Menopause Expert: Belly Fat Grows During Menopause! Your Estrogen Levels Are Controlling You & This Hormone Is Quietly Killing Your Sex Life!

**Sara Szal** (0:00)
3 to 75% of women do not get the treatment for perimenopause and menopause, but they deserve. And women are asking, why is it that I can't manage stress the way I once did? Why do I have this belly fat that appeared out of nowhere, and my usual techniques for how to deal with that aren't working? Why would I rather mop the floor than have sex with my husband? But there's more than 100 plus symptoms that women aren't aware of.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:21)
But you believe many of the symptoms of menopause are avoidable?

**Sara Szal** (0:25)
Yes, and let's get into that.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:27)
Dr. Sara Szal is the Harvard trained physician, and hormone expert who's unlocking the science and simple tricks behind feeling your best no matter your age.

**Sara Szal** (0:36)
Most people have imbalanced hormones. Think of them as text messages that your body sends to keep everything functioning optimally. But for example, out of the 40,000 people I've tested and treated, around 90% of them have a problem with their cortisol hormones.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:49)
And if my body is making too much cortisol, what is the harm?

**Sara Szal** (0:51)
It's associated with more belly fat. We know that it shrinks the brain in women, but not men. It's associated with depression. But also, if you're someone who's making a lot of cortisol, you're going to make less testosterone. And that leads to a whole host of serious problems.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:05)
And what about trauma? Does that impact your hormones?

**Sara Szal** (1:07)
Oh, yes. And one of the ways to measure trauma is the ACE test. It's a validated questionnaire. And they found that people who had one or higher ACE scores had a greater risk of 45 different chronic diseases. And my score is 6 out of 10 But those ACEs are living on in your body.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:24)
And you went on a journey to heal yourself.

**Sara Szal** (1:26)
Yes, with lifestyle medicine, not a pharmaceutical.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:30)
Tell me about that journey. Dr. Sara Szal, what is it that you do for people?

**Sara Szal** (1:41)
I'm a physician, so I work in academic medicine. I do research for people, I teach, and I take care of patients. So that's the official BBC answer, and the unofficial answer is I'm a healer.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:58)
And what does that mean, a healer? Because that's a broad term, so that could mean many things.

**Sara Szal** (2:04)
It means that my task is to connect to your innate healing capacity and to work with you to activate it.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:15)
And who do you do that for?

**Sara Szal** (2:16)
So I do it for professional athletes, executives, and everyday people.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:25)
And when you say healing, if someone came to you and they said, how do you heal people? What would your answer be?

**Sara Szal** (2:33)
My answer is, I don't heal people.
That's, to me, that's a patriarchal way of thinking about it. What I do is I work with someone who's got the capacity to heal, and we work to be in the service of that. So it's not me providing something that they don't have already. It's more understanding what some of the obstacles might be to their own healing, understanding what would allow them to be the best version of themselves, to feel fully alive.

**Steven Bartlett** (3:09)
And what was your training? So can you talk me through your sort of academic journey?

**Sara Szal** (3:15)
Sure. So my training is as a bioengineer. I did the Harvard MIT program, which is designed to train physician scientists. So the ethos of this particular program was to train the future researchers and academic physicians so that we could move the field forward. And all along, I was really interested in how do you bring the best of conventional medicine together with more ancient ways of thinking about the body, things like Ayurveda from India or traditional Chinese medicine. How do we take these wisdom traditions and use that to inform mainstream medicine? So that's the type of care that I learned how to do. I became a surgeon. I did primary care after I finished a residency in obstetrics and gynecology. But I also realized pretty early on that I wanted to take care of men too. So I've done that for about the past 15 years. And I would say that training in bioengineering and a comfort with big data and with optimizing datasets to improve whatever the goal is, like performance or having the most, the best conversations you can have on a podcast.
That's what gets me excited.

**Steven Bartlett** (4:49)