BITESIZE | What You Need To Know About Strength, Menopause & Healthy Ageing | Dr Stacy Sims #673

Rangan Chatterjee (0:00)

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Welcome to Feel Better Live More Bitesize, your weekly dose of positivity and optimism to get you ready for the weekend. Today's clip is from episode 578 of the podcast with exercise physiologist and nutritional scientist Dr Stacy Sims. Stacy is dedicated to helping active women take back control of their bodies, health, and lives through science-based knowledge and practical tools. As we move into our 40s and beyond, our physiology changes in ways that can often feel confusing and frustrating. In this clip, Stacy shares why conventional fitness advice often fails women in mid-life and what many of us may be missing when it comes to improving our health, vitality, and resilience as we age.

What would you say are some of the common mistakes you see women making as they get older when it comes to losing body fat, increasing vitality, and I guess more broadly, improving their overall health and well-being?

Stacy Sims (2:32)

I think the biggest thing is following traditional trends where if we're looking at women who are in this kind of 40 plus or maybe 45 plus age group at the moment, grown up in the whole diet culture of move more, eat less, and that's what people tend to do, when especially when they're trying to lose weight. But if we were to switch it and say, you know what, I actually want you to do more high intensity and to eat more to shift your body composition.

It becomes a little bit of a disconnect and people can't get their head around it. But it's following the traditional trends that have been so well versed in the fitness world that really do not work.

Rangan Chatterjee (3:19)

Yeah, it's interesting as I've been researching you and the things that you talk about, it's very clear that first of all, a big part of what you do is to help people understand that women and men are fundamentally different. They're physiologically different, they're biologically different. You of course have your phrase that women are not small men. But what's super interesting for me is that as women get into their 40s, you are very clear that two things need to happen with respect to movement. There needs to be resistance training and there needs to be hit, high intensity interval training. I want to talk about that, but I guess the way I wanted to frame it, Stacy, was to pose a theoretical question to you.

I often talk about what I consider the 4 pillars of health, food, movement, sleep and relaxation.

If a woman, let's say 45 years old, okay, so in that perimenopausal period, is nailing her food, whatever that means, we can maybe discuss that later, she's nailing her sleep, she has low stress levels, and for her movement, she is walking for 60 minutes a day. So her lifestyle is really good, but she's not doing HIIT training and she's not doing resistance training. Is that enough for her to age well and be well?

Stacy Sims (4:54)

If we're talking about the walking component of movement, and that's what she's doing, no, it's not. Because if we're looking at walking, we're falling into the idea that we're doing cardiovascular work, which is good. I mean, we want that. But when we start looking at what does it mean to age well, we need to look at how strong and powerful we are, just to be able to carry groceries when we're 80 Think about our bone and bone density.

We also really want to examine what does cardiovascular fitness look like. Because when we start getting into perimenopause onwards, because we've lost the epigenetic exposure of estrogen and progesterone and to some extent testosterone, that affects every system of the body, we have to really understand what that means. Because if we think about puberty and the first expression of these hormones in a major way, we see all of these changes that happen from a biomechanical and a physiological perspective in girls and boys. And girls tend to put on more body fat, they end up having less of an aerobic capacity, as we compare it to age-matched or puberty-matched boys. We see so many different things that occur with brain, brain health and mood development. And so when we get to the other side of things, and we're seeing the unwinding of ovarian function, every system of the body is affected, including vascular compliance.