← BETTER! Muscle, Metabolism, Meals, & Mindset in (Peri) Menopause with Dr. Stephanie Estima
BETTER! Muscle, Metabolism, Meals, & Mindset in (Peri) Menopause with Dr. Stephanie Estima
"Toned" Isn't Real: Build Muscle, Lose Fat, Ditch Diet Culture for Good with Dr. Stephanie Estima
00:40:14
You've been lied to. Not by your body — by the system that profits from you believing it's broken. Dr. Stephanie names the real villain behind decades of failed diets, shrinking goals, and body distrust: the wellness industrial complex that told you skinny equals healthy. You're not broken - you were just given the wrong map. Here's the right one at https://youtu.be/RsIC6Gm0ETM
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You are not broken. You are not lazy. You are not undisciplined. You are not hormonally doomed because you are 40 or 50 years old. Okay? Or 60 or 70 from when we were very, very young. The lie that we have been taught is that health equals skinny. This villain that we're talking about teaches you through society and through stupid Instagram posts that I've had the pleasure of taking down. That muscle makes you bulky. So if you want your muscles to show, you need to build your muscles. And building muscles requires eating right. Your body did not betray you. You were taught to betray it. If you chronically diet, your body will hold onto fat like an insurance policy trying not to pay out. Okay, yeah, I want to change way I look. I'm going to give myself six weeks. Don't give yourself six weeks, give yourself six years. Play the long game. You're not late, you're not behind. Right. You could be 49, 59, 69, listening to this. You're not behind. You're exactly where you are. Hello, my friends. Welcome back to another episode of better with Dr. Stephanie. It's me, your host, Dr. Stephanie Estima. And today it's going to be just you and me, another solo sode. And I really want to talk to you about our goals and how we have been tricked as women who the villain really is in our body composition and dream body goals. And then, of course, what we are going to do about it. New lower pricing on a molecule that helps with recovery, muscle strength and energy. Hello. Sign me up. It's true. Mitopur containing urolithin A is now available at a new and lower price. And this is fantastic news, because if you are someone concerned with recovering from your workouts, you can make progress faster, preserving the muscle strength and endurance that you already have and create more energy. This is big, big news. I have been in love with and taking timelines might appear for two years now, and it contains something called urolithin. And urolithin A helps to get rid of old damaged mitochondria. It helps support muscle function and plays a role in creating more energy. We naturally lose our ability to produce urolithin A in the gut as we age. So supplementing with it becomes pretty much essential if we're older than 30, because we naturally tend to lose our gut diversity. Now, timeline is a brand that I trust because it has spent well over $50 million in research, including human trials. And I'll tell you one of them. There were participants that improved by 12% in muscle strength over four months with absolutely no change in their exercise regimen. If you want to start recovering like a boss, head over to timeline.com forward/better. I want to get something straight right now. Okay? We're going to start off. You are not broken. We're going to start off by saying that you are not broken. You are not lazy, you are not undisciplined. You are not hormonally doomed because you are 40 or 50 years old, okay? Or 60 or 70. And you're not bad at consistency, okay? If you feel like you are confused about your body, if you feel like nothing works anymore or what used to work is no longer working for you, you feel like you've tried everything, I want to tell you that it's not your willpower, it's how you have been trained and conditioned, dare I say groomed, okay? And today we are going to name the real villain. Not to be dramatic, but, I mean, why not? We are going to name the real villain because once you see this clearly, you cannot unsee it, okay? And this is the moment where you're going to get your power back, okay? So from. From when we were very, very young, the lie that we have been taught is that health equals skinny. There was no other metric, okay? If you were thin, you were good. It wasn't you. If you were strong, it wasn't. If you were resilient, it had nothing to do with your load capacity or the tendon integrity that you had. It was being skinny, right? The number on the scale had to go down. That was the only metric that we ever grew up with. The measurements must go down. Your gene size must go down. Everything associated with your body must shrink. And we were told these things, right? We were told, eat less, move more, be small. That is the only metric that women have ever been told is health. And let me tell you, friend, it isn't, okay? Health is. I mean, there's so many things that make up health. It's a physiological state. Skinny, being skinny, being small, having all these numbers move downward, that's an aesthetic outcome, and they are not the same thing. But in our diet culture, and we'll call it the Wellness Industrial Complex, has blurred that line so that most women cannot separate the two, right? And when you can't separate the difference between being skinny and being healthy, you are only going to measure your worth and your health by size, by size and size alone. And that is the first manipulation that all women have been taught, okay? That's the first trap, okay? The second trap. Is this false binary that you have to choose between looks and health. So you either are going to be this vein full of yourself, someone who chases aesthetics, someone who shrinks herself, someone who restricts who over trains who, you know, earns her food, right? And then the other option is like literally on the other end of the spectrum, it's like, just accept your body, there's nothing that you can do. Don't care about how you look. Because if you care about how you look, that's misogyny, right? Stop trying. Appearance goals are shallow and that's presented as empowerment. But I'm here to tell you that that's a false binary. You are allowed to want both. You are allowed to want to look good. You are also allowed at the same time to want to move well with technical specificity, right? You're allowed to want to build muscle and protect your joints and pursue aesthetics without sacrificing function. The system will say at large, told you that these goals are incompatible, that if somehow you care about how you look, that you are vain and full of yourself and that you should never care about that, especially as you age, right? And really the incompatibility is between short term aesthetic obsession, right? And long term physical capability, right? That's the difference between the two. It's not. When we chase aesthetics with these like six week boot camp, eight week shreds, seven pounds in seven days garbage, then we start to actually sacrifice our long term physical capability in lieu of the short term temporary aesthetic gain. But they don't have to be separate. So I want to actually introduce you to the villain that in many ways has been hiding in plain sight this whole time. And like I said, once you see it, you can't unsee it. The villain teaches you that health is weight loss, right? Above all else. So what do women typically do? And I've seen this thousands, maybe tens of thousands of times at this point. You chronically undereat, right? What happens when you chronically undereat? You lose muscle one. For one, your resting metabolic rate drops. For two, your leptin falls, which is the hormone that tells you stop eating, right? So now as it drops, you are hungrier, right? Your thyroid output may decline. That is our master hormone for metabolism, okay? And a lot of times, especially in 40s and 50s, we actually see a lot of women run into thyroid issues because of this chronic over dieting, right? Hormones like cortisol rise. Now, I don't mind transient increases in cortisol and the other catecholamines that go along with it, we actually need that, especially to do things like sprinting and. Or weight training. But it's the chronic elevation of these stress hormones that create a problem. So you end up feeling colder, you end up feeling hungrier, you end up feeling more anxious, more angry, right? And even if the scale goes down, in spite of all of those things, you think that everything's working, right? That the diet or the whatever, the intervention, the undereating is working. And then at some point, usually 40s, 50s, it doesn't, right? The villain, this villain that we're talking about, teaches you through society and through stupid Instagram posts that I've had the pleasure of taking down, that muscle makes you bulky, right? Now, obviously, if you are listening to this episode, I mean, I'm kind of singing to the choir, right? You know that women do not have the testosterone levels to accidentally become Arnold, right? And would you like another Arnold impression? I'll find a way to integrate it, right? We don't have testosterone to accidentally become huge, right? We're not gonna turn into Ronnie Coleman just because we've put a couple of plates on a barbell and benched it, right? Muscle for women adds shape and curves. And then, you know, physiologically, it improves your insulin resistance, it improves your glucose disposal. It protects your bone density. By. By the way, just like a little geeky aside, the reason why it protects your bone density is a couple reasons. One is the mechanical tension, right? So as you are weightlifting, and the mechanical tension that's exerted on the muscle gets transmitted through the tendon, which the tendon, of course, is tethered to the bone. So the tendon is also pulling on the bone. So the stimulus that your muscles are getting, you are also exposing it to the bone, but also through something called. This is a little dark roast. But I just will throw it in here, FGF1. So fibroblastic growth factor, okay? So when you start to secrete this fgf, you are also going to augment or increase your bone density, okay? So this villain that tells you that muscles make you bulky. Or even women who are like, yeah, you know, I started strength training and then I started feeling bulky. It's almost that bulk feeling, or maybe look, that they're perceiving is almost always inflammation. It's almost always water retention or, you know, in some cases, poor programming. And I will shamelessly plug my program Lyft here, because it is the program that I do that I have refined over the last 20 or so years than I do week in, week out. So if you are feeling bulky, it is probably flux. Like we'll call it water flux. Because when you are inflamed and stressed and you are not recovering properly, what happens more often than not is that you are going to retain more water, okay? It's not muscle hypertrophy, okay? You need friends, you need years, years with a Z, okay? You need years to get more muscle, okay? But you were never taught that. You were never taught that. You were taught to fear growth, okay? And you were taught to fear growth in lieu of being toned. My favorite word, toned. February always feels like that. Weird in between month. Winter's still here, energy's still a little lower. And most of us are craving something that actually helps us unwind without stealing from tomorrow. That is where peak comes in. It's aspirational wellness for people who care deeply about how they feel in their bodies. Not just for tonight, but for the next morning too. Their newest creation is called Vesper and it's designed specifically for the evening ritual. Because, let's be honest, for a lot of women, winding down still defaults to alcohol. And while it might feel relaxing in the moment, it often comes with fragmented sleep and low grade anxiety the next day that only alcohol uniquely brings. Vesper was created as a better option. It's a non alcoholic, adaptogenic aperitif that helps you relax without dulling your nervous system or compromising your sleep. What I notice first is how physical the calm feels. My shoulders drop, my jaw unclenches, my mind slows down. And that comes from ingredients like L theanine and tart, cherry and lemon balm and elderflower. It's nervous system support that you can actually feel. Vesper also includes Damiana, which supports that warm, open, receptive state, which is perfect for date nights, if you know what I mean. Cozy dinners and just being more emotionally available without needing a drink. And the flavor, ladies? Gorgeous. It's sour cherry up front, layered with grapefruit and bitters, finishing clean and herbaceous. I actually love it. Over ice in a wine glass with some sparkling water. Put my phone away. Candlelight, slow slips. It's divine. You'll wake up the next morning feeling clear headed, well rested and genuinely glad you chose differently. If you want to redefine your evening ritual and still feel like yourself the next day, you can get 10% off. For life. Yes, for life. @peaklife.com better. That's P I Q U E L I F E.com forward slash better. Your nervous system will thank you. Skin aging isn't defined by wrinkles. It's defined by skin quality. And skin quality refers to how well the tissue functions. So what's the skin's cellular energy like? How is its hydration retention? What is the skin barrier like? Elasticity and recovery after stress? As NAD levels decline with age, cellular energy drops and so does skin quality. The youth serum and youth moisturizer from Yungoos is designed to support nad dependent cellular pathways in the skin. And when we improve those cellular energy availability pathways, skin cells are better able to rep and to maintain their structural organization. And that is how you improve firmness. It's how you improve texture and clarity, not just temporarily, but at the level of the tissue. When cellular energy and barrier integrity are supported together, skin quality doesn't just look better, it functions better year after year. It's more resilient, it's more hydrated and it's more responsive. This is skin quality skincare. Head over to young goose.com better and use code better for 10% off your first purch. That's Y-O-U-N-G-G-O-O-S E.com better toned. Okay, let's talk about this. This is not a state being toned, okay? As someone who is trained in the neuromusculoskeletal system, when we say to the proper application of the word toned is regarding your nervous system, are you hypertonic, hypotonic? So you know, when you're testing reflexes, this is like how we might record if we were doing a patellar reflex. Let's we would say, okay, the reflex is hypertonic, hypotonic, atonic. There's no reflex, okay? That's not a comment on the muscles, okay? What I think most women want when they're saying I want toned, when I want to look toned is they want to be able to see muscle. And often this comes in this sort of era of Pilates princesses where we start to say like, I want muscle but not too much. You know, when we're whether or not your muscle show is comprised of how much muscle you have and how much body fat you have sitting on top of it, right? So if you are toned or going after a toned look, it means that you have enough muscle and low, a low enough body fat percentage for that muscle to be visible in the first place, that requires muscle, okay? So it's not that you're just going to do cardio and burn off all the fat and all of a sudden your muscles are going to go. Because we know that if you were only doing cardio, you're burning everything. You just become a smaller version of yourself. There's no shape change, there's no body composition change, right? And in order to have muscle, of course, that requires progressive overload. So it's not five pound pink, usually dumbbells forever. Although you can certainly start there, right? It's not endless Pilates in a caloric deficit. And by the way, I love Pilates, so don't come at me. I do Pilates two to three times a week. Hello, beautiful pelvic floor and core work. But I think that the way that Pilates has been marketed is a little misleading for women, right? Pilates is beautiful. I love Pilates. It has value. But if you want that look, what you need is muscle hypertrophy that requires load and progressive overload. Mechanical tension, right? And you also need to reduce the body fat that sits on top of that. And the maybe uncomfortable truth about this is that you can't starve your way into that look, okay? So if you want your muscles to show, you need to build your muscles. And building muscles requires eating. Okay? And this is where this villain tends to panic, because women who build, right. And love themselves are harder to control than women who shrink. Okay? So I kind of want to talk a little bit about the psychology around that, maybe the psychology of shrinking. Because in our society, shrinking is praised. Oh, look, she lost weight. Oh, look, she dropped a dress size two dress sizes. She looks amazing, right? That's what we always say to be, oh, my God, you look amazing. Do we ever say, oh, my God, you've added 40 pounds to your deadlift? No. Oh, my gosh. You increased your dead hang by 10 seconds. Amazing. You can hike for six hours without pain. We don't talk about that. We don't praise that. What we celebrate is disappearance, right? We celebrate being smaller, losing, you know, air quotes, weight, right? We don't celebrate expansion. We don't celebrate growth. Right? And over time, I think psychologically that conditioning creates something far more dangerous than body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia. It creates, like, distrust. Body distrust. You stop trusting your hunger. So if you're lifting weights and your muscles are like, damn, that was a good. That was a good session. Okay, I need some building blocks now. I need to rebuild. You don't feed yourself right when you're tired because you have been going at it at the gym. You don't let yourself recover. Hashtag, no days off, right? What the hell? That's stupid. Like, no, you stop trusting your strength because you're worried about this bulk. You override the signals of your body instead of interpreting them. You know what I mean? And that is how women end up when they're 45, 50 years old, they're exhausted, they're injured, they're metabolically dysregulated and wondering what happened. And then they go on Instagram and then everybody and their mother is like, it's hormones, it's your hormones. You need hormone therapy, okay? And now I'm not saying that you shouldn't go on hormone therapy, okay? I'm not saying that if you're on hormone therapy, like, God bless, like if it is working for you, great. But people are talking about why they feel so terrible when nothing happened. Air quotes, right? But what has actually happened is the strategy has failed. You stopped listening to your body, right? Your body did not betray you. You were taught to betray it. Okay? So the long term cost, okay? So the stakes, if nothing changes, is you are going to continue to gain and lose the same £10 over and over and over again. And this constant weight cycling is going to usually have a net reduction of your lean mass over time. Every diet that you lose weight on, if your muscle is not protected, reduces your metabolic reserve. And of course, if you are over 40, the hormonal reality of some of your reproductive hormones reducing happens like estrogen declines, testosterone declines, progesterone declines, muscle protein synthesis becomes less responsive, meaning that your muscles are less responsive to mechanical and chemical stimulus from the diet. Your bone resorption, right? Your density of your bones starts to. We'll say it a different way, like your bone resorption increases, so your density has a net decrease. If you are not prioritizing muscle and bone, if you're not loading your bone and building muscle in this window when you're 40 and you're 50, you're missing a critical opportunity, right? To safeguard and to future proof your body. Osteopenia and osteoporosis does not happen overnight. You don't just wake up when you're 45 with osteopenia, it accumulates. Same with sarcopenia. It doesn't just show up on your 50th birthday. It just kind of like slowly happens over many decades. The loss of independence in your 70s begins in your 40s. And it's not because aging is like some cruelty, you know, wicked, you know, person or some wicked terrible thing. It's because your muscle and your bone were no longer exposed to stimulus. And if the stimulus. And of course, in the. When I'm talking about stimulus, I'm talking about in the form of exercising and eating, if that is replaced with more and more aggressive starvation, that's, I mean for me, that's the biggest tragedy for women, right? I am gonna rock your world right now because I am never going back to buying PJs from Amazon again. I have discovered Cozy Earth pajamas. And let me tell you, they stopped me in my tracks the first time I put them on. They are so soft it is unreal. They're made of this temperature regulating bamboo so they're cooling when you run warm and warming if you run cool overnight. And they're designed to drape beautifully over the body and to sleep cool cotton so it keeps your temperature just right without overheating. And honestly, I don't think I fully realized the power of good fabric until trying these. And I love them so much that I'm planning on buying them for everyone on my team. They are that exceptional. If we are trying to sleep like we are paid to so that we can recover and wake up feeling like we can meet the demands of our days, this is going to help you by keeping your temperature perfect overnight to facilitate that deep restorative sleep. I want you to head over to cozyearth.com and use my code better for up to 20% off. And if you get a post purchase survey, make sure that you mention that you heard about Cozy Earth right here. That's cozyearth.com and use my code better at checkout. So if I'm not being clear, let me say this very clearly. It was never you. The problem was never you. We were just taught to ignore our bodies. So if you're somebody who maybe feels like your body has stopped responding in your 40s or 50s, it's not because your body betrayed you, okay? Your body is beautiful, infinitely intelligent, right? What your body has done is it has adapted to the environment. Bodies adapt to scarcity by conserving energy. If you're not feeding your body enough, she's not going to burn anything. If your body has had to adapt to over training, she is going to increase stress signaling, right? Your body will adapt to chronic dieting by defending fat mass much more aggressively, right? I often say as a joke, it's like you try. And for those who've ever had to deal with insurance, it's like you, if you chronically diet, your body will hold onto fat like an insurance policy trying not to pay out. Okay? Your body is doing exactly what you designed it to do, right? Or what it was essentially designed to do, which is to protect you if you're not eating. She's gonna conserve so you don't die. Right? But the villain here convinced you that that protection was a failure, that it holding onto the fat was somehow the wrong thing to do. It wasn't. That is exactly what the body is designed to do. Okay? So now we know the villain. Now we know that our bodies actually we just need to put the right inputs. We just need to love her. We need to start trusting what she's telling us and what she's laying down. So now we are going to rebuild, okay? Not with aggression. We're not going to punish ourselves, okay? We are going to do it in the way that we were designed to. Okay? The first thing we want to do is we want to reject that false binary that I was talking about. You don't need to choose between aesthetics and longevity. You can have both. It's like I feel like Oprah and it's like, and you get aesthetics and you get longevity, and we all get aesthetics and longevity. Okay? You can have both of those things, right? The second is you are going to, if you are not already, but I suspect you might, might already be, you're going to build strength systemically. Okay, so what does that mean? Progressive resistance training, which doesn't necessarily mean more weight. Okay. Progressive overload comes in many, many, many forms. We are going to train in full range of motion the way God intended. Okay. None of these half ass reps. Okay. Long length partials, different story, but full range of motion. Okay? Multi joint movements, many joints at once. Think of a squat, think of a hip thrust, think of a lunge, think of a pull up, think of a push up. These are many joints working at once because we also want to protect our joints. You don't have good knees, you can't lunge. You don't have good shoulders, you can't push up. Joints are the key to longevity. Okay? And you're gonna do this like three to four times a week. If you are someone who's new to training and you're like, I don't either have the desire or the time to train three to four times a week. Start at two. Two times a week. Phenomenal results. I've seen it thousands and thousands of times. All you need is two times a week. But ideally, in an ideal world, you would do it three times a week or four. I love the idea of tracking your lifts, not your weight. And by the way, if you have a scale in the bathroom, can we all just like collect? Can we have like world throw out the bathroom scale day or something. Don't track your weight, track your lifts, track how much lift, how much weight and how many reps, how much volume you're doing. That's what you want to be tracking the load. If you want to get heavier, sure, you can add load gradually. But I'll say it this way, anytime you manipulate any of the variables of progressive overload, whether that is load or reps or sets or density, all the other variables are going to shift. So if you increase load, you're like, let's say you're doing like a back row and you were doing three sets of 12. And let's say you were doing it at a hundred pounds. I'm just making numbers up here. If you increase that 100 pounds to like 115 pounds, you're not going to be able to do three sets of 12, right? If you are able to do three sets of 12 at 100 pounds, if you pop it up to 115 pounds, you might be able to do three sets, but maybe it's six or seven, right? So also just know that all the other variables around progressive overload are going to shift when you manipulate one variable. Okay? And then the other thing you're gonna do, my dear friend, is you're gonna respect recovery. You don't have to earn recovery. You don't have to be like bedridden or couch ridden, doom scrolling on Instagram. You are going to build in recovery every week. Every week. You don't need to earn it, okay? You're gonna rest like you're paid to. Okay? And the third thing, and this comes from my 20 plus years in practice, is mobility. Okay, Again, I've been kind of hinting, like joints, joints of the future. Okay? But you're gonna prioritize mobility, right? So mobility is strength expressed through range. When you have full range of motion, I know your joints are healthy, I know your tendons are healthy. I know your ligaments are healthy, right? So that means that you're with mobility. You are going to train your hips. When we think about hip mobility, we think about flexion. Everybody's pretty good at hip flexion. I never had a problem, many problems with hip flexion. Where most people run into issues is hip extension. True hip extension, not extension from the spine, but hip extension. And then the other area that a lot of people run into is internal and external rotation of the hips. So you want to be training mobility in those ranges. The thoracic spine, one of my favorites, we are sitting constantly in a flexed position. We need to extend the thoracic spine, the thoracic spine is the mid back. And then the secret unsung hero for mobility is your ankles. I know we don't ever think about our ankles, but dorsiflexion in particular, which is the ability for the leg bone to translate forward in space over, over the foot is happens that moment. Arm happens at the ankle, the ankle mortise joint, that's called dorsiflexion. Okay? These are, I mean, there's every joint, there's mobility to do at every joint. But these are the three main areas I would start with. Because moving pain free is not a luxury, okay? It is insurance again, for independence. When you're 60, 70, 80, 90. Okay. The last thing I'll say is you need to fuel properly. We all know the protein story, okay? 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram, or about 1 gram per pound of body weight. Okay? Throughout the day, no special timing around protein, just making sure you're getting that in every day. I really love carbohydrates to support training and intensity. And so if it's possible for you to take carbs prior to your training or after, that is ideal. Although I will, in the, in the vein of transparency and honesty, say that I don't always get that in. So when I can't eat, if I'm training at some ungodly hour in the morning, which is often, I usually will have ketones and then I follow my workout with a very high carbohydrate, high protein meal. Okay. Because you have used up the micro, the muscle glycogen during that time. So if you can eat before training, great. I typically eat before I train on the weekends just because my schedule's a little more flexible on the weekends. During the week, I typically, I'm typically training fasted or with ketones. And then I want you to be thinking about dietary fats as a way to support hormonal signaling and also as a way for beautiful skin, hair and nails. Okay? You don't have fat, your hair is going to fall out, your skin's going to be brittle, your skin's going to be dry and your nails are going to be brittle with all those like ridges on them. Okay? Fats are really, really important. It's also important for your brain. Okay? Under eating, like, no one is going to give you a medal for under eating. It is not discipline, okay? It's sabotage. Undereating is completely sabotaging your dream body. If you are on Instagram or you have an idea of how you'd like to look. And maybe that is, you know, more shapely legs, more defined glutes, a smaller waist. Maybe you want to cap off the shoulders. You want to have an hourglass figure. You need to eat for that, okay? If you don't eat, you're sabotaging your efforts. And it's like, why even bother if you are going to train like a maniac, but then you're not going to eat. Like, you have to eat. You have to eat like you're building something, because you are, okay? The other thing I'll say is just consistent training. I think that that's probably easier than the eating part. Although I will say that these like, 75 hard. God, don't ever do 75 hard, please. But any, no, 12 week, eight week, six week, whatever, boot camp, blah, blah, blah, just surrender to the monotony of doing the same thing every week, week in, week out, for the next couple of years. You know what I'm saying? So I think that what we typically do when we're like, I want to change my body, I want to change the way I look, I'm going to give myself six weeks. Don't give yourself six weeks, give yourself six years. You know, like, give yourself a longer Runway so that you can accommodate for life. Because life gets lifey, right? That you can accommodate for things that you could not predict when you were really motivated and set that goal. And that you can also accommodate for your muscles and your body catching up to your brain's goals, right? The reason why we admire people with muscle is because it took them years again, years with a Z. Okay? Because our muscles have to make these like new little protein factories. And then once those little protein factories, then they can create more pro. Like, it takes a really long time to build muscle. It's hard work, but you do that on repeat and you do it consistently. I, I pro, I double pinky promise you that is how muscles build. That is how bone density improves. That's how your metabolism stabilizes, right? It's not through crazy fasting and undereating. Your midlife lack of energy isn't a caffeine deficiency problem. It's a mitochondrial efficiency one. If you're finding your energy dips between meetings and workouts and those perimenopausal ups and downs, I want you to think more about optimizing your energy production rather than having more coffee. Meet Trocription's just Blue. This is a precision dosed methylene blue buccal trochee and methylene blue works Like a tiny electron shuttle for your mitochondria, it supports ATP production, which is the energy currency that our cells run on. And we are after cleaner, steadier energy and focus without the jitters. Early human brain imaging even shows that low dose methylene blue can improve attention and memory networks, which is exactly the circuits that suffer the most in midl and that we lean on the most in our midlife transition. Each trochee is 16 milligrams and it's scored. So you can choose how much, you can choose your dose. I would start with a quarter trochee and swallow it because you probably don't want a blue tongue. Or if you do, you can just let it melt on your mouth and in about 15 or 20 minutes you're going to feel that smooth energy lift and that mood lift as well. So one pack has up to 16 doses. This is a completely new way to optimize your health and I want you to give it a try@troscriptions.com better or just enter better at checkout for 10% off your first order. That's t R O S C R I p t I-O-N-S.com better for 10% off your first order. So going forward, if I may be so bold to ask you to do this, I want you to start measuring, I want you to start measuring your strength gains. So tracking your workouts like I was talking about before, track your volume, track your sets, track your reps, track your weight, track your outside of the gym, your energy levels. Okay? Energy is this sort of like wishy washy term. It's like how do we even measure it? You know, it's not like we have like a mitochondrial test, but if you typically find yourself like crashing at like 2 to 3 in the afternoon, right? Or you need more than a cup of coffee, if you need the cup of coffee like first thing before you even speak to anybody, you know, I would say maybe there's some energy work to be done there. Or if at the end of the day you're so tired and wired like again, these are all like small little clues, right? Looking at your sleep quality is another way, right? Are you able to a, initiate sleep? Like can you fall asleep when you want? And then B, are you able to maintain that sleep? Sleep? So if you're waking up, let's say overnight, you know, what time are you waking up? If you are waking up overnight, typically it's between 2 and 4 in the morning. That's like my clinical observation with people where they have like dysregulated cortisol or like chronic, chronic stress and then your sleep quality as well. So how many hours of deep sleep are you getting? How many hours of REM are you getting? A lot of times, if you have some type of wearable, it's going to give you that data. But if you don't want to do that, then just like, do you wake up feeling refreshed? Like, sleep is one of the, I would argue, easiest things to monitor. Because we all know when we've slept poorly, right? And the goal is not to sleep perfectly all the time. God Lord knows I have bad nights of sleep. There's some days where I wake up and I just, my mind's racing. I have an idea or I'm like, just something, something. My mind's going. So the goal is not to sleep perfectly. It's just to, you know, it's like the 8020 rule, right? Like you're doing it most of the time. And then do we have a recovery protocol in place? And what does that look like? So recovery for me can be anything from sauna to walking. And I'm gonna present something maybe a little, with a little bit of controversy or controversy, depending on where in the world you are. I like to just sometimes just sit on Instagram. Like I have these compression boots that I love. They, I love them after leg day. Cause my legs are usually sore. So I strap on the compression boots and they just kind of massage my legs. And I'll just sit there for 45 minutes. Like, well, what am I going to do? I'll do a duolingo lesson. I'll do language and then I'll get on Instagram and I'll scroll. That's recovery. That's recovery too. So what are some things that really make you happy? Right, so recovery should be like light. I like active recovery. So I like walking, but, you know, Instagram scrolling also. Okay, can we track our waist to hip ratio? I love this because you don't need to be on some wait list for some influencer doctor to be able to figure out what your, you know, wth ratio, waist to hip ratio is. Get a dog, go to dollarama, the dollar store, whatever. Buy a tape measure. Measure the smallest part of your waist, which may or may not be your belly button. Ladies who've had children, we know that the belly button tends to move south after pregnancy. But just the smallest part of your waist and the widest part of your hips. Divide the waist into the hip. Is it less than 0.8? Your waist should be at at least 80% of the size, or I'll say 80% of the size of the waist, ideally like 0.6 to 0.8. Somewhere like that. And then the other thing you can track is. Yeah. How you look. You know, do you feel like your skin is glowy? Do you feel like your hair is denser? Do you feel like your nails are strong? Do you like what you see in the mirror? Right. But I want you to also contextualize it, right? Like, how do you want to look when you're 70? Is the one of the questions that you can ask yourself, Right? Because that question will change your behavior. You're not building a bikini body. It's like, you know how you build a bikini body? You put a bikini on your body, okay. You're not building a summer body. You're building a 40 year asset, right. You're going to be here for another 40 years, God willing. Right? So just like an investment portfolio. How can you. Inc. How can you make deposits into that, into that asset over the next 40 years? So what happens if you do all this now? Let's paint a. Let's paint a nice picture of unicorn sparkles and rainbows. Okay? If you do decide to change course and do some of the things that we've been talking about, you'll begin to build a body that not only looks good. So it's the dream body that you've always wanted but couldn't get because you were starving yourself, but it also moves well, right? And you're gonna stop, like, oscillating, right. Between obsession and like forceful motivation and surrender. Right. You're just going to like. I really like the. I really like this phrase, and I've said it multiple times on the show over the past couple years. Surrender to the monotony of doing the same things. So, you know, every. It's not like, okay, I got this new 75 hard thing I got. It's just, you're just. You're not gonna. You're not gonna vacillate between like, I'm obsessed, I'm gonna do it and then I failed. And then I'm obsessed and I'm gonna do it and I failed again. Because then that reinforces this idea that you're a failure and you're not. Right. The other thing that you're gonna become is metabolically resilient. You're gonna maintain your bone density, and when you're 70 or 80, you're gonna be able to maintain your independence. If you're a mother of Daughters. You'll model sanity for your daughters and for the sons that are watching you, right? Because if you are a mother of sons, they're going to choose a woman like you, right? So you model sanity for your daughters and you model a woman with earned confidence for your sons. You model a woman who's figured it out. Not because you were frickin chasing skinny and chasing small at all accounts, but because you chose yourself, because you chose stronger. You rejected the villain. So the villain is not you. Right? It's the system that's profited from your insecurity. Right. I think that's important. I'm going to say it again. The villain is not you. You are not the problem. You are not the failure. Okay? It is the system that has profited from your insecurity. It's the messaging that has equated being skinny and essentially fricking disappearing with virtue. Right? It's the fitness industry that sold you urgency. 75 days, 75 hards, 6 week boot camp. Urgency over sustainability. Play the long game. You're not late, by the way. You're not behind, right? You could be 49, 59, 69 listening to this. You're not behind. You're exactly where you are. You're not broken, you're not misdirected. Okay? Now you know, thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Right? Because once you know it, once you know it, you can't unknow it. Like, once you see it, you can't unsee it. Right? Your job is to build something, fuel the build. Right? You want to be lifting, you want to be moving and repeat, Right? Right. Lift, move, repeat. I feel like that's another T shirt. That's the long game, right? Take it or leave it. That's what it is. So that is sort of like everything that I stand for. This is something that I have observed not only with the women that I've had the privilege of working with, but also myself. Like, these are also the same demons, the same villains that I have also been exposed to. And, and as I have been writing this next book, like all of these things have come up for me in my research. I'm like, why do women think like this? Why do we always feel like we're the problem? Why is it whenever we start and quote, unquote, fail a diet or a program, it's like, oh, it's my fault, there's something wrong with me. It's like, there's nothing wrong with you. It's just you were set up to fail from the beginning. And that perpetuating or perseverating schema that you are a failure gets reinforced over and over and over again. And I will not stand for it for one more minute. So let me know what you. Let me know what you thought of my. This is. I've been journaling about this guy. I've been journaling. I've been dreaming about this. This is like when I tell you that sometimes I don't sleep and I am like literally thinking for hours in the quiet of, you know, 1:00am and 2:00am I'm like, why do we think like this? So I would love for you to let me know what you think of this episode. Would you like more of this? Because let me tell you, I got more. I got more. There's more where this came from. We read all. We read all the reviews, by the way, on Apple and Spotify and all the places so good, bad and ugly. Let us know. So I hope that you enjoyed and we will catch you next time. Thank you so much. All right, all right. I hope you enjoyed today's episode and I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer here. This podcast, Better with Dr. Stephanie, is for general information only and the advice recommendations we discuss do not replace medicine, chiropractic or any other primary health care provider's advice, treatment or care in the consumption of this podcast. There is no doctor patient relationship that has been formed and the use and implementation of of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener. The information and opinions shared on this podcast are not intended to be a substitute for primary care diagnosis or treatment. In other words, guys, be smart about this. Take it with a grain of salt. Take this information to your primary healthcare provider and have a discussion with him or her to make the best choice. That is for you. Remember, I am a doctor, but I am not your doctor, and these conversations are meant for educational purposes only.