← The Thyroid (and Hormone) Fixer Podcast: Thyropause, Menopause, Metabolism and How to Fix It
The Thyroid (and Hormone) Fixer Podcast: Thyropause, Menopause, Metabolism and How to Fix It
572. THE Training Episode of the Year: How to Find Balance Between Life, Training and Hormones with Sal DiStefano
01:19:09
Loading summary
Transcript90 lines
- [00:00]
A
You hate yourself long enough, your immune system will start to recognize that. And you see this. Autoimmune issues with depression and anxiety are very closely connected. And autoimmune issues can cause depression, anxiety, of course, but we also see the reverse. We also see depression and anxiety start to contribute to and the beating the crap out of yourself. You know, dysfunction that you see with the super hardcore fitness fanatics is coming from a place of self hate. It is not coming from a place of self care.
- [00:29]
B
Welcome to the Thyroid Fixer podcast where we dive deep into the world of thyroid and hormones. Especially for you ladies navigating perimenopause and menopause. And really for anyone struggling with hypothyroidism. I'm your host, Dr. Amy, thyroid and hormone specialist and CEO of a global telemedicine practice where we prescribe the right thyroid treatment and bioidentical hormones to all 50 states and most of Canada, helping you become that badass human that you're meant to be. So if you're battling weight gain, hair loss, you can't lose weight no matter what you do. Your energy levels are plummeting and your libido left town. Then you're in the right place and you have found your tribe. Remember, I want you to embrace every inch of that badass woman that you truly are. So if you're ready to dive in and fix things, let's get started. Do you ever feel like your energy is just off? Like you're not fully alive during the day and then you're restless at night? Chances are your circadian rhythm, your body's natural clock, has been disrupted by a lack of sunlight. So what's the solution? This is where I bring in the Mitolux sun lamp. It is designed to mimic the best of the sun, helping restore your body's rhythm. UVB for vitamin D that helps our energy. Red and infrared light for mitochondrial support. And let's not forget our skin and collagen formation. It's amazing. It's like a reset button for your health that you just turn on and then sit in front of and enjoy. And during those long, gloomy winters, those long days, it's a lifesaver. No more winter blues, by the way, improves your mood. No more low energy, improves your energy. So you need to get yourself a mito luxe lamp. It's so portable, it's so easy. I sit it on my desk, I take it with me to my bathroom, I stick my face in front of it. After I wash my face, put on my serum, it Is amazing for your skin, but amazing for your energy. Amazing for your mood. You want to go to mitolux.com forward/doctor Amy so that's M I T O L U x.com forward/d R A M I E. You're going to use the code Dr. Amy they are giving me the code to give to you for 10% off. You will not regret it. This is the best, best, best red light, hands down. I have many of them in my house. This is the only one that I use. It is so easy, portable and it works. The most important thing is it works. So mitoluxe.com forward/doctor Amy don't forget to use the code Dr. Amy if you care about your hormones, metabolism and longevity, you you have to care about your muscle. Muscle is your body's most protective organ. It stabilizes hormones, burns fat and keeps you strong and independent as you age. Here's the problem. We start losing our muscle in our 30s and that loss accelerates during perimenopause, menopause or after injury. That's why I love Suji. It's a complete wearable that helps you strengthen and activate muscles using just 20% of the weight you would normally lift. Get that 20% of the weight that you would normally lift. It uses smart targeted compression to mimic the effects of high intensity training so you can build strength, relieve joint pain and protect your metabolism in minutes a day. Minutes. It is drug free. Obviously it's a wearable, it's not a takeable backed by science and trusted by professional athletes and physical therapists. So learn more or try it risk free for 30 days@trysuji.com. that's T-R-Y-S-U-J-I.com. use my code Dr. Amy D R A M I E. And that will save you money because you want to build lasting strength with less strain. When I recorded this episode, I really thought like I was talking to a brother from another mother. Sal Desefano. His passion for fitness began when he was 13 years old. I was doing step classes in my living room at the age of 13. Now Sal, if you don't know him, you got to get out from the cardboard box that you're in. He is the voice of one of the most popular acclaimed podcasts in fitness and health, Mind Pump. He's a published author, he's one of the most trusted and respected faces in the fitness industry. And Sal just, he knows his stuff. So we are unpacking everything. This is the deepest dive I've Went in. When we're talking about fitness and nutrition across all spectrums, from beginner to intermediate to advanced. So, yes, my advanced fitness fanatics, we give you some love too. So we're not just talking about, oh, how to work out in menopause. I mean, yeah, ladies, we get into that, but we get into that psychological pull to overdo. We get into how, yes, you ladies battling a thyroid condition, battling low hormones, the weights coming on, and you just push because you can't find anything that is actually working for your body. So you overdo. We talk about it all. This was an amazing conversation. That's why I titled it the Big Capital, the Fitness Exercise training episode of the year and possibly the history of the Thyroid Fixer podcast. You're not going to want to turn this off. You're actually going to want to take notes this one. Sal, thank you so much for jumping on the show. I've been so excited to talk to you because, you know, a lot of our values, a lot of our, the way that we think about exercise, the way that you talk about exercise on your podcast, Mind Pump, it just resonates with me, especially with my background. And my background, like my listeners know I came from competing in bodybuilding, went into powerlifting. I'm always talking about the importance of lifting heavy with my ladies. You know, we gotta get the ladies lifting heavy. And I've had guests on in the past where we've talked to that menopausal woman that maybe just doesn't have that fitness background and how she should start incorporating in strength training. And then we've talked about syncing training with your cycles more along the kind of beginner to intermediate. We'll get to the beginner and the intermediate ladies in this conversation. I want to start with the a little bit more advanced ladies, the women like myself. Like many of my clients, I have a badass client, Amanda. I work with Lisa Maximus, who power lifts and looks like she could step on a bodybuilding stage right now. I want to talk to them first about their training and maybe some things that they could be doing better, especially if they are dealing with hormonal shifts. And then I also want to get into mindset because I know you love talking about overcoming challenges, too. So with that intro, in addition to the intro that people already heard about your experience, welcome to the show.
- [07:59]
A
Thank you so much. I appreciate you having me on. Thank you.
- [08:02]
B
Absolutely, absolutely. So, like I said, I'm really excited to have this conversation. Just so you know a little bit about my background. Anyone listening who hasn't heard my story yet? It was when I was competing. I was getting ready for the NPC Pittsburgh, and that's when the scale started going up instead of down, and I was doing all of the things. Well, it turned out seven doctors later, I had hypothyroidism. So that was my. That's my misdiagnosis story from conventional medicine. It took me seven different doctors for one to actually say, hey, this is what's going on with you. Reflecting back, I do feel like the intense diet and exercise regimen that you have to go on to prepare for a bodybuilding show is really what sent my body into chaos. So in all the people that you've worked with, especially women, do you find that these more advanced training athletes tend to push themselves to the point of being bad for their health instead of advancing with their health?
- [09:02]
A
100. It's extremely common with fitness fanatics in particular, generally speaking, when we're talking about fitness, you know, exercise, consistency, eating healthy, generally speaking, the average person doesn't place enough emphasis, time and energy in that direction. So that's just generally speaking. But when you take a segment, when you take the population segment of people who are fitness fanatics, the general direction that they go is too much, too far, too hard. And so here's what ends up happening, right? And I'll make it sound very plain. It is a bit of an oversimplification, but it's still a true one. Exercise serves as a stimulus for adaptations. Now, an adaptation is your body's ability to change and adapt to stress. This is why adaptations happen. Otherwise, there's no impetus, there's no reason for your body to adapt in any particular direction because adaptations require energy from the body. So your body adapts to exercise because it's trying to become more resilient to the stress that the exercise is producing in the body. Okay, so that's, in a nutshell, what's happening when you work out now, you can change the stress to induce different types of adaptations. An endurance stress is different than one that is for strength and that is different than one, let's say, for flexibility. But nonetheless, it's all stress. Then the body says, okay, let's become more resilient to the stress so that the same insult no longer becomes stressful. So your body's adapting. Okay, now we confuse, and I understand why we do this because there is some overlap, but we confuse recovery with adaptation, and there is some overlap there. So recovery is healing. Adaptation is above and beyond the healing process. So to use another Example, if I were to take a piece of sandpaper and rub the top of my hand so that the skin, the top layer of skin would get rubbed off and I'd have a little bit of raw skin there, my body would first heal the damage so it replace the skin that was lost. But then the adaptation process would add another thin layer of skin cells to toughen my skin up so that the same insult doesn't produce the same damage. And if I did this over time, then I'd develop a callus on the top of my hand. The problem is that when we confuse recovery with adaptation, what we do is we stop applying the right dose and we start veering towards. And this is super common with fitness fanatics. This is very common for me. This is a struggle that I have, is we move away from what is ideal and move into what we can tolerate because they're both different. Okay, Yep. If I were to give you a scale of zero stress to induce adaptation, and the most stress that my body can tolerate, the most effective dose is somewhere in the middle, the one that's going to induce. There's always a recovery process because there is a stress, but the most appropriate dose is the one that will maximize the adaptation process. If I move away from that towards what I can tolerate, then my body doesn't have as many resources and ability to adapt. It has to move all that towards recovery. Okay, so what does this look like? What does this look like for the fitness fanatic? Well, it looks like this. I work out real hard, I get sore, I leave the gym beat up, the soreness goes away, I'm back to normal, and I go back to the gym and repeat it again, meanwhile making no objective progress or worse. Because fitness fanatics and you want to, you know, we can go a little deeper with this. But the root of fitness fanaticism is placing fitness a little too high on the totem pole of priorities. Okay, so we start to worship some of the side effects of fitness, which is like how I look, how ripped I am, how jacked I am, or maybe I'm looking for a trophy for a competition. Once we start to go in that direction, then we move again towards what we can tolerate and then beyond. And once we start to go beyond what we can tolerate now, we can't even recover fully from what we did. And then we start to see damaging effects. And those damaging effects often start out as subtle signals, so they could be extra fatigue, little bit of insomnia, hot cold, intolerance, libido starting to go down. A little bit. Then it can look like my hair a little bit brittle, maybe not as healthy, my nails. And it can get to the point where if you don't listen, the signals just get louder until your body's screaming at you and you create a dysfunction like either. Like the one you experience, which is actually relatively common. So you see a lot of more common in women than men. Men have their own, you know, common, loud signals. But you'll see this with women where they'll hammer themselves to the point of hypothyroidism, create antibodies, and then it's just suddenly they hit a wall that's so hard in front of them that no amount of stimulants or peptides or supplements or whatever can solve the problem. And the solution is so scary because it may involve complete rest for months. Right. It may look like not working out for a while, that you're like, oh, no, I'm going to lose all this progress. And so they keep pushing forward. Now, I have to commend fitness fanatics for their discipline. But if we can wield that discipline in the right direction, then what we'll get is great health, vitality, and improvement in quality of life. So, of course, the question is always like, where am I with this? Well, again, this gets a little deep, but is your fitness routine, your diet, is it genuinely contributing to an improvement in quality of life, or is it actually taken away? Are your relationships suffering? And we can get very stubborn with this because. And this is. This was true for me, can still be true for me. In fact, it can still cause issues for me where your loved ones and friends around you are like, you're obsessed. You're missing this birthday or this date or this vacation, or we're on vacation and you can't enjoy yourself. And I want you to be more present. You're just worried about your workout. You're just worried about how many grams of protein you're eating. Whatever. Now, part of the struggle with that is to be fit and healthy is to be different. If you live like the rest of the world, you're going to be sick, fat and unhealthy. So there's an element that we get used to where, yeah, we are different for sure. However, it can go way beyond that. And then it starts to take away. It starts to become a tyrannical God that beats us over the head. And oftentimes we don't listen until major injury or, you know, back in the day, we used to call it adrenal fatigue. You know, now we have more Accurately call it, you know, HPA axis dysfunction, or where it's like, now nothing works. Now I don't know what's going on. I feel sick. Or autoimmune issue starts to pop up. So this is an important thing to keep in mind if you're a fitness fanatic. And so the question is, well, how do I know? How do I know if I'm going too far? You want to look at your quality of life. I think it's important to ask people around you that you actually trust and love. So you don't want to just ask the average person because they're not going to have necessarily a good perspective. Typically a spouse, someone you can trust, you might want. They might hear things you don't want to hear.
- [16:23]
B
Right?
- [16:24]
A
And also the root behind why you're doing what you're doing. Am I really working out because I'm caring for myself like someone who deserves to be cared for? Or am I working out because I'm running away from this. This old self that was either fat, skinny, felt inadequate? Am I actually beating myself up? Am I actually punishing myself through this process? And you know, along with that, when you look at the data on people who stop their consistency with exercise and those that remain consistent, if we take out the ones that really figured it out in a really balanced, healthy way, here's what you end up finding, right? And this is neuro. This is neuroscience. The brain is wired for pursuit. So we love pursuing, we hate getting there once we're there. And you'll see this is actually a term for this in professional sports where people are like, oh, my God, you know, I've been training my whole life for this moment. And then we won. And then you oftentimes see depression following right after because it's like, what do I do now?
- [17:23]
B
Right, Right.
- [17:24]
A
So we're wired for pursuit. We're not wired for destination. And so if we take out the people that figured this out, you have fitness fanatics and you have every other person. Either they stop because they're done pursuing and they can't handle the roadblocks, or you have, I'm constantly chasing some new goal or accomplishment or whatever, which they run out. Age catches up with all of us. You can't get strong forever. You can't look better and better all the time. Especially that's a subjective one. We can really tear ourselves up. So it's typically with the fitness fanatic, generally speaking, you're doing more than is necessary, which means you're getting less out of what you're doing and you're taking away from your quality of life rather than adding to it. So this is a conversation we have often on the podcast and it's so.
- [18:11]
B
Needed because so many people. And it doesn't have to be a competitor. I just want to say that because that's my background that. Your background, that's a lot of fitness fanatics background. It doesn't have to be. It can be that person, that. And as you were talking, I just kept thinking this. That started CrossFit.
- [18:27]
A
Oh, yeah.
- [18:28]
B
And you know, the message even in a CrossFit gym is you come every day because there's a different wad every day. And you push and you push and you have, you're surrounded by these people that are, there are maniacs. I mean, some of them could do a powerlifting competition and step on a bodybuilding stage on the same day. It's. It's insane. But that pressure in that community, I'm not saying that CrossFit is bad, that's not what I'm saying. But my experience when I went to a CrossFit gym is like, damn, there's like a lot of pressure to go harder and lift more. And I saw a lot of injuries and had a lot of injuries. So I think about that as well, is not only are we pressuring ourselves, just like you said, maybe they want to, you want to look a certain way, you want to be ripped, you want to achieve X, Y, Z goal, but then you also have that external pressure of perhaps, you know, you're at a CrossFit gym or you're at a bodybuilding gym where you're seeing the competitors and you're like, ah, well, she's doing cardio twice a day. Maybe I have to do that too. And it gets so ingrained. It is hard to pull out of that mindset.
- [19:34]
A
Very hard. It's hard, Very, very hard. The culture can reinforce it. Now, I'm going to defend hardcore gyms. I will say this about all hardcore gyms. They're the most. I love saying this because a lot of people have this perception of like a hardcore gym where you walk in, there's meatheads and chalk or whatever. They're the most accepting places you'll ever walk into in your entire life. If you're a beginner, you could be 100 pounds overweight. You go in there and you try and you will become everybody's client and they genuinely want to help you. It's an incredible environment. That being said, when you start to veer into dysfunction it becomes reinforcing. Everybody starts to celebrate the dysfunction together. And it can become. It can also become its own, you know, kind of toxic culture in that way. But it is. Listen, I'm doing a series right now, so. And I've only talked about this once or twice on my show, but my co host, Adam, recently did a YouTube series. Used to be an IFBB pro physique competitor, and he stopped that. And then he went through a stint where he just kind of stopped working out. And he said, you know what? I'm gonna do a series. We're gonna, you know, for the business. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna show everybody how quickly I can get myself back into a pretty, you know, decent shape doing the minimal amount of work. That was his goal.
- [20:47]
B
Okay?
- [20:47]
A
So he did that series. Justin followed it up, my other co host, with a series, and his goal was, can I do an overhead press with 315 pounds? Now, once he completed that, right, they both looked at me and they're like, sal, it's your turn.
- [20:59]
B
Right? What are you doing, Sal?
- [21:02]
A
The last thing I wanted to do was a series on me working out. Just because I have. I know how my relationship can be with fitness, and I know if you put me on camera with my workouts, talking about fitness, it's gonna spin me. It's gonna spin me out. I'm gonna start pushing things in ways that aren't really conducive to my health or my well being, okay? So I said, no, I'm not gonna do it. Not gonna do it. So we went back and forth, and I thought, you know what? I'm going to try doing a series where I actually talk about this and wrestle this. How do I do this, in a way, from, you know, coming from someone who's, you know, since the age of 14, this has been a dysfunctional, functional relationship. One that's actually brought me a lot of good things too. Right? It's brought me my podcast, it's brought me some, you know. You know, it's brought me wealth, it's brought me some stuff, but it's also brought me a lot of grief and a lot of challenges, and it's caused problems for me. So my series is literally going to be tackling this, and it's hard because I can communicate it and I can coach others very well with this. By the way, this is a little secret for anybody who is working with a trainer. Trainers and coaches way better at training their clients than they are at themselves. So nine out of ten Trainers struggle with what I'm talking about, but they can really help clients move through things like body dysmorphia and whatnot. So that's me. I could talk about this, I could help people, but boy do I know what it feels like to struggle with this. So I'm actually doing a series on this and I don't know what's going to look like. But no, this is, it is a challenging relationship. And no, you don't have to be a competitor. Look, if I see a competitor or somebody gets on stage, like, I know for a fact there's probably some dysfunction going on there with fitness, okay? Oh, yeah, just the way it is.
- [22:46]
B
And body dysmorphia and the whole thing.
- [22:48]
A
Yes, same thing for coaches and trainers. Greater percentage of us in the general population deal with this kind of stuff. But it's also quite common with consistent gym goers. The everyday people I saw this most often, if I had to pick a demographic, I'll tell you the people that I saw this most commonly with. It was, you know, moms, middle aged moms whose kids now are, you know, between 5 to 10 who are trying to get back into shape and they beat the crap out of themselves. They do the orange theory classes and the boot camps and the spin classes and the strength training and the 1300 calorie diets and the cleanses and then they. And it's so frustrating for them because they're beating themselves up and they're like, why is this £15 stuck to me? I don't understand. I'm working out all the time. I'm beating myself up, I'm tired and I'm eating barely. I'm tracking everything what's going on here? Why is, you know, why is my body not working? And it's like, no, that's actually what's not what's happening. Your body's actually protecting you and trying to survive. We need to work with your body and not against it. But that demographic were the ones that really, you know, again, like someone listening who's. Well, you know. But I feel so great when I go to that orange theory class and beat myself up. Well, yeah, that temporary boost of cortisol feels great, you know, that that extra squirt of, you know, energy producing cortisol in the moment makes you feel good. And there's also this cathartic feeling that comes from beating yourself up. Because you know why? Because I'm not good enough. I'm. I don't look good. I got this £15 and he's come off. I can't believe I ate that, you know, pizza last night. So I'm going to go to the gym. How often do you see this, hear this? I'm going to go to the gym and I'm going to sweat it out. Or how about this? How was your workout? I would hear this all the time, managing gyms. How Was your workout, Mrs. Johnson? Oh, my God, I almost threw up. I almost died. And then they'll follow it up and say, what a great workout.
- [24:51]
B
Oh, yeah, that was me. I gave myself a gold star if I darn near puked outside. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
- [24:57]
A
No, that was not a good workout. That was a damaging one. It's actually not a good thing to feel that way. You should feel 90, probably 95%. So there's. If you're a fitness fanatic, you know, 5 or 10% of the time, there's some value in pushing your limits. Okay? Most of it's mental. Most of it's the, I can do this, you know, or I accomplish this thing. But that's 5 to 10% of your year. 90% of the time, you should leave your workout feeling more energized, better, more mobile, with less pain. You should not leave your workout feeling like you survived a battle or war. You should walk out and be, if you walk into your workout going, oh, man, I'm a little tired. I'm feeling kind of stiff. And then you leave and you're like, I feel like I could do two more of those. I feel amazing. Good workout. That was a great workout.
- [25:46]
B
Yeah. Well, you already touched on my next question that was popping in my head about some of the mistakes that people are making, specifically women. I want to talk to my ladies because they're really the ones that, like you said, that mom that has that extra 10, 15 pounds, that maybe she has something underlying, maybe she has a little bit of a thyroid problem or that pops up after pregnancy, or that midlife woman that hormones are changing, you know, so that extra weight is coming on. So what they do, and they're so frustrated, they're going, my body wasn't like this before. All I had to do before is do an extra spin class and pull back on my calories and the weight would just fall off. But now it's not. So now I'm going to go harder. I'm going to push harder because more must equal better. I'm going to restrict more. Like you said, drop those calories, push harder at the gym. Now, whether this is a beginner, intermediate or an advanced Fitness fanatic. Can you explain what exactly is happening with the body like you said? No. Your body's protecting you. What's going on with the hormones with cortisol, with that survival mode protection, when we literally do too much, that in our minds we're going, this should work. This should be dropping the weight and it's the not.
- [27:00]
A
Yeah, no. The right dose is the most effective dose. So the question is, what determines the right dose? There's a few factors that will determine the right dose of intensity or workout structure or whatever. It's your current level of fitness. So if I take a beginner who's done nothing for five years, it'll take very little to create the right dose, very little to get their body to adapt in a positive way because they went from doing nothing. So now you're in here and we're going to do 10 full range of motion body weight squats. Like that's good for your legs. We're good for today, right now, of course, as you adapt and you get stronger, that starts to slowly progress. So that's one, two is your current lifestyle. The right dose changes dramatically when your sleep isn't good, or when you're under a lot of stress, or when your diet isn't necessarily ideal, or when you're dealing with inflammation or gut issues. Now, the right dose starts to move and fluctuate depending on your lifestyle. So you have to count all those. You have to take all those into account to determine what the right dose is. Okay, so what's happening when your body is, you know, quote unquote, protecting you? Well, one of the number one insurance policies your body has against stress is stored energy, and that's body fat. Your body think of stored body fat like your bank account. Okay, so you work, you make money and you have a savings account. Suddenly you're reading reports that there's going to be an economic downturn or you're hearing, you know, whispers that, oh, we might be laying people off or inflation may start happening or, oh, I got my older parents, it looks like I might have to take care of them soon. You're going to save more money, you're going to spend less money, you're going to try to set yourself up because things are going to start getting rocky. Okay, so this is what your body does with body fat. It actually moves towards it. It organizes its hormones and functions in a way to store more body fat. Because it's an insurance policy. It also simultaneously just again, using the example of saving money, one of the other things I would do besides trying to save more money is I'd spend less money. I'm going to start reducing my output. I'm going to start cutting unnecessary expenditures. And by the way, the worse the economy gets, the more things I start to cut and say, okay, this is not necessary, that's not necessary until I get to the very bare bones basics, right? Your body will do this with quote unquote expensive tissue. What's expensive tissue? Muscle. Muscle is metabolically active. It burns a lot of calories. It requires quite a bit of energy in relation to other parts of the body, especially to body fat to maintain. So when you push the stress and you cut the calories, you know what your body does? Gets rid of muscle. It gets rid of muscle. All right, let's energy demand. You know, we're taking in very low calories. We don't have very much energy coming in. There's a lot of stress. Get rid of this expensive muscle. We're in emergency mode. Let's get rid of muscle and let's organize our hormones in a way to store body fat and then let's produce some short term energy to get this person through this stressful position. Well, what produces that? Cortisol. Cortisol produces that. Now you can't keep going in this direction because eventually you start running into problems, right? Eventually. Again. In that economic example, I can survive economic challenges for only so long until I can't cut any more costs and I'm not making any more money. Now it's getting dangerous. Now I can't make my house payment. Oh my God. I can't afford food or whatever, Right? So you keep pushing that long enough, your body starts to become resistant to cortisol. You get an inverted cortisol response. What does that look like? Low cortisol. In the morning I wake up, I feel like I got hit by a truck. Cortisol starts to spike at night. What do I do? I drink caffeine in the morning to get me going. Like, all right, here I am. And then at night I'm exhausted but wired. Why can't I go to sleep? Let me have some alcohol, kind of calm myself down. And this becomes a kind of a common, this is like a common scenario. And your hormones, your natural hormones will get organized depending on what your body believes is most important. Okay, So I like to use men as an example because a man's hormones are so much more simple than a woman's hormones. A man's testosterone levels will fluctuate dramatically depending on lifestyle and stress. Okay. If A man gets terrible sleep for one night, you'll see a 20, 30% drop in testosterone in women. What you tend to see is these imbalance, I guess, for lack of a better term, of estrogen, progesterone, cortisol, that is inappropriate. Thyroid, that stops working. You start getting some antibodies developing, the body starts attacking itself because of too much stress. You start to develop autoimmune issues. Gut health starts to go south. So suddenly it's like bloat, indigest. I don't know why. At the end of the night, I look like I'm pregnant. And I used to eat this food. Now if I eat it, it totally bothers me. What's going on? Okay, so where am I going with this? Well, I'm a firm believer in the healthy application of hormone replacement therapy. And the reason why I said that is you brought up the woman who's. What happened. My body used to do this, and now it doesn't. Some of that is, is you're changing hormones, especially if you're in perimenopause and menopause. But here's the problem. If I throw, quote, unquote, optimal hormones at this crazy stressed state, okay, I am taking what would normally be optimized hormones for health, and I'm creating optimized hormones for health, but I'm not healthy. This is when you can actually produce problems. You can actually mask and kick the can down the road with some of these problems. So you may go on hormone replacement therapy. You know, a man may take testosterone and his testosterone's low because it's too much stress, because he's beating himself up, his diet is crap. So he goes on testosterone, temporarily feels good. So what does he do? He keeps going down that path until the. The hormones can't make you feel good anymore. And then you really hit a wall and you see inflammation and all kinds of different problems. And this can happen with women as well, where the hormone replacement therapy masks certain symptoms and can cause some problems. Now, in combination with a healthy lifestyle, it's miraculous. You take somebody.
- [33:11]
B
That's the important part. That's. I was hoping you're going to say that. I knew you were going to say that.
- [33:14]
A
Yes.
- [33:15]
B
You can't just do the hormones without the changing of the lifestyle.
- [33:18]
A
No, no. In fact, I had Dr. Lauren Fitz on the podcast, and she's like, you know, you're throwing gasoline on a dumpster fire if you're not actually improving your health through lifestyle. But if you do the lifestyle stuff appropriate, and then you do the hormone Replacement therapy, if it's appropriate for you, then you get this miraculous, wonderful, synergistic effect. Otherwise, high levels of hormones in unhealthy state can do all kinds of nasty things to the body. So in other words, you can't get away from. I need to work with and adjust a lifestyle. And so, you know, when I would work with people, if they did hormone replacement therapy, it was always in conjunction with stuff we were doing. And typically what it looked like is we did our stuff first and we would go so far and they'd still get results, they still feel good. And then, you know, six months down the line, then we would work with a specialist and then they would start, quote, unquote, optimizing hormones. But, yeah, the lifestyle stuff is still extremely important on the autoimmune side. And I know this is more common for women than men. Men still get this as well, but much more common for women. It's very interesting when you look at the data on how we perceive ourselves and its relation to autoimmune issues. So here's where I'm going with that.
- [34:31]
B
Okay, this is neat.
- [34:32]
A
Yes. So the immune system responds to our environment. Okay, we know this, right? Our perception of our environment will influence our immune system. Okay, If I am looking at myself and studying myself in the mirror and I'm not perfect enough, and I'm not good enough, and I don't look good enough, and look at this body fat here and look what's over here, and I'm beating myself up in the gym and I'm over dieting, and this is happening for decades. It is totally plausible that my immune system will start to react to me like a danger, start attacking me. And the data, I believe, very strongly supports this. You hate yourself long enough, your immune system will start to recognize that. And you see this. Autoimmune issues with depression and anxiety are very closely connected. Autoimmune issues can cause depression, anxiety, of course, but we also see the reverse. We also see depression and anxiety start to contribute to and the beating the crap out of yourself. You know, dysfunction that you see with the super hardcore fitness fanatics is coming from a place of self hate. It is not coming from a place of self care. So I think it's very. I think it's very closely. I think they're very closely related. And women's bodies are more sensitive to autoimmune issues. But I also think men do this as well. But if I were to pick a gender for who has more of a tendency to really hate themselves, study Themselves break themselves down. It generally tends to be women.
- [36:02]
B
Oh my God, you just blew my mind with that. So for my podcast editor, Patty, that is the clip that we want for social. Because that, I mean, my jaw was open for with that. Now that you say it, I'm thinking about all of my patients and going, okay, yeah, I can see where that could have triggered the autoimmunity, where your, your thoughts around yourself can literally spur on that autoimmune attack. And that's where we see Hashimoto's present itself. And like you mentioned earlier, we see a lot of thyroid dysfunction in female competitors. So kind of flipping back to that fitness fanatic, why do we see so much? So, number one, yes, it could be the rigorous dieting, the yo yo dieting, the pounding of the body, the restriction of food, the caloric deficit all day long. That's a stressor on the body. And that can flip that autoimmune switch. I never thought about that component. Like you've already stated, anyone who competes has some level of body dysmorphia, has some level, whether low, medium or high, of self beating. I don't want to say self hatred, but just really picking themselves apart. I mean, every little thing, oh, this bicep isn't as big as that bicep. And you know, my ass isn't perky. And I mean, from head to toe, we pick ourselves apart. And that alone is what you're saying, with the research even showing this can trigger autoimmunity?
- [37:30]
A
Wow. Yeah. Yeah. And it's. Look, if you ask somebody like this, do you hate yourself? They're gonna say no. But if you follow the actions, it's a yes. It's a yes. And look, getting on stage, we'll just talk about that. Like you are signing yourself up to be completely judged by how you look. So if you struggle with body image issues, which a lot of us do, the world we live in really doesn't help us in that way. Okay, Right. We don't value and honor aging. We don't value and honor motherhood the way that we should. Or wisdom, which are all incredibly valuable. What we value. And there's value to the things I'm about to say as well, but they're not the most valuable things or the only things that are valuable. Okay. Youth and beauty, those types of things, those are also valuable. But that doesn't mean it's the other parts of your life or the changes in your life aren't also as value. By the way, just give you some stats, okay? Just so people understand how much the world lies to us or to put differently, how many lies we actually believe. If you look at the data, okay, this is what the data shows. The segment of people who have the best body acceptance. People who start to become at peace with their body. They're not 20 year olds. These are men and women in their 60s and 70s.
- [38:51]
B
Yes.
- [38:52]
A
Way out of their prime. Way out of their prime. And yet they have the best body acceptance. So you don't derive body acceptance from how you look, just so people kind of understand that. And then again, you know, we talked about this, the self study. If you're watching and listening to this, like, how often do you look in the mirror looking for imperfections or to put it differently, that's what you notice and you don't notice the other stuff. Now, from a neurobiology standpoint, and I think there's a good lesson here, we're not wired to notice, for lack of a better term, good things. We're not. We're wired to notice and focus on scary and bad things. This is just the way that we're designed. And if your focus is here, you'll miss everything else. So there's this great. By the way, you can find this on YouTube. I'm going to spoiler alert. I'm going to give you the end. So it's not going to work for you if you've already seen it, if you've never seen it. But there's this great psychology experiment and it's wonderful. I saw it in high school and I love using this as an example. There's a professor comes on screen and he says, okay, I want you to count how many times the people on screen pass the basketball back and forth. There's like 15 or 10 people on screen and then he moves off screen and then they start passing the basketball. So you're counting, 1, 2, 3, 4, whatever, and you're watching it. Then at the end, he comes on screen, he goes, okay, you ready with your answer? And you're like, yeah, you know, it's 15 or whatever. And he goes, did you see the gorilla? And you're like, what? Then he rewinds the tape and a man in a gorilla suit walks through the crowd. 80% of people don't see it, even though it walks right in front of you, not in the background, but literally through the group of people passing the basketball. So we don't notice a lot of things because we're focused on other things. Now, where am I going with this? If we're Wired to really pay attention to remember the bad. And we're not wired to pay attention to or notice the good, then it makes a lot of sense. And there's a lot of data to support this. And it's extremely powerful to practice noticing the good. So an example of this is something that I've recently done. But there's many ways to do this. And I'll talk about what I do, what I've done recently, and how I used to coach my clients. But what I've done recently is I have a silent alarm on my phone, and every other hour it'll go off. It's silent, so it doesn't disturb anyone. But I'll look at my phone. Oh, there's the alarm. And what I'll do is I'll reflect on the previous hour or two and think about all the things that I'm grateful for. And it's so crazy, Amy, I've done with this is that when I do that, oh, my God, there's so many things I missed. Like that funny joke that Justin told me, or, oh, yeah, it's sunny outside, or that my lunch was. I don't even notice this stuff because I just. I'm not wired to notice these things. That's what I did. I started training myself through this process. Now it's becoming a little more automatic. Now, here's what I would do with clients, and there are studies that support this. When clients or people pay attention to all of the other benefits that fitness provides, their consistency improves by about 60%. So what are those things? Well, it's not the scale you're going to pay attention to. I don't need to tell a client to weigh themselves all the time. They're going to do that. But what do we pay attention? What do I tell them to pay attention to? Energy, interactions with other people, sleep, libido, pain, function. How are you in the morning, this morning versus. And suddenly people are like, oh, my God, like, this fitness thing is bringing me all this incredible value. And if I didn't consciously think or write these things down, all I would notice is that the scale either moved up or moved down. You know, this occurred to me as a trainer, probably five years into my career, where I would get a client who come in and the scale would completely dictate their state of mind completely. Like, I'd have a client that would come in who I've been training for three months, who is stronger, way more energy, feels good. Their friends and family are like, man, what's going on? You're doing something, you look great. Then we'd step on the scale, and in three months, they lost three pounds. Devastated, crushed. This is horrible what's going on here. On the flip side, I'd have members of my gym who I could clearly see were overdoing it. You know, bags under their eyes, exhausted. There's just overstressed. They come in, weigh themselves. I'm down £5. I'm so happy. And so it's distorted. It's totally distorted. It can totally distort you. So the root of why you're doing this and that mental. These exercises will profoundly impact your fitness journey in a way to where it really starts to serve you. And by the way, here's how I sell it, because I know I need to sell this. The side effect of what I'm talking about is what you're actually after, which is looking the way you want to look. You know, the side effect. It's funny because we want the muscle, we want the leanness, we want the look. But really, all of that, the reason why we have this evolutionary desire or why we are attracted to those things is not because of those things, but rather what they signify, which is health, good health. So if, you know, here's a practice for people watching. If you close your eyes and imagine yourself in a very healthy state, physically, mentally, spiritually. Now imagine what that version of you looks like. Pretty fit. So doing the things that I'm saying not only feels great and will break those chains of that tyrannical relationship you have with fitness, but will also simultaneously produce what you're chasing so hard, which is the look that you're after.
- [44:23]
B
The struggle is real when it comes to losing weight. Listen, I know because I've been there. You're trying all the things. You're doing the diet, you're tracking your macros, you're getting to the gym, you're going to the Pilates, you're doing all the things, but it's not working. It's not working. And this is independent of a thyroid problem. Maybe you have a thyroid problem. Maybe you have low hormones, or maybe you don't, and you're just like, I just have a really crappy metabolism that I am putting on weight, or I can't lose weight no matter what I do. Then you need some help. But what you don't need is a stimulant fat burner of the old days where you literally thought you were having a heart attack. You need something that is actually going to work to increase your metabolism without jacking up your heart rate. Enter Thyroid Fixer. Yes, I know it's called Thyroid Fixer, but I named it after myself and the brand because it's my baby, it's my childhood. It's a product that I have been studying for 15 years and using it on patients for 15 years before I brought it to you. Thyroid fixer contains T2. And what this does, I call it the forgotten thyroid hormone. No, there's no tests for T2, but your body does produce T2 in small amounts. T2 will increase your basal metabolic rate, literally the amount of fat that you're burning at rest. It's also browning white adipose tissue. So this is why you jump into cold plunges. Or maybe you're like, I don't want to jump in a cold plunge to brown your white adipose tissue. That helps with insulin resistance, it helps with metabolism, it helps with inflammation, helps with overall health. So that's a good thing as well. And here's the other thing. With T2, it's not going to affect your thyroid. So many of you know, if you take T3, if we give you T3, or if you abuse T3 when you're not supposed to, it will have a feedback loop, a negative feedback loop on your thyroid. And you're going to either look like you're hyperthyroid or you're going to shut down your own Thyroid Production. T2 doesn't do that. It's working at the cell level to just simply increase your metabolism. That's a win all the way around because now you're going to burn fat, now you're going to lose those extra LBs, and that's ultimately what we want. It also bonus, helps with ATP production at the mitochondrial level. This means steady energy through the day. No highs, no lows, no caffeinated red bull spikes, just really nice steady energy through the day to keep you going. So you want to add in thyroid Fixer and just literally watch your body change over the next couple months. Because, listen, I mean, it's. It's time. Well, it's time all year long. I mean, there's no good time of year to lose body fat. We want to be in shape. We want to look, feel, and perform our best. Add in Thyroid fixer and your body will absolutely thank you and then you'll come back and you'll thank me. Well, and with that look, too, I want to add in, just tying back together what we talked about in the beginning, about finding that balance, that in between, and kind of tying in what you just said about as you age. And I wouldn't even say 60s, 70s, I would even pull it back, at least for women, 50s. It's funny, I just said to my husband the other day, he's 58, I'm 51. I said, you guys don't get the benefit of when you turn 50. Like us women, we don't give a shit anymore. It's like your body armor drops, your fuck bucks are spent. You literally, the things that used to bother you don't anymore. So we get that you guys don't as much. But Even in my 50s, I can honestly say now that I have found that balance. And so much of what you said just resonates so deeply with me. But I have found that balance now between pushing too hard and doing just enough and taking some time off and all of that, that I honestly look better now than I did in my 20s when I was stepping on stages. I have more muscle now, more shape now, and it's all because I found that balance. And maybe some of that is, you know, turning 50 and not caring and not beating myself up anymore. But when you find that balance, it absolutely does come back around to how you look, how you look for your land perform.
- [48:45]
A
Yeah. Isn't that ironic? 100%. Far less intensity and work is required to give people what they're looking for. Okay, now, of course there's a truth to high performance. You are going to trade longevity and quality of life when you're trying to be at the top. When it comes to performance, this is true for anything, right? If you're a professional athlete, longevity goes down. They're not trying to live the longest or live the healthiest. They're trying to score the most touchdowns or get the most points. So I get the same thing with business. There's a certain amount of business and you work hard and it benefits your family and then you can go beyond that, make more money, but your family ends up suffering and you sacrifice certain things. So I get that. And I get that sometimes, you know, that's the direction people are going to go. But for most people, you don't need a ton. The ideal routine, now this is very general, but the ideal routine for the average person who wants to be fit, healthy, sit in this nice, you know, for women, they're probably going to sit anywhere between 19 to 24% body fat. For men, probably about 12 to 15% body fat. So you're not like shredded, but you're healthy, you're lean, good strength, good muscle shape, great quality of life, good sleep, like Everything feels good for most people. Here's what that looks like. Probably two to three days a week of structure strength training and, you know, anywhere between 8 to 14,000 steps a day of walking. And then diet wise, what it looks like is you don't eat processed food for the most part. You prioritize protein and you get good sleep most nights. And that's it. That's it. They would have you believe that it's way more than that. It's not. It's not. If you have a well structured, appropriate strength training routine, you could go really far with two full body workouts a week, really far. And with your daily steps, especially if you structure them so that they're after meals, you know, like a 10 minute walk after breakfast, lunch and dinner is more beneficial from a health perspective than a 30 minute walk done separately, for example. If you just do those things, you know, if you avoid processed foods, for the most part, you eat, you know, your target body weight and protein and that's what you're aiming for and you prioritize it in your meals. Now, of course, this is general because there's people that gotta, you know, are a little different and there's food intolerance, all that stuff. But if you kind of stay in that general, you drink a lot of water and you get good sleep, like you're gonna do great. I mean, you're gonna do more than great, you're gonna do amazing, it's gonna feel great. And you're not gonna feel like you're spinning your wheels in the dirt. And that's for the vast majority of people. Now again, of course, if you want to push it to some extremes, I want to compete in a triathlon or I want to get on stage, know what you're signing up for and you are trading certain things. And is there some value to testing yourself? I think so. I think for some people there is. I think for some people there isn't. If you struggle with body image issues, more often than not, we tell people to not compete. We'll get callers that will call in, oh yeah. And I'll ask them questions about their history and their past. I'm like, so I want to do this bodybuilding show or this, you know, this figure show competition.
- [51:45]
B
And I'm like, no, no, you will have an eating disorder afterwards.
- [51:48]
A
This is going to throw. Yeah, you're going to get on stage and have a bunch of people like judge how you look like. That's a terrible idea.
- [51:53]
B
And then you're going to think you're fat. When you go back to, like, what would be a ripped, normal state that anyone would look at and go, I want to look like her.
- [52:01]
A
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So. But that's it. That's really all that it is. And watch what happens. Watch what happens. You get this nice, consistent general improvement. You start to feel good, and here's how you know you're on the right path. When my clients would come to me and say, and this would happen when I did a good job, this was, by the way, the back half of my career. Because in the beginning I was terrible. I was that, like, beat you up trainer. In the beginning, back half. I figured it out for the most part when my clients came to me and said, sal, I don't understand how this is working. Like, I feel like I'm eating a lot. I mean, we're working out, but I'm not getting, like, sore and my body is just responding like, what's going on? This is so weird. Then I knew we're on the right track. And that's what you'll notice. That's what you feel.
- [52:45]
B
And you know what's funny is the things that you just said. They're sleeping, taking a walk after your meal, getting in good protein. Those are the hardest things for people to do.
- [52:55]
A
Yeah.
- [52:56]
B
People would rather go out and buy peptides and $5,000 worth of supplements every month than incorporate and focus on those three simple things.
- [53:05]
A
Very effective. Simple. And what I just said is going to give you 95% of everything that you're looking for. Here's the data on walking. Just walking. Just talk about walking for a second.
- [53:16]
B
Yeah, yeah. Because you guys, I just want to say you guys just had a killer episode.
- [53:20]
A
Yeah.
- [53:21]
B
On cardio, I am an avid listener, so. I know. And. Oh, you said something in there about getting your cardio with strength training if you work hard enough. That's what I always say. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna hand it to you. Yes, please. Talk about the walking. And then let's talk about the cardio queens a little bit too.
- [53:36]
A
Yeah. So 80% of all of the benefits you're going to get from walking happen around 8,000 steps a day. Okay. So 80%. The more you do after that, then you get to start to get diminishing returns. So I'm not saying don't do more than 8,000 steps. I'm just saying if you can get 8,000 steps a day, you're like, the majority of those benefits are going to come. So that's number one. Why am I such a fan of walking. Why not running or something else? Yeah, there's a few reasons why. One, it's one of the few things we could still do without terrible biomechanics and horrible physical form. Okay, so if I take the average person who stopped running when they were 12, which is most people stop running when they're kids and then they're 35 and they're like, I'm gonna run for fitness. Like your technique and biomechanics are. You need to focus on that before you go run to fatigue, because all you're gonna do is injure yourself. That's what ends up happening. Now, the human body evolved to be very good at running, but when you stop for years and years, you lose that those biomechanics, you lose that the skill of running. So if you want to run, don't go run to fatigue. One of the easiest ways to get your technique to go out the window is to do something till you're tired. So if you're going to run, hire a running coach and perfect the skill of running before you, just before you go, push yourself with running. So there's a learning curve with running that most people don't have the time, energy, money, really to go after. And it's also, you know, it's. It requires me to change my clothes and I'm a sweat and all that stuff. Most people can still walk. Thankfully, we're not in Wall E world. Remember that animated film, Wall E? We're not there yet. Right. So people can still walk. So it's easy. It doesn't cause injuries in most people. You can do it in your work clothes. You could take a break and go for a walk. It's got in tremendous health and longevity benefits. And if you time it post meal, it's got this really incredible insulin sensitizing effect. It really does. It's a real easy way to dramatically improve your insulin sensitivity. And then downstream of that is mitochondrial health. It's a real easy way to do it. It's like 10 minutes. Want to get into the weeds? You get the glute 4 receptor, that moves to the surface of the muscle cell and sucks in the sugar, turning it into glycogen. That's what happens when you. So you eat, you get, the blood sugar goes up because of the food, but then you move. Now your body's sensitive to the insulin and you utilize that and bring that into your muscles. And you know, I was talking to Dr. Seeds a while ago, great researcher, yeah, very smart man. And he, I mean he said, sal, he goes, if people just walked for 10 minutes after meals, he goes, we would solve a significant percentage of diabetes, we would prevent a significant amount of diabetes just from that. Right. So walking is easy. Most people can do it. It's also regenerative and recuperative. So other forms of cardio. Now, to be clear, if you want to get endurance, if you want lots of cardiovascular endurance and you're going to do, then you should do hard cardio. Like, if your goal is to be a good cyclist or a swimmer or a rower or a runner, well, yeah, you got to train that way, right? But if your goal is health, longevity, mobility, some fat loss, walking is the absolute best. And it's also, again, going back to what I was saying, it's recuperative. So if I take somebody who's in a high stress state, it's one of the safest forms of activity that isn't going to really hammer their ability to recover. In fact, if they do it slowly, if they go outside when they do it, if they combine it with something that is uplifting, like music, podcast, a book, what we tend to see is it tends to actually enhance their recovery ability so it doesn't take away from the stress. So when I'm looking at the average person who's, look, here's the deal, here's what I want. I want health. I want some muscle strength. I want to have a faster metabolism so I don't gain body fat. If I go off my diet for a day or two or go on vacation, I want to feel good. What should my routine look like? I'll say, look, put most of your energy intensity towards strength training. That's the biggest roi. Two days a week or even one day a week of strength training has a huge ROI in terms of results, more so than any other form of exercise. And then on all the other days, just try to walk throughout the day. And let's see if we can get you up to 8 or 10,000 steps a day and that's it. You know, combine that with, you know, decent diet, some good sleep, and you're gold. You're doing great. Now, again, if you want endurance and athletic performance, then we start talking about different forms of exercise. Now to address the cardio queens.
- [58:03]
B
Yeah, cardio queens.
- [58:05]
A
First off, exercise as a primary tool for fat loss is not very effective. The data on this is very, very clear. Diet plays the biggest role there. Now, why do we preach strength training so much for fat loss? Well, here's why. If I reduce my calories and Increase my expenditure. That's the basic formula, right? Calories in versus calories out. Can't get away from that. It's true. That's not all that's true, though. It's oversimplification, but that's definitely true. If I just expend more calories and take in less calories, my body will try to adapt to the new energy intake by reducing my metabolic output. So what you end up seeing is muscle loss. And so you see this in the studies quite clearly. Diet without exercise, you know, 30, 40% muscle loss. So you lose 10 pounds. Four of it comes from muscle cardio. Plus diet results in the same muscle loss, sometimes even more, because you don't need strength for endurance. Look at high, look at the best long distance runners. Very little muscle. So your body will actually start to teach you how to become or learn or adapt to become more efficient with calories. Actually try to slow your metabolism out. You actually start to lose muscle along with the body fat. Strength training is great for fat loss because it offsets the muscle loss. And if you do it right and we don't do too deep of a calorie deficit, or let's say we stay at maintenance for a little while and try and build muscle, well, it burns more calories. We get a metabolism that's a little faster. And a fast metabolism, 10,000 years ago was a liability. You know, if you're living in the wilderness, I don't want a body that burns 5,000 calories a day because that'll be tough to find. But in the modern world where I can DoorDash 1200 calories to me in 10 minutes, a fast metabolism is an asset. In fact, again, and I'm going to oversimplify this, I think this is a terrible. People take this and go too far with it. But if your body burns the calories that you've taken in, or even more than the calories you take in, even if the calories that you're taking in aren't great, a lot of the damage is gone. In fact. And this is where people go too far. You have these Internet scientists that take this too far and they'll say, I'm only gonna eat McDonald's or whatever for 70 days, you know, 90 days, and I'm gonna show improvements in my blood lipids. Well, yeah, you're in a calorie deficit. That tends to fix a lot of things. I don't think that's the approach, by the way. Try to eat processed foods or garbage foods and also try to eat Appropriately impossible. They're designed to make you overeat, so you're going to be white knuckling this your whole life if that's your approach. And then there's other things. We could talk about the negative health impacts. But yeah, that's it in a nutshell. So use strength training to leverage my body to speed up its metabolism, organize its hormones towards muscle building. Just to touch on that. The muscle building process requires a youthful hormone profile. It requires a little higher testosterone balancing of estrogen, progesterone, cortisol needs to be appropriate. And so if I'm doing an insulin sensitivity, so in other words, if I'm sending an appropriate muscle building signal, feeding myself appropriately, what tends to happen with the hormones is they start to organize themselves towards building muscle, which is a youthful hormone profile. So strength training, structured work, that's your structured training. And then the rest of the time you're just moving, you're just walking. Combine that with the other things I said and you're again, that's awesome. That's everything.
- [61:12]
B
I actually stopped doing cardio probably about six years ago. And yes, my heart rate still gets up. I'll still do the occasional high intensity, maybe I'll throw in some burpees or I'll do a couple sprints on a bike and that's it. That's the extent of my cardio. Most of the time my heart rate is getting up through just lifting heavy weights.
- [61:32]
A
Yeah.
- [61:33]
B
Or maybe shortening the rest time between a lift. Even if I'm using lighter weight, shortening the rest time or just use heavy weights. I mean, I'm telling you, if you deadlift and really even keeping it within your capacity or your limitations, I don't care whether you're deadlifting 45 pounds or 145 pounds and you're pushing yourself and that's hard for you to do, you will get out of breath, which equals cardiovascular training. You don't have to get on a treadmill or an elliptical in order to get your heart rate up. I think people need to break out of that machine based cardio or running cardio mode and just think of it from a perspective of what is going to increase your heart rate. And that equals cardiovascular training.
- [62:20]
A
Yeah. And head to head composite comparison. Now a good appropriate combination of the two. Some heart rate, elevated, exercise, some just focus on strength. Probably the best overall for health. But if we had to compare head to head strength training to cardio for heart health, the data actually shows strength training. In fact, I would bet Dr. Amy that the Majority of the time that you spend on structured exercise is strength training.
- [62:44]
B
Right.
- [62:45]
A
In fact, the reason why you probably don't do a bunch of extra cardio is because that would take away from the time you spend strength training. And what we want is an roi. We want a good return on investment. Look, you want to become wealthy, you can either work more hours, or you could take your money and put it in an account that brings you back a nice return on its own. That's what muscle is like. You build muscle and your body's doing the work for you. Like, I'm sitting here right now doing this podcast, and because I carry a good amount of muscle on my body, I've got a humming metabolism. I don't need to get up and move my butt. Also, by the way, you know, we have to. We have to understand the context of modern life. Modern life is a lot of sitting. It's just sedentary. It's just the way it's organized. If you. If you want to move a lot, you have to actually make yourself. Life doesn't require you to be move anymore. We just. It's just the way it is. Most jobs involve sitting. We shop online.
- [63:36]
B
Yeah.
- [63:36]
A
Most of the time, we're sitting down. Muscle is very protective against the ills of being sedentary. It's very protective. So unless you have all the time in the world and you can balance all this out and whatever. Yeah, okay. But if you're like, look, I don't have all the time in the world, I want the best roi. I want to do the least amount of work to elicit the most amount of results in both health and aesthetics, then strength training is going to be the foundation. And then walking daily will be your daily activity. And then. And you're. And again, I'm going to keep hammering this. You're good. You're doing great. Like, that's the recipe for what most people want and they're looking for. When I move outside of that is when I have somebody with a specific goal. I want to run a marathon. I want to compete in a triathlon. Well, now we got to get more specific with your athletic training.
- [64:24]
B
Sure.
- [64:25]
A
Otherwise, you're totally fine. And then again, you nailed it. Can I get cardiovascular benefits from a hit session that's 12 minutes? Yeah, absolutely. Can I get cardiovascular benefits from doing 30 reps of a barbell squat? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you totally can. So. So, yeah, it's not. Definitely not necessary now. I don't want to discourage people who love it. Look, if you love running and cycling. And you're doing it appropriately, Go for it. But definitely don't negate strength training, especially for those people, because it protects your body. It really does. I mean, you look at the study on osteopenia and osteoporosis, people who do lots of running, you see a little bit of a benefit in the lower extremities for bone density. No benefit to the rest of the body. Strength training builds bone. People don't talk about this enough. Yeah, it's a muscle builder. You know what else it builds bone. Nothing builds bone like strength training. Nothing comes close to building. You take a woman who's been strength training for 10 years, you know, eating appropriately, you test her bone density, and what you're going to see is the bone density of like incred, like way far away from osteopenia. So that's where you should spend most of your energy and efforts, is in that style of exercise. If your goal is health, longevity and.
- [65:35]
B
Aesthetics, well, I'm going to tie in the osteoporosis because that's a huge concern with my audience. And what you said about sitting, I know you are a deep researcher, you love the research. I'm going to pick your brain on this. I tried to research. This is years ago because my job is very sedentary. Yes, I could get a stand up desk, but I prefer just being here. And this is how I prefer to do my podcast. I like sitting. So yeah, as an entrepreneur with a desk job, I start to freak out when I hear these studies about sitting and how detrimental it is. So I wanted to look up will strength training and let's say getting in an hour of strength training every day in addition to walking my dog, is that enough to override the sedentary effects of sitting at my job? And both from a bone density standpoint and from a overall body comp standpoint. Now, personally, I don't notice a huge difference in my body composition. Like I said, I look better now at 51 than I did in my 20s. I think I'm doing something right. But for the average person who sits at a job, does their workout override the detrimental effects of sitting?
- [66:46]
A
To a large extent. So one of the strongest correlates to bone density is strength, one of the. One of the best correlates of that. So just how strong you are oftentimes will point to how dense your bones are. Okay. Or how strong your bones are. If you look at the data on strength training, how much strength training is required to prevent strength and muscle loss, that Happens as we age. And I don't know what the exact number is, but I know after age of 30, you lose a certain percentage of muscle and strength. And for every decade that continues to happen, you want to guess how much strength training is required just to stop that, not build muscle, but just to stop the loss.
- [67:22]
B
All right, I'm going to go to your two days a week.
- [67:25]
A
It's once every two weeks.
- [67:27]
B
Are you serious?
- [67:28]
A
Yeah. It's very little. This is one of the beautiful gifts of strength training. You set the wheels in motion, and the adaptation process happens when you're not doing the activity. So you do your strength training and then you're sitting. Now, I'm not saying you shouldn't be active. Everybody will benefit from moving. Like you said, you walk your dog. You know, I'm also sitting a lot because we do our podcast and media. So what we try and do is get up and walk at least once, if not twice a day. So you should still move. But the strength training, I mean, if I keep lifting and then do nothing else, no, I'm not going to get weak bones and neither will women. Now, of course, I got to say, this is in combination with feeding yourself appropriately. So if you strength train, but you're not taking in enough nutrients, your body has no ability to do anything with that signal. So you can starve yourself to osteopenia as well. It's quite common. You look at people who are anorexic, and that is a very common side effect of that. So you still gotta feed yourself, by the way. So women watching this right now. Cool. I'm gonna go lift weights, but I'm gonna eat 1200 calories a day. You have to feed your body so that it can do something with the signal you just sent. It's like giving instructions to a bunch of construction workers. And then you give them no lumber, no nails, no nothing. They're just going to sit there like, we can't build a house. We got nothing. So you have to combine the two. But, no, it's remarkable. You know, I remember there was years ago, I brought her up many times on my podcast, because I remember it was so remarkable. I had this woman that I trained. She was a professor, petite woman. And she came to me because she had osteopenia. Now, she was healthy and she walked daily, but she was petite, smaller frame. And when she hired me, I believe she was in her early 60s and she was osteopenia. And she was about to get into osteoporosis. And the doctor Was like, okay, we're going to put you on Fosamax, we're going to do all this other stuff. And so she came and talked to me about strength training. And so I talked to her about strength training. So look, if you strengthen muscle, your muscles get stronger, your bones get stronger, bones anchor at muscles. It's just the way it works. You send a signal to your bones just like you do your muscle. So we strength trained once a week. This was her routine. One day a week, I can't remember how much longer after, I want to say six months later, she went to get her bone density test. She comes back, she we're working out and she gets a voicemail on her phone. It's from her doctor. She's like, hold on one second. She gets on the phone, she listens to the voice message, she hangs up and she goes, that's weird. And I said, well, what happened? She goes, they want me to take another bone density test. I said, how come? He said, because he believes the results were wrong. I said, what do you mean? She goes, this is the first time in years that my bone loss stopped and actually reversed. So they want to do another test. So she went back. This was one day a week of strength training. And let me explain this routine to everybody because remember, she was deconditioned, you know, early 60s. This was like sitting down and standing up off a bench. This was like holding a three pound dumbbell, pressing it overhead, doing very elevated push ups on the Smith machine. You know, appropriate strength training. Right. That's what she could do. So that's what we did. She went and did another test, came back, the results came back the same. Her doctor sent me an email and said, sal, what are you doing? And I said, we're working, we're lifting weights once a week and the focus is on getting stronger. And she can do now 15 more reps on her squats that she did before I moved her the bar way down for her push ups. She can now row 50 pounds on the cable machine versus, you know, 10 when we first started. And he said, we're going to make a case study out of this because this is remarkable that her bone density is reversed in such a short period of time. That's what happens though. That's what happens with strange traits. So it's extremely, extremely protective for people, especially if you're sedentary, like, go lift some weights.
- [71:03]
B
Yeah. And it doesn't even have to be because sometimes when we say go lift some weights, that intimidation factor immediately hits, especially for A beginner, like you said with this woman. So if you just told her, go, listen, wait, she go into the gym, be like, I don't know what the hell I'm doing here. Yeah, that's too heavy. I'm not going to pick that up. But to your point, you just had to start her with some type of resistance. And when you say resistance, that can mean your own body weight, that can mean an air squat, that can mean a high elevated pushup that you're still using your own body weight to resist. It doesn't have to be the heavyweights.
- [71:40]
A
No, Dr. Amy, let me just look, I'll say this to people watching right now. If you want to invest, if this is feasible for you and you want to invest in something that's going to benefit you tremendously in regards to strength training, there is nothing that I can say here that will match what a good trainer will do for you. Okay, hiring a good trainer. What's a good trainer? Yeah, somebody with experience. You know, you can't replace experience with personal trainers. Education is nice, but somebody who's got good experience, somebody that, you know, like I said, you look forward to meeting with because that's important. You're building a relationship with exercise. You got to look forward to it. You should leave your workouts feeling better than you did going in. If you do get sore, it should last a half a day. If you're sore for three or four days, that was inappropriate. So somebody who really knows what they're doing, where your pain goes down, you don't. Your shoulder doesn't hurt because you worked out with them, they know how to address these things. If you find a good trainer with experience and you invest in hiring them, work with them for six months, three months, a year, nothing will give you the return that you'll get from that. Just having that guide will dramatically improve your success and strength training. I'd say one of the challenges with strength training is it can feel overwhelming because there's 500 exercises and how do I pick the right resistance? And okay, am I doing this right? How am I supposed to feel this? Why does this hurt? My back, my knees hurt. What do I do now? Type of deal. A really good trainer once a week. Once a week, if you're just getting started, is such an incredible investment, will make a huge, huge impact on your results. I really, really encourage everybody watching. If, like this is affordable for you, do it. It'll blow your mind.
- [73:17]
B
Well, even for the more advanced, going back to our more advanced fitness fanatics. Listen, all Day long. I love working with the trainer if I can afford it with my time. And that's the biggest hindrance as an entrepreneur is the time aspect. I would do it a couple times a week because to not have to think for yourself, for somebody else to literally take the wheel and you just follow and they're watching you and they're making sure that your form is right, there's nothing like it. I mean, those are the times where I get the best workout, is when I just go, you know what? I'm blocking out time. I'm going to work with the trainer.
- [73:48]
A
Yeah, they will understand how your body moves if you're doing the exercise properly, they'll know how to scale back or scale up when appropriate. And most importantly, this can't be understated if you're just getting started. What a good trainer will do is they will help you develop a relationship with exercise where you want to do it for the rest of your life. And that's how you know you've got someone good. I look forward to seeing this person. In fact, I look forward to seeing this person when I'm tired. I look forward to seeing this person when I'm stressed. If you're scared to see your trainer because you're tired, they're not a good trainer. But if you start to find yourself developing this relationship with fitness and a trainer needs to meet you where you're at, by the way. So there is a component of a good trainer who helps try to encourage and motivate. But if you're like, man, this diet part, I just, I don't want to tackle this yet. A good trainer will be like, fine, that's no problem. You let me know when you're ready. We're just going to start here. They need to meet you where you're at and you need to feel like you're guided, not kicked in the butt or, you know, sometimes people think, oh, I need a trainer, beat me up. No, no, no, no. Yeah, that's not what you want. That's not what you want from me. It's not going to the military. That's totally different than that.
- [74:52]
B
Right? We're not looking for Ben Stiller from Dodgeball to train.
- [74:55]
A
No, no, not at all. But, yeah, invest. Invest in a good trainer. And, oh, boy, your odds of success are so much higher with that. I love that.
- [75:04]
B
I love that. Sal, I could talk to you forever. This is just. My love is my passion. I got to be respectful of your time because we could. I could just go for two hours But I want to know from you, since we talked about the over training, the undereating, that's pretty much what brought me to my thyroid problem. We talked about. That's very common with competitors, but that's very common with women. Getting into that mindset of, oh, my God, my body's not responding. I'm going to push harder. Do you have a story? I want to leave with a story. So do you have a transformation story of somebody that you've worked with or somebody that you've seen or someone. Somebody that's been a listener of the Mind Pump podcast that has overcome this and literally shifted their body?
- [75:43]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So if you listen to our show a few days, we do five episodes a week, but a few of those, we have callers call in and sometimes we'll have people call in for updates. And so you can hear from them because it's scary. Look, it's scary to go from. I'm working out six days a week. I'm running like crazy. I'm eating very little. And then you guys are telling me to go down to two days a week and just walk and up my calories. I'm going to get. So, you know, I'm going to blow up. What's going to. And then they trust us. Thankfully, we have some authority. And then they come back four months later, like, I can't believe this works. So you'll hear stuff like that all the time on the show. But I'll tell you a personal story. I remember years ago, I had a woman that hired me and she competed in marathons, and she was pretty good. I mean, she qualified for the Boston Marathon and she would run on average. So this was an average week for her, between 30 to 35 miles a week, plus about four days a week of strength training, plus she would do the occasional spin class. And her calories at the time were about 1700 calories a day. Okay. So that's a lot of work. Very low calories for that kind of work. And she came to me because she was like, you know, I can do these things, but I have this body fat that doesn't seem to want to come off. I feel like I'm spinning my tires. Is it my genetics? Is this just the way it's going to be? Because I feel like if I eat a little more or cut back, I'm going to just gain all she, you know, she had a. A previous history of being overweight, and she'd been doing this for a long time. So I said, okay, here's what we're going to do. So we got to start working with your body. We're going to scale back on the running. I'm even going to scale you back on the strength training. It's going to be about two days a week. And we're going to slowly reverse diet you. I'm going to slowly increase your calories, make sure you hit your protein. We're going to focus on good sleep. So here's the end result. This was over the course of a year, okay? Because there was a lot of damage that had been done. So over the course of the year, this was the process. And it was a lot of trust on her part because it's scary. Like I said, at the end of the year, okay, this woman had gone from eating 1700 calories a day to eating about 2,600 calories a day. So dramatic increase, okay, so almost a thousand more calories a day. Her miles went from 30 to 35 a week down to four. She loved running so much that she, you know, she kept four miles a week and she lifted weights two to three days a week. Her body fat percentage was now at this point sitting at about 18%, whereas previously she couldn't go below 27, 28% body fat. And she was like, I can't believe I can eat this much. I can't believe I look this way doing as little work as I'm doing. That was after just a year, by the way. This woman ended up becoming a personal trainer, and she continued down that path and she ended up competing at some point. And she got to the point where she was eating 3200 calories a day and not gaining any body fat. You know, this was someone who was overweight in her youth and had really just beat the crap out of herself. So that's just. That's a personal story. But you see that. I mean, predictably, if I'm working with someone in that state, we can do it. Sometimes it takes some time. But the hardest part, the biggest hurdle is ourselves and letting go of that abusive. You know, that abusive boyfriend called over. Training is so difficult because you're so scared of what's going to happen. But it works. Definitely works.
- [78:48]
B
Oh, yeah. Terrified of what's going to happen. Absolutely. Oh, but that's so inspiring. That just tells women everywhere who are in that vicious cycle, that destructive boyfriend cycle, that there's hope. And believe it or not, your body can be better than it is right now with less like one so much better.
- [79:08]
A
I'm going to add a Couple of things, because there's more to that. Okay. If this is something you want to tackle, there's a few things you're probably going to need to do so that you don't scare yourself or overcorrect. Okay. Because that's super common. Like, you might do this for a little bit. You listen to this podcast. I'm going to try it. You freak out, and then you go in the opposite direction. Here's what you're going to do. You're going to take your scale and you're going to throw it away. You're not allowed to weigh yourself, okay. For at least three or four months. Don't weigh yourself. You're also not allowed to study yourself in the mirror. So you need to be very aware. It's okay to look in the mirror, get yourself ready. But if you catch yourself, close off studying yourself, stop. Stop immediately. Here's what you're gonna track. Track your protein intake. Make sure you hit your goal body weight and protein. Don't eat heavily processed foods. Get good sleep. But here's what you're gonna track. Strength. Am I getting stronger in the gym? If I'm getting stronger, I'm moving in the right direction. Here's what else you're gonna track. Energy, libido and mood. That's what you're going to keep notes on. And if those are improving and your strength is improving, trust the process. Because you're going to second guess it. I promise you, you're going to feel like something's tight. My pants feel tight. Oh, what's going on? Feel like I'm gaining weight. Trust the process. Trust the process and you'll move in the right direction.
- [80:27]
B
I love that. Those are great tips. Amazing. Just mic drop right there. And what's interesting is I heard a long time ago, this is back when Bob Green was training Oprah and he said on an interview that he tells Oprah she is not allowed to weigh herself for exactly what you said, three to four months. Because even as your body is burning fat, you might be retaining a little bit of water. That's gonna.
- [80:53]
A
Or building muscle.
- [80:54]
B
Scale or building muscle. That's going to screw with the scale, which is going to screw with your head.
- [80:58]
A
100.
- [80:59]
B
And you're going to think that you're not making progress. So if you do exactly what you said sound, track the strength, track the energy, track the mood, track the libido, then you can see progress as opposed to the number.
- [81:09]
A
Yeah. It's funny when we'll work with people like this and they'll I did what you said. I threw the scale away. I'm not weighing myself, but I'm freaking out. I don't know if, you know, I feel. I feel fluffy or I feel bigger. And then. And then I'll ask them, always. I'll ask them this question. What's your husband saying? Oh, my God. He thinks I look amazing. It's like, all right. It's like, all right. We really are our own worst enemy. It's so true. But when you get past this, I'm going to tell you, this is what it's going to feel like. It's going to feel like you broke some chain. You had some chains on you and you broke them. And you're going to feel so free. You're going to feel so free to. Because when your metabolism gets faster and you've got muscle, first of all, muscle is so empowering. It's incredibly empowering, especially for women. You feel strong, you feel capable. I could do things. I can move. My energy's better. And then you get this faster metabolism that allows you to. Yeah, I'll go. You know, we went on vacation for a week and I enjoyed myself and I came back and I feel fine. In fact, I feel stronger when I'm working out in the gym. Like, how freeing is that? And that's so achievable for people.
- [82:12]
B
So good. So good. Sal, you're amazing. Thank you so much for all the truth bombs and advice and information and tips and everything that you gave my audience today. This is like the training episode of the Thyroid Fixer podcast history. That's what I'm going to title it because. No, this is fantastic. I mean, we hit. We hit everything from beginner to advanced and really everything in between.
- [82:36]
A
So thank you.
- [82:37]
B
I appreciate your time. I appreciate you and all the knowledge and the research that you've done through the years. So obviously the Mind Pump Podcast, but I'll hand it to you. Where can people find you and more information.
- [82:49]
A
Yeah. So we're on all social media platforms, Mind Pump Media, typically. And then anywhere you can listen to a podcast, you'll find us Mind Pump.
- [82:58]
B
It's amazing. Podcast. I'm a huge fan, like you said, five days a week. And I love hearing the call ins. I love hearing from real people and where they're at as well. I think that's amazing.
- [83:08]
A
So thank you.
- [83:09]
B
Thank you so much for your time and thank you for everything that you do.
- [83:11]
A
Thanks, Dr. A.m. foreign.
- [83:19]
B
The information shared on the Thyroid Fixer podcast is intended solely for informational and educational purposes. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always consult with your physician or other qualified health care provider with any questions you may have regarding a medical condition treatment or before making changes to your healthcare regimen, including medications, supplements or other therapies. Use of the information provided in this podcast does not establish a doctor, patient or client prescribed, provide a relationship between you and the host, or between you and any other healthcare professionals featured on the show. Any medical opinions or statements made by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host or affiliated parties. Statements regarding dietary supplements or health related products mentioned in this podcast have not been evaluated by the fda. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Some episodes of the Thyroid Fixer podcast may include sponsorships or affiliate links. The host may receive compensation for discussing or promoting certain products or services. Any such sponsorships or affiliations will be clearly disclosed during the episode. All opinions expressed are those of the host or guest and do not necessarily reflect the views of any sponsors. The inclusion of a product or service does not imply endorsement by any healthcare professional featured on this podcast.