From Bone Loss to Bone Strength: Thriving Beyond Frailty with Dr. Vonda Wright

Summary

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unPAUSED with Dr. Mary Claire Haver

Episode: From Bone Loss to Bone Strength: Thriving Beyond Frailty with Dr. Vonda Wright
Date: November 4, 2025
Host: Dr. Mary Claire Haver
Guest: Dr. Vonda Wright

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Episode Overview

This episode is a deep, urgent conversation between Dr. Mary Claire Haver and renowned orthopedic surgeon Dr. Vonda Wright on women’s musculoskeletal health throughout midlife and beyond. They challenge the narrative that frailty, osteoporosis, and muscle loss are inevitable as women age, reframing them as both preventable and treatable with a proactive, informed approach. The discussion weaves in both expert insight and personal stories—theirs, their mothers’, and grandmothers’—to highlight how modern life, social pressures, and outdated medical models undermine women’s healthspan, not just lifespan, and what steps listeners can take to reclaim their future strength and independence.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Rethinking "Normal" Aging and Frailty

• Frailty is Not Inevitable:
  Dr. Wright argues that what the medical establishment deems “normal aging” is in reality “normal for stressed out, undernourished people who are not intentionally building muscle, not attending to their hormonal health, and not prioritizing mobility” [(01:21), (14:59)].

  "Aging to frailty only seems normal because modern life has made it so and threatens to rob us of our vitality." — Dr. Vonda Wright [01:21; 14:59]

• Sedentary Death Syndrome:
  Much age-related decline stems from persistent inactivity and chronic disease rather than just time itself.

The Menopause Gap and the Musculoskeletal System

• Early Education and Missed Prevention:
  Both Dr. Haver and Dr. Wright describe medical training that barely covered menopause, especially beyond hot flashes and vaginal dryness [(31:17)].
  Most women, including doctors themselves, aren’t taught the profound impact of estrogen loss on muscles, tendons, ligaments, cartilage, and bones.

  “I was taught hot flashes, vasomotor symptoms... I was never taught estrogen’s effects, the loss of estrogen’s effects on the musculoskeletal systems.” — Dr. Mary Claire Haver [31:19]

• Musculoskeletal Syndrome of Menopause:
  Coined by Dr. Wright, this syndrome affects up to 80% of women who experience body pain, tendonitis, frozen shoulder, arthritis, and rapid cartilage loss after estrogen decline [(32:00)].

Bone Biology: Renewal and Communication

• Bones as Dynamic Organs
  Bones are not static but renew themselves fully about every ten years. They also act as endocrine organs, producing hormones like osteocalcin (which affects insulin, muscle, even brain function) and LCN2 (which influences satiety) [(17:02)].

• Bone Loss Trajectory
  Women reach peak bone mass between ages 17–25. After 30, slow decline begins, but after menopause, loss accelerates to 2–3% annually, totaling up to 20% lost in the 5–7 years after menopause [(23:18)].

• Why Screening is Crucial
  DEXA scans—the primary bone density test—should be performed by age 40; waiting until 65 (current insurance guidelines) misses decades of prevention opportunity [(22:49), (65:06)].

Sarcopenia: Muscle Loss with Age

• Definition and Risks
  Sarcopenia means loss of muscle mass and—more importantly—function. It’s about the ability to get up, walk fast, and live independently [(25:01)].

• Muscles, Tendons, and Bones Communicate
  All stem from similar cells and are hormonally interdependent—strong muscles help create stronger bones.

Inflammaging: Chronic Inflammation as the Real Enemy

• Estrogen and Inflammation
  Loss of estrogen creates a pro-inflammatory state called “inflammaging.” Chronic inflammation worsens bone and muscle loss, raises disease risk, and makes menopause symptoms worse [(39:04)].

• “Invisible” Menopause Effects
  Even women with few symptoms still face these risks long-term, as chronic inflammation silently progresses [(42:03)].

  "You may not feel it, but it's happening." — Dr. Vonda Wright [42:15]

What Actually Builds and Maintains Bone and Muscle?

• Hormones:
  Estrogen is the single most important hormone for bone (and helpful for muscle), with testosterone playing a smaller role [(24:32)].

  • Estrogen is FDA-approved for osteoporosis prevention [(68:44)].

• Nutrients:

  • Vitamin D is essential for bone, brain, and immune health.
  • Calcium supplements (alone) are ineffective for preventing fractures. Food sources (yogurt, leafy greens, fish with bones, prunes, etc.) are preferred [(43:09)].

• Strength Training (>5-lb weights):
  Heavy weightlifting and high-impact activity (jumping) are the two most effective lifestyle ways to build bone density and muscle [(44:20), (80:01)].

  • Jumping 20 times/day (with proper guidance) delivers the shear stimulus bones need.
  • Even women with osteoporosis can train safely under supervision [(47:16)].

• Protein & Macronutrients:
  Dr. Wright recommends aiming for 1g protein per lb of goal bodyweight, focusing on high-protein, high-fiber diets for muscle and metabolic health [(78:35)].

Challenging Generational, Societal, and Medical Bias

• Thinness vs. Strength Myth
  Generations of women were taught to pursue thinness at all costs. The legacy is a rapid epidemic of frailty and osteoporosis. Strength and function—not clothing size—should be the markers for health and longevity [(58:43), (66:23)].

• Medical Dismissal and Bias
  Women are far less likely than men to have their musculoskeletal complaints investigated or treated appropriately. Men get swift interventions for testosterone-linked complaints; women are told they’re just getting old [(70:44)].

  “But when women come in and have multiple things going on, they're accused, it's all in their head.” — Dr. Vonda Wright [71:11]

Changing the Narrative and Taking Action

• Healthspan vs. Lifespan
  The goal is to maximize years lived independently, doing what you love—not merely to extend life, but to improve quality of life throughout the later decades [(63:01)].

• Prevention Is Self-Driven
  The medical system is a "disease care," not a "preventive care" model. Women must take ownership: educate themselves, demand early screening, and pursue trainers, clinicians, or telehealth platforms when their providers fall short [(78:21)].

• Measuring and Tracking Progress
  Body composition scales, grip strength, pushups, and getting up from the floor without using hands are practical surrogate markers of functional health [(82:29)].

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Memorable Quotes & Timestamps

• “Aging to frailty only seems normal because modern life has made it so and threatens to rob us of our vitality.”
  — Dr. Vonda Wright [01:21; 14:59]

• “Osteoporosis is largely preventable. Frailty doesn’t have to define the latter decades of a woman’s life.”
  — Dr. Mary Claire Haver [03:51]

• “My old body was revolting against me... hot flashes, I lost my nouns, heart palpitations... I thought I was getting dementia—so I started looking it up online.”
  — Dr. Vonda Wright on her own menopause [10:55]

• “No one is talking to these women. Nobody.”
  — Dr. Mary Claire Haver (on the lack of prevention guidance offered to her mother and grandmother) [37:44]

• "You must make your hormone decision because... it’s going to be harder to get in front of this if we don’t."
  — Dr. Vonda Wright [44:20]

• "Don't get another purse. Get a trainer."
  — Dr. Vonda Wright [82:09]

• “You are worth the daily investment of your health. Not because your children need you—not for anyone else. You as a person have value and worth and you are worth the work.”
  — Dr. Vonda Wright [87:34]

• “If I don't do this, no one's coming to save me. You have to be the hero of your own story.”
  — Dr. Mary Claire Haver [88:25]

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Key Segment Timestamps

• [01:21]/[14:59] — Dr. Wright’s manifesto: reframing frailty and “normal” aging
• [17:02] — Bones as endocrine organs and their communication with the body
• [23:18] — Bone turnover and effects of menopause
• [31:17] — Medical education ignores menopause’s impact on muscles and bones
• [32:00] — “Musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause” explained
• [39:04] — “Inflammaging” and the role of chronic inflammation
• [44:20]/[80:01] — Building muscle and bone: protein, weights, jumping
• [65:06] — DEXA scan guidelines, why screening is so late for women
• [70:44] — Medical dismissal and gender bias in musculoskeletal care
• [78:35] — Protein goals for midlife women
• [82:29] — Functional fitness tests: pushups, sit-to-stand, grip strength

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Practical Action Steps & Blueprint

• Educate Yourself: Don’t wait for your doctor to bring it up.
• Screen Early: Advocate for bone density scans (DEXA or REMS) by age 40; don’t settle for “wait until 65.”
• Prioritize Strength:
  • Heavy resistance training 2–4x/week
  • Include jumping or high-impact movement, as able (start with professional guidance)
• Eat for Muscle and Bone:
  • High-protein diet: ~1g per target/lb body weight
  • Calcium and vitamin D from food
  • Focus on complex carbs and fiber, not restrictive “thinness” diets
• Challenge Function:
  • Strive for 11 pushups, independence standing from the floor, strong grip
• Take Hormones Seriously: Consider estrogen, especially in early menopause, as prevention—not just treatment.
• Find the Right Provider: If your doctor isn’t equipped, find a menopause-trained provider or reputable telehealth option.
• Measure What Matters: Track muscle, fat, and strength—not just weight.

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The Episode’s Tone and Ethos

Bold, compassionate, and urgent. Dr. Haver and Dr. Wright alternate between frank scientific explanation, storytelling, and rallying cry—empowering listeners to see themselves as architects, not bystanders, in their own health. Their personal investment and lived experience make technical content reassuringly relatable and actionable.

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Final Takeaways

• Frailty is optional. Prevention is in your hands.
• “We are not destined for the slow decline. The future can be unbreakable if you step in front of it.”
  — Dr. Vonda Wright [14:28]
• "You are worth the daily investment of your health... No one is coming to save you."
  — Dr. Haver & Dr. Wright [88:25]

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Resources Mentioned:

• Dr. Vonda Wright’s new book: Unbreakable
• Podcast: Hot For Your Health
• Dr. Haver's book: The New Menopause
• [ @DrVondaWright | Instagram ]
• [ @DoctorMaryClaire | Instagram | thepauselife.com ]

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Recommended Next Steps:

• Get a baseline DEXA scan (aim for age 35–40)
• Begin/resume heavy strength training (consider a trainer)
• Prioritize protein, complex carbs, and micronutrient-rich foods
• Stay curious, stay pushy, and demand prevention—not just care

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Transcript

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

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[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I contend that although we certainly undergo some life stage changes, what we call normal aging is actually normal aging for stressed out, undernourished people who are not intentionally building muscle, not attending to their hormonal health, and not prioritizing mobility. Aging to frailty only seems normal because modern life has made it so and threatens to rob us of our vitality. It's why most of us spend a quarter of our lives deteriorating from chronic diseases that encompass what we now understand as sedentary death syndrome.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

The views and opinions expressed on Unpaused are those of the talent and the guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice to diagnosis or treatment. Both my grandmother and my mother had osteoporosis and fractures, so I always assumed it was inevitable for me too. I knew menopause hormone therapy would give me an edge, but I honestly thought weak bones and multiple fractures as I aged would just be my destiny. I see older women every day who were clearly becoming frail, bent over, moving stiffly, faces showing pain with every step. Recently, on a flight, I noticed an elderly woman traveling with her family. She was very weak and had trouble balancing and had to be guided just to walk. And it was clear she was living with dementia. I could even see through her pants that she was wearing a diaper. Her family tended to her with such love and care and I thought, my God, she's so loved and so well cared for. Thank goodness. But I couldn't help wondering what the last 10 years of her life had looked like. Was this long, difficult end of life slog inevitable? Is this what we're all destined for? Or can we change the way we think about aging, frailty and Independence? The first time I heard our guest, Dr. Vonda Wright, speak was at a menopause conference. I had never heard anyone talk specifically about aging for women. She told stories of women coming into the ER with a hip fracture who also had heart trouble or incontinence and they would look at her and say, I wasn't always like this. Hearing her speak stopped me in my tracks. She wasn't calm or detached about the way women age. She was furious. Furious that so many women are funneled down a path towards frailty, osteoporosis and muscle loss when so much of it is preventable. Up until that moment, I had only heard osteoporosis and sarcopenia discussed as inevitabilities, something you diagnose, accept and manage with treatment, almost never as something you could actually prevent. Dr. Wright shattered that narrative for me. She said, no, this doesn't have to happen. Here are the steps she showed me that osteoporosis is largely preventable, that frailty doesn't have to define the latter decades of a woman's life. And hearing her say that completely changed the way I think, the way I practice medicine, and the way I counsel both my patients and my followers. I call this stretch of life the minnow span and we need to talk about it openly, urgently and with solutions. Because aging looks very different for women than it does for men. And if we understand the difference, we can change the trajectory. I'm Dr. Mary Claire Haver, a board certified obstetrician and gynecologist and certified menopause practitioner and also an adjunct professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Texas Medical Branch. Welcome to Unpaused, the podcast where we cut through the silence and talk about what it really takes for women to thrive in the second half of life. Joining me today is Dr. Vonda Wright, a double board certified orthopedic surgeon, internationally recognized researcher and sports physician with more than two decades of experience dedicated to high performance, orthopedics, aging and women's health. She is the author of bestselling guides like younger in eight weeks, fitness after 40, and her latest New York Times bestseller, A Woman's Guide to Aging with Power. Millions of women experience debilitating fractures every year from osteoporosis, and yet it's still framed as inevitable aging rather than a preventable diagnosable condition. One out of two women will suffer an osteoporosis parotic fracture after the age of 50 versus 20% of men. Most women have no idea that they can lose up to 20% of their bone mass in the first five years after menopause. And as bone mass decreases, fracture risk increases. As I told you, Dr. Wright's mission is to educate women and help them navigate midlife with clarity. That begins with seeing menopause not only as the moment when your periods stop. It's the life stage many of us will enter for the next 45 years and one we can meet with strength and resilience. Why did you leave nursing? Why orthopedic surgery?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I know orthopedic surgery. Of all the things, I was fortunate to progress really rapidly in nursing. Smart kids in my generation were directed only a few pathways. There weren't that many. And again, you should be a doctor, teacher, nurse. And I come from a really small town in Kansas, so of course I said, okay, I'll be a doctor, even though nobody in my family was a doctor and my parents were the first in their family to go to college. I get to college, where I made it through freshman year. Organic chemistry then comes in front of me, and on the second organic chemistry test, I failed it. And I'd never failed anything in my entire life. And so I didn't know what to do with that. The end of the story is by the end of the year, I had a B. But by then I had decided that I couldn't be a doctor. And no one told me that that was just bad thinking, right? So right after college I have a degree in biology. There such a shortage of nurses that in three years I got another bachelor's degree and a master's degree in cancer nursing and started working on a cancer floor at 23 years old. But because I had the capacity to learn really quickly, I progressed really quickly in that job and I was promoted. And Suddenly I was 27, thinking, I think I've learned what I'm going to learn from this career. So do I do a PhD? Do I go into the business of nursing or do I finally go into medicine? And I decided in the end that I need to take care of people and I need to do research, and being a doctor allows me to do both. It had been 11 years since I took organic and all those things because I hadn't taken my mcat. So I went back and I took all those things and went to medical school, only for some reason to decide to do a surgical residency, which dumped me out of my training at almost 40.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So how old were you when you started medical school?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

28.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So there's not a lot of female orthopedic surgeons. I knew two, I think, through all my training, and they were badasses. Why on earth vonda would you pick something there? You're automatically an outsider?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I mean, I knew that there weren't many women, but I didn't realize that it could be a problem. And I'm going to tell you for sure, it never became a problem until I was an attending. Only when I was attending did I feel the difference in opportunity, the difference in acceptance of my work, the difference in salary. In my residency, I think we were well supported. This was an anomaly and amazing, but out of 46 residents, they were eight women, which is unheard of. I never knew in residency it was gonna be a problem. And plus, I was a nurse, and I was a cancer nurse, and I wasn't about to be pushed around. But not until I got to my attendingship did I see the differences that still exists today. Even though when I trained, there were 3% women and now there are 6 or 7% women, we're not at critical mass.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Let's pivot a little bit. I want to hear about your own experience at midlife. You've talked about this before. So you're getting tossed out of your training residency and newly minted at around 40. And what was that like for you?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

What, to be that old Mary clone.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You know, 40 being in the best shape of your life.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I was 40 was amazing. I lived in New York. 38, 39. I moved back to Pittsburgh, where I took a faculty job at 40. But you live in New York and you walk everywhere and you have access to amazing food. And I started racing in the park and training for triathlon. And I was single at that time, so I could work out twice a day if I wanted. So I entered my attending ship at 40, in the best shape of my life. As I describe it, I decided to have a baby. So I had a child. When my dear friends, the obs, call us geriatric, but I exit that. And what I've become aware of, Mary Claire, is that. Okay, baby at 40. I breastfed till almost 42. I think I went right into perimenopause because the chaos of pregnancy, then the resumption of your estrogen. Weirdo.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I'm going back to work. I can't remember what cortisol levels were doing.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, six weeks. And I was the head doctor for the University of Pittsburgh football team. So I was leaving my newborn to go take care of 150 football players, which is my job. But the cortisol. Crazy, right? So I don't. I think I went right from one hormonal stage to the other, but I didn't know it. I had no idea what was happening. You're going to laugh at this. I've said this out loud sometimes. I wasn't sleeping. I had a new baby, but different kind of not sleeping. Hot flashes. I lost my nouns. And I thought that I was getting dementia, so I started looking it up online. I started having heart palpitations. I call my friend the a cardiologist to do a stress test. And then I couldn't get out of bed. Right. Triathlete, training person couldn't get out of bed because of the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. But here's the. Here's the wackiest thing. And just shows that I got no education on this in medical school. I was an athlete my whole life and had a lot of amenorrhea because I was just that kind of athlete and low body fat for months. And I'm like, yes, because then you don't have to mess with it. Little did I know that was damaging my bones that I didn't know you.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Were robbing your body of estrogen. Yes.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So I get to perimenopause and I start having heavy, raging periods. And do you know what I said to myself, Mary Claire? I said, oh, my God, I'm finally a woman. Because all the other girls said I never had real periods. Isn't that ironic? But then when I entered this place where I describe it as feeling like I was going to die, out of control. Like I've never not been in control. I'm a surgeon, right? It's my job to be in control. But my old body was revolting against me. Out of control. Makes me sad. I'm about crying. Like, I figured it out. I did a deep dive. I became an expert in what I could. I read the books, right. I was not gonna leave a stone unturned. But it makes me upset about all the women I meet right now who still don't know what perimenopause is. I mean, I had all the resources in the world, and I still didn't know same.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I was the expert.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

That's right. You're an ob gyne program director.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I could not diagnose myself. I gaslit myself for six months, and I was actually fully menopausal by that point, but had never had regular periods. And I was blaming stress and my brother's death and all the things. And after month six, I was like, oh, my God, I might be in menopause.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I know.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And I felt like a chapter of my life was ending. Why did you write Unbreakable?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It's interesting. Unbreakable is actually how I treat women. This is not theoretical. It's not something that I had to make up to write a book. It's actually my approach to women. And so I felt like I was seeing enough women. I had a system that I was using. And the need was so great. Mary and Claire, I mean, not everybody is going to read the papers we published in academic journals. My group published this paper on the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause and in climacteric. So I'd like to raise my hand and say that was God's gift to papers, but it wasn't. It was a good paper that tells me the need was so great that women are dying out there and need information. Right. It's the same response, you know, that you get from the new menopause. Right. Women are dying. They need information. And that made me think, okay, Mary Claire's written this seminal book on menopause. A lot of our friends have written great books on menopause. And I'm gonna write the book that tells them, now what?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Now what?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

What do you do next? And so that's what Unbreakable it is. But it's more than just physical resilience. But when we close the back cover of the book, I'm hoping that women close the COVID on hopelessness and emerge with this great hope that their future can be unbreakable if they step in front of it.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

There's a couple of paragraphs early on that really strike me as probably two of the most important paragraphs in this book. And I would like you to read them for me. I don't think I can do them justice.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, you're so sweet.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I'm heart. Okay.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I contend that although we certainly undergo some life stage changes that we call what we call normal aging is actually normal aging for stressed out, undernourished people who are not intentionally building muscle, not attending to their hormonal health, and not prioritizing mobility. Aging to frailty only seems normal because modern life has made it so and threatens to rob us of our vitality. It's why most of us spend a quarter of our lives deteriorating from chronic diseases that encompass what we now understand as sedentary death syndrome.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Let's dig in. The bone I had at 30 is not the bone I have at 57.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

No, it is not. In fact, that was two and a half bones ago.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So explain that to me. Talk to me about how bone is made, how it turns over. Like, what is the process of our.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Bones if we think of bones at all. The only time I contend that people think of bones is when Aunt Mary breaks one.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Or mama.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Or mama. But the reality is bones are not just a structural I beam that our muscle is attached to. It is a structural ibene. And thank God, because if muscle weren't attached to it, muscle would just be a heaping pile of metabolic tissues steaming. It wouldn't have the form and function we would not locomote. But bone, my friend, is the incubator of all of our baby blood cells. We make all of our immune system in our pelvis and long bones in the bone marrow. It is the storehouse for all of the minerals that our body needs to function from our brain to our muscles. So structure, it is storehouse, it is incubator, it is endocrine organs secreting hormones that move to almost every other body part and do things like help you build a better brain.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Walk me through a little bit of that. You've always said that bones are a master communicator. And so for our listeners, what does that mean? So they make bones make hormones.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

They do. They make many kinds. I love to talk about two in particular. One called osteocalcin and one called LCN2. Osteocalcin is secreted by the bone. It can cross the blood brain barrier and stimulate your brain to produce its own growth hormone called brain derived neurotrophic factor, which helps you build a better brain. Your bones do that, right? It goes to your pancreas. The pancreas is responsible for secreting the hormone insulin, which helps us with our blood sugar and without the function of the pancreas. And so bone sends osteocalcin to the pancreas. It sends it to the muscle to help with glucose metabolism. If you're a man it sends it to your testicles to help you make testosterone. And we think bones are just structural. They are talking all the time. Bones also secrete this other hormone called LCN2, which is directly influencing the feeling of satiety, or feeling full after a meal.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Whoa.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I know.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

GLP1.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Exactly. And I had that same reaction that when I first read about it. Like what? But it makes so much sense. If our bones are the storehouses of minerals, if they're involved in glucose metabolism, why wouldn't bones also be interested in influencing when we're full? The system just works together. So when I say bones are the master communicators, they're talking all the time to every other tissue. It's just that we don't know how to listen to them. We're not good bone listeners. When you asked me the question of the bones you had at 30 are not the same bones you have today, that is because not only are they master communicators, but they're constantly renewing. The way bone is made, which is important in menopause, is there's a cell type called an osteoclast, which digs bone out.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I think of it as Pacman.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

That's right. Maybe that's why I do this with my hand when I talk about it. It creates an acidic environment, so all the minerals and vitamins are removed from bone so your body can use them. Well, your body's not going to leave itself full of holes. Coming up behind it is the osteoblast, which fills these little holes when we have enough estrogen is a balance because our bones are constantly remodeling. That's the key word. Every 10 years, we essentially have a new set of bones. But the problem happens when for some reason, we are not balanced and we're breaking down more bone than we are building.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And that happens in menopause?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It happens. One of the reasons it happens is in menopause, one of the main reasons is because estrogen is a critical controller of the osteoclast. So this pac man is partially controlled by estrogen. So with. Without that, we're eating more bone than we're laying down.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You can lay down?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What is peak bone mass? What does that mean?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So peak bone mass is the bone mineral density. It's a measure of how much mineralization is in the bone. We reach the peak, we say 30, but it probably happens between 17 and about 25. And so I get a lot of young women. Their peak bone mass is osteopenic. Wow. Because I test almost everybody that comes into me, and if I catch it in their 20s, then we do a big job of trying to get you to a better peak bone mass. But that being said, I catch a lot of young women in their early 30s, definitely in their early 40s, who don't have amazing bone mineral density. So you're starting this decline from a lower starting point. We want to start this decline from as high as we can because we are gonna decline due to natural aging and then this catastrophic loss of estrogen.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Let's talk about muscles and tendons for a little bit.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Here's the thing. Muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, fat, annulus, the discs in our spine, they all come from the same kind of stem cell. They're all cousins. They all speak the same hormonal language. So they're all interacting. They're all talking together all the time. So that's why we can build better bone. The action of muscle.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Yeah, that musculoskeletal unit always works together.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Exactly.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So strong muscles usually mean stronger bones, better bones. Okay, so what is. So we talked about peak bone density. What is low bone density?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah. So the most common way to measure bone mineralization, bone density, is through this test called a DEXA scan. It uses X ray to tell us about our, how much bone we have. So the top of the bell curve, the zero point, the average, is the, the bone density of a healthy 30 year old woman. When you get your DEXA scan, any positive number is fantastic. That means you have bone density more than a healthy 30 year old. But at minus one, we start calling that bone osteopenic, which means it's getting weak. If we continue to lose bone and our T score declines to minus 2.5, which is 2 and a half, 2 and a half standard deviations below average. So that's osteoporosis. One in about two women will get osteoporosis about 40 to 50%. And if you do, you have a 50% chance of fracturing. So it makes your fracture risk much, much higher. And you wouldn't even care about that until you fracture. And then it's all anybody in your family can think about. Definitely all you're thinking about.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

When do you order dexa or when do you recommend DEXA on everybody? Same.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I think just like we get our mammograms at 40, I think we should have our screening test by 40, should have a baseline. Let's just figure it out whether it's REMS, whether it's DEXA. Just find one. In fact, we should probably do it at 35, when we have a little bit of estrogen still circulating.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

See what your. Your baseline.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

And if you're already low, then you really got to get after it because you're still probably producing some estrogen.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Walk us through bone loss over time. Like, what is the process? What does bone do?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Right, so we're building peak bone density. If we're building peak bone density to 30, and then we stabilize for a while, and then, just like men, we start to lose bone density about 1% per year in a slow, steady decline. And men just continue like that. Men get osteoporosis. Two million men in this country have osteoporosis, but they had this slow, steady decline. Nobody notices. For women in perimenopause, when estrogen walks out the door, as I like to say, and never looks back, that girlfriend of ours, we start to rapidly lose bone density between 2 and 3% a year, such that in the five to seven years surrounding the end of perimenopause to menopause, we can lose 15 to 20% of our bone density, and most of us never know it.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I have no idea.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

No idea. It's a shock when people, even women, who are doing all the right things, will lose bone density because of the loss of estrogen. So that's what happens. So men and women do not age the same when it comes to bones.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Now, what role we talked about, estrogen, does the other two hormones involved, you know, coming from the ovaries, progesterone and testosterone, have any play in this?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah, testosterone has a bigger role than progesterone. I mean, and the reality is these things need to be worked out. We don't know all the answers, like, how does progesterone affect it? How can we use the supplemental progesterone that some of us take at night? But because not enough research has been done, we know testosterone plays a big role in bone density in both men and women, but not as big as estrogen does.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

As estrogen does. What is sarcopenia?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes, so sarcopenia translated means a low muscle. Okay? Sarcome musclepenia, less like osteopenia, sarcopenia. But it is not just about your total pounds of muscle. It is a functional definition. You want to be 45% muscle or more, actually. But it's functional, meaning can you sit, to stand? How fast can you walk? Because the concept of sarcopenia has to do with function. Do we have enough muscle mass to function? Do we have enough strength in the muscle? We have to get up off the floor or to walk fast enough to be safe. It's not running, but it's, it's not the slow crawl we see some people do as they age.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What is frozen shoulder?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

One of the most audible musculoskeletal symptoms of menopause has to do with our shoulders. And it's not because suddenly your shoulder is bad for you. Estrogen walks away. We become highly inflamed everywhere. The shoulders, shoulder is very susceptible. So the shoulder on the inside, you see it on the outside with skin and then muscle, and then inside of that there's this layer called the capsule. The capsule will become so inflamed that overnight you wake up and your shoulder is killing you. And you didn't bump into the door. Nothing happened. You're like, I don't know what happened. So like most women, you try to wait it out. You're like, I got this. I've suffered a little. And so women come to me in a relatively short amount of time and their arms will no longer move. They're excruciating and they can't get their arm up. And they certainly can't hook their bra.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I shared one of your videos on frozen shoulder years ago now, and it was absolutely viral. The comments in the thousands and thousands of women, oh, my God. No one's ever said this. I can't. I've had this. And one of the hallmarks I see is that women struggle to put their. You know, we always love to take our group photos.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

All right. Oh, can't put their arms around each other.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

They can't put their arms around. How would you know? Maybe if you had frozen shoulder? Like, if someone is like sitting at.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Home listening to this, Are you in your perimenopausal years? Did your shoulders start hurting out of nowhere? Like you didn't hit it?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

No obvious injury.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

There was no obvious injury. Can you suddenly not reach behind your back or reach out to the side? Those are the two motions that go first. And suddenly you can't put your bra on from the back. You got to scoot it around in the front. Those are clues. This also happens in people with uncontrolled diabetes. So if you don't have diabetes, like, where is this coming from? Here's the thing, though. The medical term is called adhesive capsulitis. We orthopods have known about this for centuries. In fact, it's sometimes described in the conclusions of papers. Tends to happen in middle aged women with nobody then taking the next step to say, well, why can't it be? Why? What's a common so bless their hearts, I have to say about my orthopedic peers, whom I love, I do. But Most of them, 94% of them, were born without the benefit of ovaries, so they're never gonna know what they don't experience.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

True.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

All they know is that women show up in midlife, their shoulders don't work, and then it's gonna take two years to defrost.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Oh my gosh.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh my gosh.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

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[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, I don't even remember maybe.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And then in my OBGYN residency which was four years of hundred plus hour weeks, I had six scheduled lectures on menopause, six hours in four years. And I was taught hot flashes, vasomotor symptoms. I was taught some vaginal dryness, atrophy. I was taught the bones would begin to deteriorate and sucks to be a woman for that. And there's not much we can do about it, you know, until she's diagnosed with osteoporosis, then we give her all these meds. I was never taught estrogen's effects, the loss of estrogen's effects on the musculoskeletal systems for our listeners. Walk us through what the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause is.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause, which affects about 70 to 80% of all women. So think of all the women with hot flashes. Equal numbers have one of these, right? Every musculoskeletal tissue, muscle, tendon, ligament, bone, cartilage, which is the smoother than ice lining of the end of the knee. Fat is a musculoskeletal tissue. We have stem cells, the disc, center, back. All of those which are cousins, have estrogen alpha and beta receptors on them. So I always hold up my hand like a little basket because estrogen fits in there. And then all the good things happen. Lack of estrogen in these tissues manifest as total body pain. It's called arthralgia. I think we throw every woman under the bus and call her fibromyalgia when actually it's untreated arthralgia of the musculoskeletal syndrome of menopause. So total body pain. I had this, I'm an athlete. It was disabling. I mean, not so Much that I couldn't work, but I had trouble getting out of bed. Number one, frozen shoulder, both due to inflammation. We have tendonitis. How about tennis elbow? Tennis elbow, Golfer's elbow, Achilles tendon, patellar tendon. All your tendons hurt for no reason. On the bottom of your foot, it hurts. Your plantar fascia hurts. Women have a rapid increase of arthritis, which is loss of chronic cartilage. After 50, before 50, men have more arthritis. After 50, women rapidly develop arthritis. I see this all the time in my clinic. It's because, again, estrogen alpha and beta receptors are critical for maintaining cartilage. Cartilage is a matrix and without it, it just crumbles and we wear down our cartilage, which is irreplaceable. We get one set for a lifetime. All of these things happen for the same reason. Estrogen decline.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You often talk about meeting women for the first time in the emergency room when they're shattered, broken, fractured. As an orthopedic surgeon, where should they have met you first?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

The youngest. Big fracture, life changing fracture. Not an ankle, not a wrist. The woman was 57. I write about her in my book. And I met her in the emergency room. And I had probably met her in the gym. We went to the same gym because she was doing everything she thought she could possibly do. She was, because you know why? Her motivation was she was not going to age like her mother, who was frail and overweight. And so she was doing everything she thought Dr. Google would want her to do. She was lifting, but she was starving because she still believed that she could only be this big. Right? So if we're gonna work that hard, we need to feed ourselves that hard. But what I do, what you're referring to is when I meet women in the emergency room or on the floor because she has a hip fracture, it's the first time she's ever thought about her bones. And she's forced to because fractures are excruciating. Finally, these bones that you think are silent are screaming so painful that you know in hospitals how the beds are kind of slick. Cause they're in their plastic beds and people slide down to the end of the bed and they need to be pulled up in bed, but they won't let you touch them because it's too painful. They're in so much pain. But here's the reality. And I've gotten not afraid to say these things out loud, you know, that when I go to the bedside, she has been incontinent and she's usually laying there not because of bad nursing care, but because she's a constant incontinence, because she's just lost her bladder control and we've done nothing about her pelvic floor or her prolapsed bladder. And often when I'm trying to clear her for surgery, which we go through a certain procedure, do lab tests, she has a uti. In fact, maybe she got dizzy and fell down because of her chronic UTIs, which we know is a thing. Then what happens now in the hospital is the medical doctor will come and clear her heart for surgery. It takes about 45 minutes to fix a hip, but the heart has to be healthy enough. But many women have not been treated with estrogen. Only 4 or 5%, right? So they have microvascular heart disease that they may not even know about. And it's difficult to clear their hearts.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And then finally, meaning clear their hearts.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

For surgeries, to prime their hearts for surgery.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

That they're gonna survive the surgery.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

That they're gonna survive. Anesthesia. Thank you for clarifying that. Cause it's a stress to undergo surgery and anesthesia. It's like running a race. You don't want somebody to have a heart attack on the table. But the other thing, Mary Claire, either the stress of the incident or they've already got early Alzheimer's. They're not cogent, their brains are not functioning the way they would want them to. So we've got all these things that frankly, my friend, we could have prevented had we gotten a hold of women when they were 35.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So Mama is 88, and she has never had a bone density scan in her life. And no one ever, ever, ever, ever talked to her about her bones. Her mother laid in a bed, incontinent with severe dementia and had broken, not a hip, but broke ribs, broke shoulder, arm, you know, multiple falls, and spent probably the last good three to five years in a bed, hallucinating, incontinent, yelling out, you know, not how she wanted.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

To be and.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Ever talk to her about what mama could do to prevent that. Not even me now. I tried to help her with vaginal estrogen. My mother's had struggles with incontinence since I was a child. Mama is now has Alzheimer's, is in a facilitated living facility, and on New Year's night, fell looking for my father, who passed away six years ago. Hallucinated, thought she heard his voice, Fell, shattered her hip, got taken to the er, passed clearance for heart, survived the surgery. It is eight months post op and she is just now walking with a Walker, she has been rolling around in a wheelchair, scooting herself around since that. And we finally got the right physical therapist in to really get her up and get her motivated. And no one is talking to these women, nobody, about prevention, about this doesn't have to happen. She's exactly walking the path my grandmother did. And I am refusing. I know for this, I'm changing the legacy for my daughters.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes, you are. There is no way you'll let that happen.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So we're gonna talk about how we're gonna. How, you know, what we can do about that. What part does inflammation play in all this?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I'm so glad you asked that, because.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

It'S not just one thing. It's not just menopause. It's not just calcium intake.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

The second chapter of the whole book is all about the science behind aging. Because I just don't want people to walk away thinking, just get on another exercise program or another diet. That is so not what you and I are talking about. One of the things we talk about is this concept of inflammaging. It is chronic inflammatory processes in your body that never stop. Now, let's clarify. Inflammation is a normal bodily process. When you twist your ankle and it gets hot, it's red and it swells up, protect. Because your body is rushing to the scene, it is dumping growth factor. It is creating inflammatory cytokines to heal and to clean up the mess so that you can return to life. When we do not turn off our inflammatory processes either because we're chronically stressed, which increases our cortisol levels and increases all these inflammatory cytokines that we just normally produce, they never get taken care of. We enter a state of inflammaging, which is one of the motivators for all of our chronic disease. Whether it's your heart disease, whether it's your diabetes, whether it's your sarcopenia and your bone density. Because both bone and muscle are critically sensitive to inflammatory cytokines, when they are present all the time, they can increase loss of bone because they give osteoclasts, the bone eating cells the advantage. So high inflammation, more loss of bone, the same for muscle mass. High levels of these inflammatory cytokines make us weaker, make us recover from muscle injury slower, such that there are lots of studies that go way deep into the mechanisms of this. But we know that in some studies in women that when they measure these levels in the blood, they can correlate it to significant decreases in muscle mass and recovery. So this is not just theoretical. We know this Happens. And so why do we become so inflamed? Because estrogen is a potent anti inflammatory.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I remember reading the data on blood inflammatory markers and some researchers, thank God, who were tracking them across the lifespan, specifically in women, and seeing this dramatic uptick somewhere around 45 on average. And some other researchers said, hmm, I wonder if this is menopause. And they started looking at animal studies and then human studies and just how menopause itself, just from the loss of estrogen, changes in progesterone becomes a pro inflammatory state. I was floored by that.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

When women say, oh, I didn't have menopause, I didn't have night sweats, brain fog, I didn't feel bad, or you know what, I just had it a.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Little, or I'm done with all that.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, I'm done. Well, okay. That just comes from the fact that we need to educate women continually to say that you may not feel it, but it's happening.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

It's happening.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It is happening.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Yeah. That loss of estrogen will follow you and every system for the rest of your life. That's right. Okay, talk to me about vitamin D and calcium. We hear a lot about that on social media, and this is one of the things I was taught in residency.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So, you know, we talk a lot about, about those things in terms of building bone density, but we forget that vitamin D is critical for brain health and immune function and gut absorption.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Calcium supplements, and correct me if I'm wrong, have never been shown to decrease the risk of osteoporotic fracture.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

We need it from our food. It's not hard to accumulate 1800 milligrams. Definitely not hard for 1200 because a cup of yogurt has about 300 milligrams of calcium. Salmon with bones in it. Sardines, but, you know, who wants to eat those? But prunes and bok choy, there's just so many choices that I'd rather people try to get it from their food.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

The way I counsel my patients is these foods that are rich in calcium are also rich in so many other things that are wonderful for you.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Great health.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So it's always better from food. So earlier we talked about that one in two women after the age of 50 can expect to have an osteoporotic fracture. And you know, that's our reality. However, in my clinic, I am recommending dexa scan. So let's go get your bone density checked. Often, insurance won't pay for it until the age of 65 or if she has some severe risk factor. But Even in that setting, I feel like that is too late. When my patient are diagnosed with low bone density, they are devastated. They cannot believe it. How do you counsel those patients in your clinic?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

They feel disappointed, ashamed, frightened, and then we don't just leave the conversation there. I think a DEXA scan number alone is useless until. Unless you give a patient or a woman a plan. And so we go through all the things we know that will help build better bone, and we know that we can stabilize or build better bone.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What are those things?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Every woman is a sentient being and gets to make her hormone decision, but I insist that she makes it based on facts, not fear. And so every day I recommend. Well, I recommend your book. So I say if you want all the world's data on the safety of your hormones, you're gonna read Estrogen Matters. If you wanna know what's about to happen to happen to you, you read the new Menopause. If you know how good sex can be at this age, you read you are not broken. And then of course, I recommend, now here's your plan. Unbreakable. But as I explained to them, I say you must make your hormone decision because. And then I explain the role of estrogen on bone. It's going to be harder to get in front of this if we don't. But if you don't want to, well, what else are we going to do? We are going to learn to lift heavy weights. We are going to put down the Mamby Pamby 5 pound weights that we lift 30 times to failure. And we are going to take the six or nine months to work up to lifting the hex bar that you lift when you deadlift, right? To lift heavy, because it is that which is going to exert the most pulling force against your bone. We're going to jump around like a crazy person. I want people to jump 20 jumps a day, not just straight up and down, not landing lightly. I want you to thud on the floor because we need to generate four times body weight. You can do that. Walking generates about 1.2 times body weight, running 2 to 3 times. But we want a thud on the floor and that takes jumping from a height of about 8 inches. If you cannot do that because your knees hurt too much, well, NASA uses rebounders or little trampolines. We can't use it as an excuse. We just have to do the best we can. Because lifting, jumping plus or minus estrogen plus nutrition, high in protein, can help you stabilize and rebuild bone. And so of those things, the best data is from estrogen and lifting. Women always ask me, especially online, but either I'm afraid or I have osteoporosis, I can't lift.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I see a lot. Anytime I post about lifting exercises, the comments are always full with, but what if, but what if, you know, I have osteoporosis already. Am I going to fracture? I have a herniated disc. I have arthritis. You know, a lot of women are already dealing with conditions that are going to make these things harder.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

But, you know, the irony is. So Dr. Beck, who's from New Zealand, I believe, did a big study called the Lift More and under supervision, we must be taught to lift heavy. We don't want to get hurt. In her protocol, you're lifting to failure in five reps times five sets. That is heavy. And nobody broke. And everybody built, no injuries. And so, yes, it can be done.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And they all had osteoporosis.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, they were. That's entry to the study was osteoporosis. What the irony about what you just said is people think that they can't lift because they have arthritis or they can't jump because they have arthritis. When I get someone coming to me for arthritis, I don't start with the medical interventions. I start with, we are going to make you strong as a bull because your butt, core and hip strength will act as shock absorbers against the impact of your weight on your knees, because regular activity exerts, you know, seven to nine times body weight on your joints. So if we don't want them to pound together, we have to build better muscle. Right? Isn't. People are so shocked when I say that we're going to make you strong first before we start doing all the medical stuff. But that's an approach that maybe they haven't heard at their standard doctors, because you're right, we silo things, but the reality is, if we want to treat the whole person, that person needs to be strong.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Can you talk about some of the pharmaceuticals that have been developed to treat osteoporosis? And when would you begin those?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So there's several categories. The most. The most common one that people are familiar with are the bisphosphonates Fosamat. And then now there's a new category of monoclonal antibodies that work on. There's a receptor on the osteoclast that it blocks. Those medications are offered to women when they have the diagnosis of osteoporosis, which is a T score of -2.5. But do you know, nearly to a woman that I See, they've all said to me, I have osteoporosis. My doctor wanted to put me on a bisphosphonate to rescue my bones, and I don't want it because of the side effects. Well, that's understandable because some of them are very terrifying sounding. But here's the reality. Mary Claire, we were talking about the women I treat and your own mama. If you get a hip fracture, 70% of all hip fractures are in women. 30% of the time you die in the first year from that moment, even after surgery, even after surgery, from the complications, whether it's a uti, sedentary living, bed sores, dementia, not being mobile, you lose 9% of your muscle mass laying in bed for a week or more. These things add up in already frail people, right? 30% you hit the floor. Those people who survive 50% will never get to go back home because they're. They can't get around. Right? To live independently, you must be able to get up and down from a chair and do ADL's.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

This is why we care about fracture.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Absolutely no one would care unless the devastating outcomes of it.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So what most women don't realize is most women are not offered any screening for osteoporosis. Currently. Currently, they just kind of get skipped. And most people are diagnosed with their osteoporosis at the time of fracture.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

You can buy a DEXA scan without a prescription. You can Google DEXA scan near me if you don't want a DEXA scan. There's a new technology using ultrasound called a REM scanner. Right. It's not as common in the United States as it is in the UK or Australia, but it's coming. And it uses ultrasound, not even X rays, to tell you bone quality, because. Because whether or not you fracture has more to do with the quality of your bone than how much mineral you have in it. Because what people don't know about bones either is that every time you take a step, if this is your femur, your leg bone, your thigh bone, it bends a little. It bends a little. And your body knowing that, perceiving that will build the strongest bone where you have the most bending. So the ultrasound type predictor will tell you the quality of your bone. But so either one of these things, listen, can be purchased. So if you've got a clinician who just won't do it, then you can buy it yourself by saving up your Starbucks money. So do it just because we both told you to do it. But if that's not enough for you, Think about these things. Is your mother shrinking? Yeah, my mother has shrunk so much. She used to be my height, and now she's about down here, right? I can look over her head.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Why are they shrinking?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Because the vertebral bodies in our spine, our spinal cord is surrounded by an armor of bone, and they are like blocks, literally blocks. They sit one on top of each other, and as we lose bone, they collapse and shrink, so we lose height. So is your mother shrinking? Are you shrinking? Did you smoke when you were young? Because it was so cool. Smoking and nicotine is bone poison. Or did you have an illness when you were little, like. Like asthma, where you had to take a lot of steroids chronically? Or do you have an autoimmune disease? All of these things and many more, frankly, are risk factors for osteoporosis. Or how about this, Mary Claire? What if you're like me? You were a young athlete and you never had periods. Or maybe you had periods, but you were an athlete and never fed yourself. So all of these things could make you at risk for osteoporosis. And if you're identifying with any of these things, go get yourself a scan.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So when should women begin to think about being proactive or just begin to be proactive about protecting their bones?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

How about during our fertility periods? I start talking about this, and I have to be very careful with the way I phrase this, but to build a baby, you are gonna use at least 500 milligrams of calcium from your bones every single day. So, I mean, we're building a baby from ourselves, right? So either we're eating or we're taking it from ourselves. So there is a real entity called osteoporosis of pregnancy. Now, here's the good news. Our bodies are built to renew that, but only if you eat. Post pregnancy, many women are so focused on getting back in their genes that they don't eat. Or I may have used my breastfeeding period of life to get back to my original weight, because I'm thinking, oh, I'm going to lose weight by doing this.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Yeah. 500 calories a day out the breast. Yeah.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes. That was such bad thinking. I didn't know at that point. Let's say you're breastfeeding. That requires about 500 milligrams of calcium, which we're gonna take from our bones. Now, hear me, audience, when I say it's not that I'm anti breastfeeding. I breastfed for as long as my daughter would let me, right over A year. But unless you know that you're gonna lose your bone, you can end up osteopenic or osteoporotic just from something so natural. So. So mothers and lactating mothers need to be really conscientious about getting enough of great nutrition to rebuild. Historically, women would have baby after baby after baby. And now what I see millennial women doing is because they're waiting a long time to have children, they're getting their babies done because before they become midlife, right? And then maybe you don't have enough time to rebuild. So it worries me that teenagers aren't building enough bones. It worries me that young mothers don't know that they need to rebuild their bones. And then if they're like me, they go straight from postpartum to perimenopause.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

That is a lot get a chance because we're 80% in perimenopause. So yeah, they never have that chance to get back. Taking care of your mental health can feel isolating. There are days when scrolling through advice online just doesn't give you what you need. And let's be honest, reaching out for support can be overwhelming. It can be hard to know where to start. But that's where Alma comes in. With a nationwide network of over 20,000 diverse licensed therapists, 99% of whom accept insurance, ALMA makes finding the right care simple and affordable. You can search without creating an account, then filter by what matters most, like gender, race or therapeutic approach, and even see the session costs upfront. With their free insurance estimator, on average, people using Alma save 80% on their sessions. What stands out most about Alma is that this isn't about quick fixes or generic advice. It's about real human connection. Which means you can schedule free 15 minute consultations with as many therapists as needed to find one who truly fits your goals. Building a meaningful relationship over time leads to better mental health outcomes. And ALMA makes that easier than ever. Better with people, better with Alma. Visit helloalma.com unpaused to get started and schedule a free consultation today. That's helloama.com unpaused hormones affect more than how you feel.

[Alloy Health Representative]

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[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So conventional wisdom, conventional medical advice that my mother and likely my grandmother got was to always fight to be in a smaller body. What is this, you know, this constant workout, you know, cardio eat less. Cardio eat less. Because if you're this size then you're healthy. How much of this epidemic? And I believe that we are living in an epidemic of frailty right now and osteoporosis for our women in that last decade. You know, how much of can we lay at the feet of we've been telling women the wrong thing.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I think we need to redefine what healthy is because you my mom knew was little skinny.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

To this day, with her dementia, I walk in the room and she comments on my side.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Does she?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You're looking nice and thin today, honey. Thanks mom.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Well, you know what? That is what she was taught. I cannot get my 86 year old father to only compliment how I look. In fact, I got a little nasty with him. Bless his heart. It's just as I said daddy, I am smart. But that is the generation they grew up in. So here's what I see happening. Tell me if you think so. Our really elderly, your parent, your mother, my parents and the baby boomers. I don't know if we'll ever get it through their head that it's okay to take up space. The Xer is like us. We were raised like that. I was raised like that, where it's an aesthetic. I mean, you gotta ask yourself, were we taught that really because skinny is healthy, or were we taught that because in the world we were raised, there's an aesthetic of attractiveness that has to do with your size. But I am very hopeful that the millennials, or definitely the generation of my 17 year old or your daughters older than my 17 year old, will value their strength versus their thinness.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So when I think about my exercise patterns throughout my life, when I was younger, my daughter's age, I moved my body to be thin.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So I did it for aesthetics purely, and I thought that was healthy. And then when my 30s and 40s, I moved my body for performance. I got into racing marathons, triathlons with my girlfriends. It really was a social thing to do. And we were healthy and we look good. Of course, now this morning I'm in the gym and I am moving my body for longevity.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah, that's right.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What is your vision of that? That what does moving your body for longevity mean?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

When I think of longevity, when we talk about women's longevity, all of us that are working together towards this are trying to reframe the narrative for men, longevity. Living longer is longevity and glorified in every press.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Women win. When we just talk about longevity, we win.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

We win. We're being six years longer anyway. But we suffer longer because we've spent our life on anti aging the superficial. And it's not the inside out anti aging, it's the superficial. Do we look young enough? Are we little enough? Right. So we're reframing that to women living longer. Well, how do you want to live longer? I talk about in Unbreakable, what it means to me is I want to do what I want, when I want it, how I want it. I want to only ask for help if I want to ask for help, not because I can't help myself. So if you want to be in, if you want to have the kind of relationships that fill your soul when you're older. It takes daily work now on all the kinds of things. You know, you went to the gym at 5 o' clock this morning. Nutrition is a huge part of your practice in your life. Right. There's the daily Investment of your help. That's the only way to get there. Because what happens if we just leave time to itself? Well, we don't answer the time bombs of aging. We don't build the kinds of shields that you're building from a lifestyle. And we're gonna become frail.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I don't want to burden my children. They will step up. I know my girls, you know, if I need help, they're gonna come in and do it or find a really nice nursing home for me, you know, if they can't take care of me. But God, I don't wanna do that to you.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

You don't want to?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I wanna die like my grandfather. He drove a truck the day he died.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You know, he drove a truck, went out about his business in his 90s. He probably should not have been driving, by the way, but he lived out in the country on a farm, and.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

They all do it.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

He got home, had a massive heart attack and it was over.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Me too. I want to die like Queen Elizabeth, who on Tuesday met the prime minister of Great Britain and on Thursday just didn't wake up. Yeah, that's what I. I mean, if I get to choose, if I pick.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What about the difference between lifespan and health span? And I think, you know, all this talk about anti aging longevity and all the wellness bros saying they want to live to 120. I do not want to live to 120 if it means I'm not going to have my loved ones ones, you know, if they die before me. I am not interested in that. And I don't have a single patient who tells me I want to live forever.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

They all say, well, fix my hot flashes. Give me my life back. Okay. Now then we sit down and say, let's talk about your mom. Let's talk about your grandmother. The women in your family, how they age. What are we looking at in the next 30 years if you're lucky enough, if you run the cancer gauntlet. And you know we're going to decrease that risk too with all of the exact same changes. And they're like, I don't want to be a burden.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Women say that to me in my office. And then I'm like, great, because here's the plan. We're going to start and we start building a blueprint together. And one of two things happens. Either they are all for it and they're like, tell me how to do this. Set me up with a trainer. Like they are all action, or this is what happens. Okay, well, I can't Give up my sugar. Okay. And so there becomes an excuse for everything. And to which I say two things. Number one, you can't out excuse me because I've been doing this 30 years. I have an answer for every excuse. And they kind of chuckle when I say that. But number two, if you don't want to burden your children, then you better get active right now because that's what's going to happen. Either they're going to have to make a hard financial decision about who's paying for the nursing home, which can cost 7,000, $15,000 a month.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

A month?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah. And eat up your life savings, or you're going to move in with somebody like my parents do, which we made that choice. Right, right. So it's one of those two things. So either stop making excuses, take the action you need, or just know you're going to burden somebody.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

When do you order a dexa? Or when do you recommend DEXA on everybody?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I think just like we get our mammograms at 40, I think we should have our screening test by 40.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You should have a baseline.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Let's just figure it out whether it's rems, whether it's dexa. Just find one. In fact, we should probably do it at 35 when we have a little bit of estrogen still circulating to see.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What your peak baseline.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

And if you're already low, then you really gotta get after it. Cause you're still probably producing some estrogen.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Do you have another way to measure body composition? Like, do you have one of the impedance scales in your office?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yeah, I like. Well, we have in bodies in our facility. Yeah, Yeah, I like those. I mean, I think. I don't. Do you know the data? I don't know how accurate they are. I mean, they're close enough because we're actually looking for trends.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Right.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

More than absolute numbers. Yeah.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So. And for our listeners, when we talk about body composition, we're talking about not just their bone density, like we would get on adexa, but these scales in our office do not give us bone density. But what they do give us is they can tell us how much muscle, where the muscle is. So I can look at muscle mass, especially for my GLP1 patients. I wanna know their baseline and where we're heading throughout their treatment. It also tells us where the fat is. What type of fat? Is it visceral fat, which is around our organs, or is it subcutaneous fat, which actually is not that harmful?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

No.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So, yeah, curves are good. Curves are healthy curves in a premenopausal woman, meaning subcutaneous fat under her skin, especially in the hips and thighs is actually protect.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Uh huh.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

For your bones and cardiovascular disease because you have to carry around a little bit heavier body than someone like me who didn't wasn't blessed with wonderful curves.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes. There's benefits of all body types.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Why is insurance company and I think it's gatekeeping a little bit is the decision to not have bone density and this is based on, you know, it's not an insurance company making an independent sit. They're going off of guidelines. Where do you think the guidelines are wrong or you know, are underserving women here?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Well if we're working in a disease care model then you set the guideline for when you've got the highest probability of picking up the most disease. So it's 20 years postmenopausal. Right. So it's 65. That's probably, I don't know how they were established but probably that's what the thinking was. We're going to treat osteoporosis with drugs.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Right.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

And is their T score likely to be low enough? Well, it's actually bad thinking. 65, right?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Right.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Or in Australia 70. Interestingly. Okay, if you're in a disease care model, okay, I can see why you did that. Although I know that 30 year olds are osteoporotic. 40 year olds. But if you are in a preventive care model like we are for breast cancer, you're going to do it much earlier because we know interventions the longer you're preventing the less likely meaning. The Endocrine Society data show that you need to be on estrogen optimization for 10 years to have the biggest effect on fracture risk. Not started at 65 when you have a bad DEXA scan, but it's better if you start earlier to give your bones all that Runway. So that's why I think is we're working in a disease care model. Let's got osteoporosis, we've got a drug for that. Let's give you the drug. We wouldn't give you the drug if you didn't have the diagnosis. So why check?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And estrogen is FDA approved and most women don't know this, most doctors don't know this.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Or the prevention. Prevention of osteoporosis. That's right. Yes it is.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

It's the only drug approved for the prevention of osteoporosis is estrogen.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Estrogen. Estrogen, that's right. And the other reason I think women don't get them is Is it's not thought about in most medical circles. Right.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

In ob gyn it is in our guidelines to discuss osteoporosis and to recommend like it was one of our little check boxes. So I can say in mine, but most women stop coming to me when they're done having babies. You know, when I was doing traditional general obgyn gyne practice, they weren't. They were like, I'm done having kids. I'm just gonna go to my internist or my family medicine doctor. And I think we, as a medical specialty or, you know, all. All of medicine is really dropping the ball, especially for prevention in women.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Well, the whole medical system is a disease care model. There's never the whole person care.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Let's pivot. I love that you're trained in orthopedic surgery because you were trained to treat both men and women.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes, I don't have that. I still do.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So I only. The only penis I saw were baby boys at birth. And I did a few circumcisions and then g up on that practice. And then my husband is the only one I have to tend to now. When I talk to orthopedic surgeons, especially females, when I talk to our female urology friends, people who came up through the system and treat both genders, it's shocking to them when they get out into practice and they realize the bias against women that is built into the system. So in my education, we had a term called WW or www which was whiny women or whiny white women. And I talk about it in the book and I always give lectures on it. Bas a woman in her 40s would come in with multiple vague complaints and we couldn't figure out what it was. Turns out it was probably perimenopause, some multi system effect that she was having that we couldn't figure out. And the urologists, you know, our friends.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Dr. Caspersen and Dr. Rubin, Dr. Rubin.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Would said, hey, wait a minute. These patients are coming in with the same complaint, sexual dysfunction. You know, things hurt or aren't working down there. And the men, you just go all in. You rush in to fix the problem and you give them the medication. And the women were getting pats on the head and coconut oil or you know, and just said, you got this, babe. Do you see the same thing?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes, because. And I may have historically been guilty of it, because when a man comes in in midlife, dragging around and multiple tendon issues, like everything hurts, multiple tendons or rupturing tendons, I test his testosterone and then I send him off to get some testosterone even. Because in men, the physiology is different. But obviously I'm encouraging my millennial sons to get their testosterone check in their youth. They're in their mid-30s, because that's how we know what to correct back to. Because even if a guy in midlife rupturing all his tendons, feels terrible, moping around, moody as heck, has a testosterone that is between 250 and 1,000 something, which is normal. If he used to be 800 in his youth and he's now 300, that's a big delta. Yeah. But we're sending that guy off to get some testosterone because God forbid we let anybody feel like that. But when women come in and have multiple things going on, they're accused. It's all in their head.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Yeah. They get a psychiatric referral, or maybe.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

They'Re labeled with fibromyalgia. And I don't believe that everybody I say that comes in and wears that diagnosis has something like that. I think it's untreated perimenopause that affects the musculoskeletal system. So now there is parody in my clinic. But when I have queried my Instagram following. What have orthopedic surgeons said to you?

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What have they said?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

And it is appalling. It is appalling. The blaming, the dismissive, the. You're just getting old. There's nothing wrong with you. It's in your head. If you talk to your whoever about it. The musculoskeletal system is at least 8 to 10, depending how granular you want to get. Whole organ systems, muscle, tendon, ligament. How can we just ignore that? Right? So I'm this much encouraged. This much. You can even see the space here. Because I can't attract the attention of my own peers to publish these things in our own literature, to do grand rounds at our departments. Except I have to shout out Mount Sinai, which is led by a woman. We did this two years ago. The International Cartilage Research Society just called me to say I think we're missing something. We need these researchers to learn about perimenopause. So we're sneaking in a talk to their whole assembly. It is a slow drip that needs to be a roaring conversation.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Right. You and I both, and I'm back on as adjunct faculty, come from this academic world. And it's really. That's where the magic happens. That's where the guidelines happen. The guidelines are what insurance decides what they will and won't pay for. That's who gets screened for certain things. And I just want our listeners to understand from new research to a guideline, changing on average right now is 17 years.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, my God. That is a generation of people, 17.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Years on average now, that one of the beautiful things about the Internet, good and bad, is that now regular people, smart people, women who can make decisions for themselves, actually have access to some of the medical journal articles, and they're coming in asking better questions. But, you know, we have this whole force of wonderful physicians who do care, who just weren't trained, of course. And so where do you see, you know, what, what is the stopgap for this gen? These Gen Xers are not taking it. They're not having it. You know, my Gen X patients are like, absolutely not. I am not gonna live like this. Yeah, fix me. But I can't. You can't be the doctor for everyone. I can't be the doctor for everyone. Where can they go now? Like, like, where can someone find better help?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Yes. So I require women to be responsible for themselves, so they must become educated. So that's why I recommend the bevy of books that I discussed with you. You must get the information for yourself, number one. Number two, you can go the regular path. You can go to your primary care of your OB and have this educated discussion. And if you. If they're not caught up with you, if they blow you off, it is okay to keep them as your disease care person. But you must not stop there. So many women who write to me, they're like, my doctor said, no, so I just stopped. That's not the answer. Seek out somebody who knows. So where do you find that person? Well, you're right. I can only see so many patients. You can only. There are many telehealth companies now that are staffed by legitimate clinicians who can expand the database. But in order to get in front of this, it has to start being taught in medical schools.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Now for a MIDI pause sponsored by MIDI Health. If you're in midlife and feeling bloated, sluggish, or frustrated that the same diet you've always followed suddenly isn't working, you're not imagining it. As estrogen levels drop, we lose some of estrogen's protective effect on metabolism, heart health, and gut function. This shift can mean slower digestion, rising cholesterol, more insulin resistance, and potentially more belly fat. This is where getting enough fiber becomes critical. I Recommend Women get 25 to 30 grams of fiber per day. And it doesn't have to be complicated. Simply add a tablespoon or two of chia flax or hemp to your meals. Include lentils, beans, berries, avocados, whole grains and other fruits and vegetables into your daily menu. If you fall short, don't worry. Supplement the gap with a high quality fiber supplement. Remember, this isn't about dieting. It's about supporting your body's changing needs. Menopause is a biological transition, not a decline. When we understand how nutrition supports it that we can all thrive. So if you could design midlife care for women, what would that look like?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Well, what it will look like is from the minute you either if you decide to have children or the minute you are done having children, you would automatically go into a holistic program, a whole woman preventive care model that includes education, that includes annual labs, that includes exercise teaching.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

So I think the takeaway here is we have to take our prevention into our own hands.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

We're responsible.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Yeah, you can't count on the medical system, nor should you, to be really an active partner in your prevention of disease.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Right. Prevention is on us.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

How much protein do you shoot for in a day?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Me, I shoot for 130 because that's a good weight for me. I'm short, but I'm really muscley. So that's what I need to take in a day. And it's not that much volume of food. When you consider that a cup of Greek yogurt is 25 to 30. Your morning shake has 55 grams of protein, for God's sake. Right. And you drink it out. You do. So people think you have to eat this tremendous volume of food. You don't actually to get in that much.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

And I find when you're focusing on protein, when you're eating that much, the other stuff tends to just fall to the side. I mean, I'm eating complex carbohydrates, I'm eating plenty of healthy fats. And I'm really focusing on protein and fiber are my top two goals. And I hear my daughter loves to make tiktoks about meals she makes. And she's like, here's my high protein, high fiber. I'm like, you did the right thing. Thing.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

You did the right thing. And I know you focus on fiber. And I love to help people understand that. I am not anti carb. No, I am anti simple carb and sugar. Because fiber often comes as carbs. Is carbs. Right.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Things rich in fiber.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Rich in fiber.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Complex carbohydrates. That's right.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So I'm not anti carb. It's not a war against carbs. It's just who you let in. And it has to be. I have to.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What does a adequate workout program look like? How many days in the gym? How long should you be in the gym?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

So it's not about time. It's about time under tension, which means how many reps you're doing and how many sets you're doing. So no matter what kind of lifting you're doing, you need to lift to failure, meaning by the end of the set, you can't lift it anymore. So if you want to lift for endurance, you're going to lift a little tiny weight, 30 times. That does not interest me. In old age, if you want to build big muscles like bodybuilders, then you're gonna lift medium reps. For women, that's like 10 to 15 for four sets or so. And that's what's gonna stimulate enough damage that you're gonna build muscle. But in midlife and beyond, I teach people to lift for strength and power. Strength so that we can do what we wanna do when we wanna do it, and power, meaning lifting over time so that we don't fall down, that we can move quick enough to not have a fatal fall. Right. So strength and power take a different kind of lifting. Lifting for strength is lower reps, higher weights. I've been treating people for 30 years. I know people want very specific instructions. So my last lifting program, which is the one I published, was four reps, four sets. Sets.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Okay. And that's all in the book.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It's all in there. So what that means is when I'm doing a bench press, I can do four reps. I may be able to squeeze out five, but I'm not doing six without the bar coming down because I'm lifting to failure. And then I'm gonna completely rec. I'm gonna recover for two or three minutes before my next set. But this type of lifting will build our strength. And then once we're really good at it, and it might take us six months, nine months, a year, then we can add. Adds speed, meaning it'll take us three seconds to go down in a squat, and then we spring up in one sec. That speed work helps us build the power we need to age without falling down. And so it sounds complex. It's not really. Once you learn, this is a great time to hire a trainer for a short period of time. Don't get another purse. Get a trainer. So I say in the holidays, but to get great benefit, you can do it as little as twice a week. I'd rather you do it four times a week and it doesn't take that long. You can pound out a complex set in about half an hour.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I've seen you talk about certain tests, certain milestones that women should meet and the gym bros love to talk about this. I posted a video of myself doing push ups.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

You sure did.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

When you talked about a woman should be able to do 11 push ups. And I got. It went viral. Not because I was doing 11 pushups, because every personal trainer in America jumped in about my form, which needed some work. But okay, so we've got the 11 pushup tests.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Two, don't worry about it. Yes.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What else is there?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I want to clarify why we even do things like that. Because the response I got, whether it was the push ups challenge or the situation to stand challenge, meaning can you get up and down off the ground without using your hands or your knees or there's a pistol, squat, anything, anything. The point is not. Or I'll say it another way, 90, more than 90% of the time, women responded like you do. They're like, can I do this? I'm going to try to do this. I'm going to get better at this. Let's challenge ourselves. Let's be positive about the future. There were a small percentage of women and Jim Bros who came on and said things like, why are you shaming women? Why are you isolating and excluding people? To which I say, why do you expect so little from women? Why do you think that we can't do hard things because we birth the babies in this world, Right? We do hard things already. We figure it out. So when I do those kinds of challenges, it's aspirational because there is a line called the frailty line where your VO2 max, your fitness is so low you can't get up from a chair by yourself. That is the day you have to be moved into assisted living, whether it's with your kid or in a home, because you can't get up from a chair yourself. Nobody wants to pass that line. And we can build that. So that's the purpose of all these tests. Tests whether it's push ups, which tells you what your upper body strength is, what your core is, whether it's grip strength. Testing your grip strength online, which we have all done, is not about how strong your hand is and squeezing a tennis ball. It is a measure of your total body strength such that if you have a decrease in 5 kg of grip strength, it infers a increase in all cause mortality of 16%. It's been big. It's not about squeezing a tennis ball. It's about your total body strength. That's what those are for.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Well, I've loved having you on today.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Thank you so much.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

I have a few questions I kind of ask everyone. What is the best part of this stage of your life right now?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

I may have come to this late in my life, but this is the most authentic I've ever been. People are surprised when they meet me. They're like, oh, oh, you're just the same as you are online. I'm like, there's only one me. The most authentic, the most confident. Because I think that we learn from the memory of our successes. And I have figured out a lot of stuff in my life, and I know I can figure anything out. I've said this to you before because I am in a male field. I have more professional support now, and I don't even know the right word to say, camaraderie, collegiate, whatever, than I have ever had. And from that, I mean, it's you. It's the extended group of people that.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

We talk the menopausy.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It's the menopausy. It's the five of us that talk every day that enables me to go further, faster, harder, and I've never had that before.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Under what are your non negotiables? Like, how do you take care of you? What does Vonda do? We have a thing in the menopause. What would Vonda do?

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, my gosh.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

Cause she's our touchstone. None of us wanna end up in a nursing home. So you are my nursing home prevention partner.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

Oh, my gosh. Well, if that's the truth, then you're gonna be in bed at the same time every night, and you're gonna get up at the same time every day when you can, because you are not gonna compromise on your sleep, which is completely restorative. And that includes anything that might muck it up. Alcohol, alcohol, drama, eating too late, stress at night. I am not compromising on that, number one. Number two, at this point, eating the way I eat is just the way I eat. It's not a burden. It's not a diet. It's a lifestyle with the protein, with the fiber, with the knowing what I'm eating. It doesn't mean that I don't occasionally have. Have sugar, but it's not how I used to live, which was always having sugar. Right. Non negotiable. And then it's lifting weights. Whether, you know, when I'm traveling, it's very hard. So sometimes it's just push ups in the hotel room or anything I can fit in. You know what I like people to remember as we've just laid out a bunch of things to do right, do this, do that, and it can be overwhelming, but we have to return to what do we value and why do we even want to do this. But the number one reason has to be because you believe that you are worth it. You believe that you are worth the daily investment of your health. Not because your children need you, not because something else you as a person have value and worth and you are worth the work.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

What I'm finding in menopause with my patients, with myself, with my girlfriend is that they are something about menopause kind of crystallizes that acknowledgement that if I don't do this, no one's coming to save me.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

There's no hero.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

You have to be the hero of your own story. You have to be the CEO of your own healthcare. Thank you so much for joining me. I've told you this before, but you've changed my life, you've changed my patients lives, you've changed the way I practice medicine. And I could not be more grateful for you joining us us today on Unpaused and for your your support through all of this.

[Dr. Vonda Wright]

It's my privilege.

[Dr. Mary Claire Haver]

As a reminder to our audience, her book Unbreakable is available now and listeners can also check out her podcast, Hot for your Health wherever they get their podcast and follow her on Instagram @ Dr. Vonda Wright I'd love to hear from you about this topic and anything else that's on your mind. You can find find me on Instagram @Doctor MaryClaire and get the honest, accurate information on health, fitness and navigating [e-mail] if you're loving this podcast, be sure to click Follow on your favorite podcast app so you never miss an episode. Unpaused is presented by Odyssey in collaboration with pod people. I'm your host, Dr. Mary Claire Haver, and be sure to share the show with the women you love. We would be so grateful. You can also find full episodes on YouTube at. Dr. Mary Claire the views and opinions expressed on Unpaused are those of the talent and the guests alone and are provided for informational and entertainment purposes only. No part of this podcast or any related materials are intended to be a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment.