Longevity Debate: The Truth About Weight Loss, Muscle, and Creatine!

**Steven Bartlett** (0:00)
So in this part of the conversation, I want to talk about exercise, nutrition, fasting, lifestyle, sleep, environmental factors. And the first question is, why does muscle matter as a woman in particular?

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (0:09)
Muscle matters because it helps your brain produce more neurons, and that's super important for brain health.

**Dr. Mary Claire Haver** (0:16)
As far as protection as we age, it's directly correlative to the amount of muscle that we have.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (0:21)
And if you have something like PCOS or endometriosis, it's even more important for you because building muscle is going to fight insulin resistance and inflammation.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:30)
I've got two questions to add. Should women exercise differently across the menstrual cycle? And what is the reason why women hear what you guys say and they don't do it?

**Dr. Mary Claire Haver** (0:38)
I'm so glad we're having this conversation. We're back with the leading voices in women's health.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (0:42)
To unlock the specific insights, data and tools needed to combat the growing challenges women face throughout their lives.

**Dr. Mary Claire Haver** (0:50)
For women, forever it was all about aesthetics.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (0:52)
I'm healthy, I'm thin, because they are under the assumption through their sociocultural ideas that a woman is coming to the gym to lose weight, not to get strong, not to gain muscle.

**Dr. Mary Claire Haver** (1:00)
But what we've ended up with is an epidemic of osteoporosis and frailty, really dementia.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:05)
Where 40 to 50% of women will have low bone density, 70% of all hip fractures happen in women and when you have that, 30% of the time you have a chance of dying in one year.

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (1:15)
Because most of it is based on male data. And I see a large number of women trying their hardest to be healthy, but what they are choosing to do is actually having a negative impact on their hormonal health. And it's not your fault. And this is where we have to educate.

**Dr. Vonda Wright** (1:29)
And it starts now.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:30)
It brings me to questions from the audience, like what's the best and healthiest way to lose weight? Is there a diet for fertility? Should women ask, is there a link between environmental toxins and early menopause?

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (1:39)
We think so.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:40)
But also, if you were to design perfect workout regimes for menopause, and early menopause, what would you... Oh, Stacy's clapping. Go ahead. This is part two of my conversation with four of the world's leading experts in women's health. And in this episode, we go even deeper into actionable, practical things you can do to improve your health. And by the way, if you're a man and you've been sent this episode by a girlfriend, a wife, a daughter, whoever it might be, I know you might not think this conversation is for you, but more than 50% of this planet are women. You have a tremendous advantage in your relationships, at work, and just being a human being going through life, if you understand the majority of the population. And for so long, women's health, women's bodies, women's anatomy, their psychology and physiology has been a mystery because there hasn't been the same amount of scientific research done to understand them. So in this conversation, we're going to demystify all of that so that you can understand your wife, your partner, your daughter, your colleague, your mother, your grandmother even better.
So in this part of the conversation, I want to talk about exercise, nutrition, fasting, lifestyle, sleep, environmental factors and all the things that we kind of alluded to when we were referencing hormones and menopause, but in a more actionable sense. And I guess the first question is similar to the first question in part one, which is why does it matter for us to have a conversation about women in this context versus fitness generally or nutrition generally?

**Dr. Stacy Sims** (3:14)
Sport and exercise science in itself is a small subset of like sports medicine and medical research, and most of the research has been done on men. So if we look inherently at most of the recommendations of exercise, recovery, nutrition, it's based on male data. And we established earlier that that's not generalizable.
So when we really want to get into the nuances of how do we create an adaptive stress for women, we have to look at it differently. We have to look through the female lens, understand the female physiology, and acutely how hormones can affect adaptations and how women respond to different environmental cues than men. Yeah, our hormones distinctly control a lot of our environment and our other cells that are not what we think of as our hormone cells, work with our hormones. So if we think about the gut, we think about the liver, our immune system, a lot of this is so hormonally derived, but it's a two-way street, meaning your hormones influence what is happening in your gut, but your gut influences what is happening in your hormones. And because women have different hormones than men, as far as what's predominant and when they are, we have to come at this and approach it a different way.