The Diary Of A CEO with Steven Bartlett
The Exercise & Nutrition Scientist: The Truth About Exercising On Your Period! Women Were Right About Menopause! These 4 Supplements Give Women Optimal Health!
Mon, 06 Jan 2025
Is mainstream exercise advice sexist? Dr Stacy Sims reveals the science-backed secrets for optimal health and fitness every women needs Dr Stacy Sims is an exercise physiologist, nutrition scientist, and expert in female-specific nutrition and exercise. She is the author of books such as, ‘Next Level - Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond’. In this conversation, Dr Stacy and Steven discuss topics such as, how to optimise your menstrual cycle for fitness, the biggest myths about menopause, why women need more protein than men, and the truth about creatine for women. 00:00 Intro 02:20 What Is the Work Stacey Does and Why Does She Do It? 09:52 Stacey's Academic Background 12:10 Main Physiological Differences Between Men and Women 14:35 Q-Angle 17:05 Fat Differences in Men and Women 17:48 Heart Differences in Men and Women 19:10 Lung Differences in Men and Women 20:20 Muscle-Building Capacities in Men vs. Women 20:48 ACL Injuries 22:10 What Is Quad Dominance? 23:04 How Much More Likely Are Women to Get ACL Injuries? 25:21 ACL Injury Prevention in Women 28:01 Does Science View Women as Smaller Versions of Men? 33:01 Differences in Weight Loss Advice for Men and Women 36:04 What Is the Hypothalamus? 42:46 Fasting and Exercise Differences for Women vs. Men 50:18 Stacey's Thoughts on Ozempic 52:11 When Should We Eat Around Training? 53:23 Stacey's Thoughts on Keto 54:53 Keto and the Microbiome 56:38 Saunas and Cold Plunge Differences 01:00:38 Women's Use of Creatine 01:05:53 Recommended Supplements for Women 01:11:28 Blood Glucose Sensitivity 01:15:16 Adapting Nutrition and Exercise to Your 28-Day Cycle 01:17:45 Are There Days in the Cycle We Shouldn't Work Hard? 01:20:51 When Are Women Strongest in Their Cycle? 01:21:48 Unasked Questions About the Menstrual Cycle 01:24:49 Why Is Bone Health So Important? 01:26:19 Sleep Differences Between Men and Women 01:28:05 Jet Lag Differences 01:30:12 Chronotypes 01:31:47 How Important Are Meal Timings? 01:35:30 Let's Talk About Menopause 01:41:25 The Perimenopause Phase 01:49:59 HRT (Hormone Replacement Therapy) 01:54:41 Nutrition, Exercise, and Endometriosis/PCOS 01:56:25 What Is the Most Important Thing We Haven't Talked About? 01:59:05 Why Don't We Learn About Women's Health in School? 01:59:40 The Most Important Message Stacey Would Pass On to Her Kids Follow Dr Stacy: Instagram - https://bit.ly/4j10BhK YouTube - https://bit.ly/41WFZAY Website - https://bit.ly/4a8xB3C You can purchase Dr Stacy’s book, ‘Next Level - Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond’, here: https://amzn.to/4a4gYGk Watch the episodes on Youtube - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACEpisodes My new book! 'The 33 Laws Of Business & Life' is out now - https://g2ul0.app.link/DOACBook You can purchase the The Diary Of A CEO Conversation Cards: Second Edition, here: https://g2ul0.app.link/f31dsUttKKb Independent Fact Check: https://stacysims.tiiny.co Follow me: https://g2ul0.app.link/gnGqL4IsKKb Sponsors: 1% Diary: Join the waitlist to be the first to hear about the next drop of The 1% Diary! https://bit.ly/1-Diary-Megaphone-ad-reads Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett ZOE - http://joinzoe.com with code BARTLETT10 for 10% off Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Chapter 1: What does Dr. Stacy Sims do and why is it important?
A lot of women come with their partners to see me and say, I don't understand. We're both doing the same training. He's leaning up and getting fitter. I'm putting weight on and getting slower. And that is because we have puberty. We have our reproductive years. We don't have pregnancy in there. We have perimenopause. We have postmenopause and menstrual cycle.
Each one of those is a different hormone profile that can affect the way we eat and the way we train. But no one told us this or what we can do.
Until right now. Dr. Stacey Sims is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist.
Whose best-selling books and over 100 peer-reviewed studies is revolutionizing how women can optimize their health, fitness, and longevity by working with their unique physiology.
We're looking at sports science research. Everything from training to eating, recovery, it's based on male data. And women have been generalized to that data. Things like we see men do really well on calorie restriction and fasting. But for women, it doesn't happen that way. and we'll talk about that.
And we also know that during puberty, girls' hips widen, shoulders widen, which changes our angle of the native hip, what we call the Q angle, so they don't feel comfortable running or swimming or jumping. And because they're not taught this stuff, we see that by the age of 14, girls who previously were sporty, over 60% of them drop out of sport.
The problem is, it's never about how we can empower women to use their physiology to their advantage.
So let's change that.
Let's go.
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Chapter 2: What are the physiological differences between men and women?
If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can't tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to do in this thing we love.
If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button wherever you're listening to this, that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time. What is the work that you do and why is it so important that you do it?
I look at sex differences in exercise and nutrition because when we think about everything that we know for protocols from training to eating, recovery, it's based on male data. And as a female athlete. And working with women across all ages, just trying to maximize their potential, you have to lean into different data. But people aren't aware of it.
So as I'm looking at what I do and trying to empower women to understand their own bodies, realize that there's a lot of research that still needs to be done. So if we think about something... like caffeine and caffeine intake, right? And people are talking about how it either boosts them or not.
Yeah.
If we look at all the data on performance about caffeine enhancing performance, there isn't anything that's been done on women. So if we're looking at How does that work for a woman? We have to look and say, okay, how much exercise have you done? Where are you using caffeine? When are you using it? Because we fuel differently during exercise. We go through blood sugar quickly.
Caffeine clears blood sugar. So a woman is going to have to eat when she uses caffeine, whereas a man doesn't have to.
You said it's based on male data. How can you quantify that? Like paint the picture for me that proves this is the case for someone that might not understand the significance of what you just said.
So if we're looking at sports science research, and I'll just bring it down to sports science because that's the exercise and nutrition research. If we're looking at who's around the room when we're recruiting for studies, for the most part, the language around recruitment is geared for people getting men because we're using a lot of aggressive language in sport.
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Chapter 3: How do sex hormones affect exercise and nutrition?
Which is like the angle of my knee to hip.
Yep.
And it's showing that women's Q angle, basically like the shape of the gap between your leg, is it roughly 15 degrees? What is it? Do you know?
Yeah, yeah. And so when we're looking at girls whose bodies are changing, we see that by the age of 14, girls who previously were sporty, over 60% of them drop out of sport. Because they're not taught that their bodies are changing, so they don't feel comfortable running or swimming or jumping or landing. Because they have a new cue angle, they become quad dominant.
Their center of gravity is different. Their shoulders are wider, so they don't feel comfortable running because their whole running mechanics change. So, you know, when we're looking at girls who are eight, they can keep up with the boys, right? Their bodies haven't quite started changing yet. By the time they're 10... They're starting to see a discrepancy.
And I say that because my daughter's now 12, and I've seen it over the course of the elementary school years where they used to be on par with the boys playing soccer and rugby and stuff on the field. And then you start seeing a morph where the boys are... becoming more aggressive and they're kicking the balls faster and running faster.
And the girls are starting to develop a little bit more, getting a little bit more body fat, feeling a little bit more comfortable running. They can't do the monkey bars anymore because their center of gravity is lower, so they can't get up and do the monkey bars as well. But no one explains this to them.
So then when we see this discrepancy of being sporty, not sporty, we see the changes in body composition. And all of this is in those early stages of the teen years, which is another knock because we also have brain changes where girls become more self-aware and boys don't. They're like, okay, you know what? You piss me off. I'm going to beat you up and we're going to get on with it.
But girls are very self-aware and they hold on. things to themselves in a more negative fashion. And this creates a lot of mood changes. And this also creates a feeling of negative body positivity. So they don't feel that comfortable with how they look or who they are. And society doesn't help that either.
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Chapter 4: What is the Q angle and why is it significant?
Chapter 5: What are the differences in weight loss advice for men and women?
And then when I got to university and that happened, that was the definitive seed that just really pushed me into the whole academic and sporting career that I've led over the past 20 some years.
Give me an overview of that career, the sort of significant milestones and the research that you've done that's fed into everything that you know today.
I've been a competitive athlete most of my life. So I would, I race bikes professionally. I did Ironman, I did XTERRA, and I'd have teammates who would ask me questions of how am I fueling? How am I going to perform my best? So we'd take those questions into the lab.
So we were looking at how do we optimally fuel or how do we optimally acclimatize the heat when we're at a point in our menstrual cycle where we don't have as much heat tolerance. So that we see when progesterone comes up after ovulation or core temperature comes up, we don't have as much heat tolerance. So how do we adjust for that?
So there are a lot of questions that would come through just by the nature of being surrounded by competitive athletes and being a competitive athlete. So we look at things like, we know now that when you want to do... acclimatization to the heat.
And I bring this up because if I live in New Zealand in the wintertime and I'm trying to train for something like Kona, that happens in Hawaii, and we max out at 10 degrees Celsius in the winter, but we have to face 40 degrees Celsius to race Ironman. And we get into a sauna and we want to accommodate for that heat. We know that men can go seven days in a row and be fine to then race in the heat.
But for women, it depends on which phase of the menstrual cycle. And if you are going in the high hormone phase, then we say, okay, well, you don't need a primer. You can just go in and do nine days in a row.
But if you start in the low hormone phase, you actually have to go into the sauna for five minutes, come back out, and then go back in and do that during the low hormone phase for nine days in a row.
So there are different nuances in the way that your body responds to the heat and is able to accommodate for those heat shifts versus a man can just go in and accommodate for that and be ready for the race.
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Chapter 6: How does exercise impact women during their menstrual cycle?
Chapter 7: What are the recommended supplements for women?
Okay.
So we look at stress and the mom under stress. We see that there's a higher incidence of a miscarriage if it's a developing boy fetus than a girl fetus. And it has to do with XX versus XY. Okay. Then after birth, we see that there's relatively little sex difference that is apparent until the onset of puberty.
But when we're looking at those sex differences that aren't that apparent, there are there. We see that there's a sex difference in what we call muscle morphology. So that means that men are born with more fast twitch fibers. So they have more anaerobic capacity as they get older. They have more ability to produce power. We see that girls are born with more endurant type fibers.
So this means they have more mitochondria for oxygen consumption and oxidative stress and being able to go long and slow. Then when we get to the onset of puberty, we see an expansion of these sex differences with the exposure of the sex hormones. So what we're seeing is now the boys are getting leaner, they're getting faster, they're getting more aggressive.
But girls' bodies completely change because center of gravity drops from the chest down to the lower abdomen area because their hips widen. And their hips widen because, you know, being XX, they have to then accommodate for getting pregnant and eventually having a baby from a biological standpoint. Hips widen, shoulders widen. This changes the angle of the knee to the hip. So we then have a, yep.
So for anyone listening, there's an image I have here, which I'll put on the screen and I'll also link below. And it's called the Q angle.
The Q angle, yes.
Which is like the angle of my knee to hip.
Yep.
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Chapter 8: How does fasting affect women differently than men?
And then I'm not that hungry because I did a hard workout at the gym. I might have a protein recovery shake. And then I'll hold off eating my first meal until noon. I always turn to them and go, well, why did you go to the gym? Because all you've effectively done is burn through your lean mass. So your body needs to have some fuel.
And the first thing that goes is lean mass because it's a very active energy. component of the body. So it would be better for you as a woman to have maybe 15 grams of protein.
If you're going to do strength or 15 grams of protein with 30 grams of carb, which isn't a lot before you go do cardio and strength, because this is just enough to raise your blood sugar to circulate to the hypothalamus that yes, there's some nutrition coming in. I'm able to get that blood sugar working. I'm able to get that blood sugar into the muscle.
I'm able to stimulate the mitochondria in the muscle to actually use some more free fatty acids. I'm able to tell the liver that I can actually get through this and use these free fatty acids instead of storing them. It only takes a little bit of food to then have benefit for what you're doing. For a man, if he's like comes in, I have a black coffee. I go to the gym. I do my strength.
I might do a little cardio, have my protein afterwards. And then I might delay my meal. That's all right. Because you have a longer window for recovery. The hypothalamus isn't as sensitive. You're not burning through a lean mass. You're developing a stress on the body.
And we know that it's really good that you had that protein post-exercise because that's going to create some muscle protein synthesis and hold you over till you have your meal.
Okay, so I'm going to try and explain this to you like I'm a 10-year-old, which is the exact level of IQ I have on this subject matter. So you've got this hypothalamus in the brain, which is basically this sensor. It's trying to figure out, make sure everything is in, I'm trying to think of that big word that someone taught me.
Homeostasis.
Homeostasis. Everything is level, right? Yeah. And a woman's hypothalamus is more sensitive. So if my partner wakes up, goes to the gym, has her black coffee, goes to the gym, does a big workout, which she always does, her body, her hypothalamus, is going to panic a little bit more because it's going to assume that there's stress on the body now
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