation, and it's going to allow you to get off the Ozempic when you get to a certain point, which is decided by you and your doctor or whatever your lifestyle choice is.
7:50 Jen Cohen? So, okay. And then, by the way, I just remembered something else going back to the other part about training. We talked about menopause and perimenopause training. What about if you're not at that place, what type of training should someone actually do if they're in their twenties or thirties? That's different than when they're forties, fifties, sixties. You missed that part.
8:10 Speaker 02 This is a time, yeah, well, this is a time where you can play. You can play a little bit. You can try a lot of things. It depends on your hormone profile. It's like, what kind of, if you're using hormonal contraception, what kind is it? Is it oral contraceptive? Is it a Marina? Is it a copper IUD? All of those have different responses within the body, which is going to affect the kind of training and how you feel about training. Naturally cycling, are you finding changes in your bleed pattern? Are you finding changes in the length of your cycle? Well, those are beginning stopgaps and warning signs that you're putting your body under too much stress. But for the most part, you want to find a goal. And the basic idea of periodization of both cardiovascular and strength is beneficial.
8:54 Speaker 02 If you're someone who wants to go the endurance route, sweet, you can. But put some strength training in there. You don't have to put it your mainstay, but you want to have a strong, resilient body regardless of where you are in your life. And you can pepper it in your twenties and your thirties with different adventures.
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12:27 Jen Cohen? What else happened with your habits and your routine?
12:30 Speaker 02 My habits, yeah. So I am the kind of person that needs to get up before anyone else in the household, so I can have 10 to 15 minutes of absolute no noise, because that's how I can reset and recenter. Then I like to do some training, either go for a swim in the pool or the ocean, a couple of days a week, strength training, definitely, three to four times a week. After training, come home, have food, do the email thing, go through all the meetings, have some quiet time, get some work done. Then my daughter comes home from school, we do some stuff, then I do some more work, then I take the dog for a walk, make dinner, have dinner,
13:11 Speaker 02 have conversations, and maybe read with my daughter. And then I try to be in bed by 9:30, 10 o'clock. I get up maybe 6:30, 7:00, but I'm also the most fatigued person at the end of the day, and I want to go to bed before everyone else. But I make a priority. I'm like, I need to go to sleep now, and I need to sleep. I might do some reading before falling asleep, make sure it's a cool, dark room, because I don't like to be hot when I'm sleeping. And I get very agitated if my sleep is disrupted, because I'm like, I need sleep.
13:45 Jen Cohen? Yeah, especially when you're active, like, or do you train people still regularly?
13:49 Speaker 02 No, I don't. I advise people who do train, and every once in a while, I'll take someone on, especially if it's a really complex, like, sticky moment where people are trying to do all the things and they're stuck. I wish I had the bandwidth to be able to get out there on boots on the ground to help more people on an individual basis. But there's only one of me at the moment.
14:12 Jen Cohen? Right, exactly. What, can I just ask you a couple more questions, and I can hopefully see you when you're here? I want you to tell, can you tell me what you think the most underrated health tip would be, and the most overrated health tip, or most overrated health myth?
14:32 Speaker 02 Trend out there?
14:33 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
14:34 Speaker 02 I think the most underrated is the intuition. I think people have forgotten what it feels like to sleep well, to eat well, to have energy, because we've been told by wearables what we're supposed to be feeling and what we're supposed to be doing, and people have lost that connection to themselves. So that intuition of actually understanding our body and using things like rating of perceived exertion without any of the tools, I think that's one of the most underrated, but one of the most effective means of invoking change. When I look on the other end of things, it's all those top end, like the 1% that you should be looking at, like peptides or fasting. Let's just bring it back to basics. How are you eating?
15:19 Speaker 02 What are you eating? When are you eating? How are you sleeping? It's like the big four is the mindfulness, the sleep, the physical activity, and the nutrition. If we focus on those, then we can start to really see change. It's when we start going outside the box and really focusing on all the biohacking and the neuroscience that's out there is when we start to lose sight of where we should be and get into the overrated trends that tend to take over everybody's mentality.
15:49 Jen Cohen? What is your take on saunas and cold plunges, cold, you know, therapy?
15:55 Speaker 02 Saunas, I love. I started as an environmental exercise physiologist, so I look at how the heat can invoke positive change on the body. It doesn't have to be a large dose. It could be 10 to 15 minutes in a finished sauna three times a week because we start to see massive cardiovascular improvements, blood pressure improvements included in that metabolic changes. We have better blood glucose control, we have better gut health, brain health, so many great things happen with the heat. When we think about cold plunge, for women, it's cool water. It's around fifteen degrees Celsius, which is around that fifty-six, fifty-seven degree Fahrenheit mark.
16:35 Speaker 02 Ice is too cold and we don't get the same kind of response that men do when we get into ice. It's too strong of a stress and the body rebounds with too much sympathetic drive, too much constriction, where if it's cool water, we're going to invoke initially a vagal response, which is a and then the body's going to get that more parasympathetic relaxation response that we're looking for for cold plunge.
17:01 Jen Cohen? So what happens if we do the cool therapy? I mean, because I hate it, I, you know, but, and I won't do it. And I get a lot of, you know, slack for that. But what does it do to the body in layman's terms? Like, what does it do to a woman's body when they jump into a cold plunge?
17:16 Speaker 02 So if you're a woman, you're jumping Yeah, so you're jumping into that icy cold water and you're getting that shock. And that shock is a sympathetic, so that you, you have your flight or fight sensation, which is your sympathetic drive. And you have that deep relaxation, which is your parasympathetic drive. For women, we get that shock and that sympathetic drive, which increases cortisol, increases our blood glucose and our free fatty acids, because the body's like, ah, what is this incredible shock? I've got to get out and run away. For cool water, it's not as intense, so you don't get that sympathetic. You get the initial and then the body's like, okay, I can deal with this. I'm going to do some basal constriction.
18:00 Speaker 02 I'm going to put more blood sugar to the brain so that the brain understands what's going on and stimulates what we call the vagal nerve. So the vagal nerve is what that parasympathetic nervous system is attached to. So it invokes that calming and you can stay in it, take some deep breaths. But, that said, Heat does so much more for a woman's body than cold plunge. So if we're looking for increased parasympathetic drive, we're looking for better metabolic control, we're getting better hormonal control, it's all instigated by sauna work, not by cold plunge.
18:36 Jen Cohen? So a Finnish sauna is usually two hundred degrees or two ten sometimes, right? If I have a sauna that's like this infrared that doesn't get hot enough, it's like it takes forever to get to one sixty and even that takes four hours. Can I still because at the time it was everyone's like, oh, the infrared is the best sauna for your body. It doesn't warm my body. I'm like cold. I'm shivering in my sauna.
19:01 Speaker 02 Yeah, I know.
19:02 Jen Cohen? It's crazy. I mean, but do I, if I wait long enough and it gets to one sixty five, if I'm lucky?
19:09 Speaker 02 Yeah.
19:10 Jen Cohen? Do you still get the same benefits as you would in a Finnish sauna if it's an infrared sauna?
19:16 Speaker 02 So the thing with the infrared is it really bypasses when the initial thermo regulation control centers. If you get to a point where it's hot enough and you get that sweat onset and you feel really uncomfortable, then you're hot enough. But you don't have to like stay in there for a half an hour or more being uncomfortable. You bring it up to your sweat response and then you can get out. And I think that's what people don't like. They're like, oh, I get an infrared and I get warm, but I don't sweat. I'm like, but you need that. You need that uncomfortable heat and uncomfortable sweating to invoke the change.
19:50 Jen Cohen? No, I wish I did sweat. It doesn't get hot and these things don't get that very hot. Have you ever been in one like these things are like fifty degrees much cooler than the Finnish saunas?
20:00 Speaker 02 Yeah, my, um, my stepdad has one, but we have a Finnish sauna. So I'll use our Finnish and then I go to my parents' house and I'm like, I'm freezing in your sauna.
20:10 Jen Cohen? I know. So I'm saying it's like a cold plunge. I mean, it's like crazy. It's so not hot, but I don't know. I mean, so you believe that the, that's kind of all hype, the infrared sauna, because you're, it gets maybe your skin a little bit warm.
20:25 Speaker 02 Red. Maybe you put on one of those sauna suits they sell in like Kmart or Walmart and you wear the sauna suit in your sauna.
20:34 Jen Cohen? Or just get a new sauna, call it a day, right?
20:36 Speaker 02 Get a new sauna.
20:37 Jen Cohen? Yeah.
20:37 Speaker 02 Do that. That's the best way to do it. Yeah.
20:39 Jen Cohen? I think that's a great idea.
Previous Episode 467: Senada Greca: Why Women Fear Weights (And How She Built 6M Followers) Next Episode 469: Tamsen Fadal: Breaking the Menopause Silence (100+ Symptoms Your Doctor Never Mentioned) Page updated November 1, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
