HFYH: Level Up - Women's Midlife Performance | Dr. Stacy Sims

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:03)
Hi, I'm Dr. Vonda Wright, and this is HOT For Your Health. Join us for conversations on the bleeding edge of science, health and culture, as we bring you tech innovators, thought leaders and the movers and shakers who are transforming science fiction into your new health reality.
Hi, everybody, I'm so glad you've returned for another episode of HOT For Your Health. And tonight, I want to introduce you, although you probably already know her, to an amazing exercise physiologist, nutritionist, and expert to high performers all over the world, Dr. Stacy Sims. And her book, this book, now look at this book, Dr. Sims. Can I call you Stacy for the purpose of it?

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (0:59)
Of course.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:00)
This book, I got so many years ago before I really even knew who you were, and I'm pouring through a roar. I'm like, that's right.
And then I get this book, and for those of you who haven't read it, Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Your Goals. Like who doesn't want to live like this? So I'm really excited to have you tonight.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (1:24)
I'm excited to be here. It's been a long time in the making.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:27)
I know, I know.
I feel, I sometimes I feel, I don't know if you feel this way when you read other researchers, but I feel like in, at least in orthopedics, I've known these people for years. And then all of a sudden, I'm actually seeing them for the first time. I'm like, oh, you don't actually know me, but I know your work. So anyway, thank you.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (1:48)
I hear you.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:50)
You know, I wanted to talk about so many things, tonight, but I have really, really become committed to the idea that you talk about when you open your book. And that's about how the way we think and talk about midlife and menopause matters, right?
So yeah, so tell me about your philosophy of how we should approach midlife before we get into the nuts and bolts of-

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (2:22)
Ready?

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (2:22)
Yeah, so where did you get it?

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (2:26)
So I think I was first exposed to being a normal conversation when I was doing my postdoc at Stanford, because I was working with Marsha Stefanik, who was one of the PIs for the Women's Health Initiative, and we were doing follow-up studies. And I also had one hand in human performance, so I was kind of taking some of the concepts of cooling and heating and thermoregulation stuff and applying it to the hairy and postmenopausal woman, who wasn't athletic, really, just trying to get after hot flashes. And then I met Freddie Kronberg, who was a huge complementary alternative medicine researcher. And just really looking at all these changes that are happening in women that are late 40s onwards. And then we're looking at late postmenopause, too. No one wanted to say the word menopause. And I was like, but that's what we're researching. No, we're researching older women, but we're researching specifically very postmenopausal women.
And in our bubble, it was really easy to talk about, but when you started getting participants in, they were like, oh, no, it's powered.
Yeah, whisper it.
And it was because they were afraid that they would get stigmatized and put in this box of women that couldn't do anything.
That they were now old and decrepit, and they weren't able to achieve their work potential, their parenting potential or anything like that. And I was like, wow, that's a really interesting, negative way of thinking about just something that naturally happens, how we naturally age. Because you think about men, they age in a linear fashion, right? And so like their declined, it's over a decade, where ours is boom, right here, in this like really short period of time. But no one really wants to talk about it. And so I was sitting and doing a focus group with some of these women, and I was like, well, what if we change it and take more of the Japanese or the Asian culture and talk about it as, hey, this is just a natural art, and now I actually don't have to worry about having a kid or reproducing, and I can achieve potential. I'm just a little bit older, I'm wiser, I have all my lived experiences to draw from. And one of the biggest things was how many people actually give an ass of what people think of you right now. And all of them were like, I'm too old for that. I said, exactly, exactly. So that's how, kind of, through that one focus group, really started going, okay, well, let's look at how other cultures examine menopause and realize it's just our Western culture that puts a 20-year-old up at the movies next to a 60-year-old and says, that's normal, and just ignores all the women in the middle.