The Exercise & Nutrition Scientist: The Truth About Exercising On Your Period! Women Were Right About Menopause! These 4 Supplements Give Women Optimal Health!

**Stacy Sims** (0:00)
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, we have 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.

**Steven Bartlett** (0:22)
Until right now.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:24)
Dr. Stacey Sims is an exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist whose bestselling books and over 100 peer-reviewed studies is revolutionizing how women can optimize their health, fitness, and longevity by working with their unique physiology.

**Stacy Sims** (0:36)
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 knee to hip, what we call the cue angle, so they don't feel comfortable running or swimming or jumping. And because they're not caught with 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.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:11)
So let's change that.

**Stacy Sims** (1:13)
Let's go.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:13)
As it relates to nutrition and exercise, how do I need to adapt across the menstrual cycle? What's your view on cold plunges and supplements like creatine? And what's the variant between men and women as it relates to sleep? And then let's talk about menopause, starting with perimenopause.

**Stacy Sims** (1:26)
I'm excited.

**Steven Bartlett** (1:28)
The Diary Of A CEO is independently fact-checked. For any studies or science mentioned in this episode, please check the show notes.
Dr. Stacey Sims. What is the work that you do and why is it so important that you do it?

**Stacy Sims** (1:45)
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 the 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.

**Steven Bartlett** (2:56)
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.

**Stacy Sims** (3:07)
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 getting men, because we're using a lot of aggressive language in sport. So it's off-putting to a lot of women. The other aspect about sports science research is there's limited funding. So then we're looking at, okay, how can we get people in that can come in for day after day or week to week? Most often, it's men.
When we look at what we're doing, we might be doing muscle biopsies, we might be doing blood draws, and if that's not explained in advance, it's a little off-putting to people. So when we're looking at the major recruitment strategies and the people that will say, yes, I'll come and do this study, it's 18 to 22-year-old college-age men. And that's just been the norm. And when we look at how studies are designed, and we're looking again at who's in the room who's designing the studies, primarily it's men. Why? Because we see that most of the PIs on the studies and most of the, I guess, scientists that are coming up in academia are primarily men.