Health, Fitness & Personal Growth Tips for Women in Midlife: Asking for a Friend

Ep.188 Midlife Fitness for Women: Dr. Stacy Sims Explains Why Your Old Workouts Stopped Working

• Michele Henning Folan • Episode 188

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Midlife fitness for women 45+ is not about trying harder—it’s about training smarter for perimenopause and menopause physiology. In this powerhouse episode of Asking for a Friend, host Michele Folan sits down with Dr. Stacy Sims—exercise physiologist, TEDx speaker behind “Women Are Not Small Men,” and author of ROAR and Next Level—to break down exactly why your old workouts and “eat less, do more cardio” strategies stop working in midlife… and what to do instead.

We get practical (and refreshingly no-BS) about the real midlife playbook:

  • Why estrogen shifts change metabolism, muscle power, recovery, and body composition
  • Why heavy lifting matters (and why it won’t make you “bulky”)
  • The difference between HIIT vs. Sprint Interval Training (SIT)—and why many “HIIT classes” aren’t actually HIIT
  • Where Zone 2 fits (and why it’s great for mental health, but not your best lever for optimization)
  • The truth about fasted workouts and intermittent fasting for women—and how it can backfire on appetite, cravings, energy, and sleep
  • How to think about protein needs in midlife (including the “1 gram per pound” conversation and how to distribute it)
  • Why creatine is having a moment (brain, muscle, mood, performance, and aging)—and what dosing typically looks like
  • Recovery upgrades in perimenopause/menopause: sleep, mobility, heat/sauna (and why cold plunge isn’t a one-size-fits-all tool for women)
  • Why testing and metrics like DEXA (bone density + body comp) and VO2 max can be useful for longevity-focused women

If you’ve been standing in your kitchen wondering where your “30-year-old metabolism” went—and why you can’t out-discipline midlife hormones—this episode will give you clarity, strategy, and a realistic path forward.

You can find her newsletter and blog at:

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https://www.instagram.com/drstacysims

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If you’re doing “all the right things” and still feel stuck, adding a layer of support may be an option. I’ve partnered with a trusted telehealth platform offering modern solutions for women in midlife—including micro-dosed GLP-1 and other peptide therapies.

https://elliemd.com/michelefolan - Create a free account to view all products.

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Transcripts are created with AI and may not be perfectly accurate.

Disclaimer: This podcast is for general informational purposes only and does not constitute the practice of medicine, nursing, or other professional healthcare services. It is not a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. Always seek the advice of your qualified healthcare provider with any questions regarding a medical condition.

Michele Folan:

I want to take a minute to talk to the woman who's doing everything right. You're eating well, you're lifting weights, you're walking, managing stress, and trying to sleep. And yet your body isn't responding the way it used to. I see this every single day as a coach, and I've lived it myself. And here's what I want you to hear clearly. There is no failure here. Midlife physiology is different. Hormones shift, metabolism adapts, inflammation and muscle loss become real obstacles, even when your habits are solid. That's why I went looking for answers, not shortcuts. After a lot of research, conversations with physicians, and personal experience, I chose to partner with a medical team that offers physician-prescribed peptides as an adjunct to a healthy lifestyle, not a replacement for it. Peptides aren't magic, they don't override poor habits. But when used appropriately and medically supervised, they can help support things like metabolic health, recovery, body composition, and overall vitality, especially when lifestyle alone isn't moving the needle anymore. If you're curious, if you want real information, not hype, and you want to explore whether this extra layer of support makes sense for your body, I've made that resource available. You'll find the link in the show notes. No pressure, no shame, just options for the long game. Health, wellness, fitness, and everything in between, we're removing the taboo from what really matters in midlife. I'm your host, Michelle Fullen, and this is Asking for a Friend. Okay, today is a big one because if you've ever stood in your kitchen wondering why your 30-year-old metabolism packed its bags and left, Dr. Stacy Sims is here to explain exactly what happened and how to get your power back. She is the voice behind women are not small men, the author of Roar and the Next Level. And the woman who has been telling us lovingly to do less cardio, stop undereating protein, and stop following workout plans built for dudes. And today she's breaking down the real midlife playbook: how to fuel before you lift, how to recover so your workouts actually work, my creatine matters, and what kind of cardio gives us return on our investment without wrecking our hormones. If you're 45 plus and trying to figure out why the old rules don't apply anymore, this episode will get you started on the right path. Dr. Stacy Sims, welcome to asking for a friend. Thanks for having me. I'm looking forward to uh having this conversation. It's gonna be great. Well, I quote you all the time. After you were on Huberman Labs, I told my clients, I want you to listen to this. So if you wonder why I say certain things, it's because of this woman. You can blame it on her. But Stacy, what I love about what you do is that everything that you say and do is really research-based. And that gives you such amazing credibility in my eyes. So I am super excited to have you here. I would like you to start, though, a little bit about your background, your career path, and how you ended where you are right now. Yeah.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

So I never would have imagined being where I am now. Like if you were to ask my mom when I was little what I was gonna be, she's she probably would say, I don't know, behind some book in a library somewhere because I was super quiet and shy. But through my life, finding um just points of conflict where it's like that's just not fair. Like I grew up in a family where we're all about equality and fairness, military family, you know, like there wasn't anything that we weren't allowed to do. We had to try things first. And um, being a female athlete and going to university and finding things that just weren't right, and then looking into things like why are we training this way when we're not responding the same as men, and then not finding any representation of women in any of the textbooks being told across my career, why do you want to study women? We don't know enough about men, and realizing that there is such a massive gap in health research, especially when we're looking at sports science and exercise science. I think the most recent um quote was out of the $460 billion of research funding last year alone, only 1% went to all of women's health research. So if we're thinking about everything that's in women's health research, and 1% of that seems like a lot of money. But if you're thinking about all of our comorbidities, our um disease states, how cancer and Alzheimer's well, Alzheimer's doesn't even have a lot of funding, then you when you disseminate it down into sports, science, and exercise, it's almost nothing. Yeah. So my whole career has been like, I'm a female athlete, I'm at a high level. My friends who were also at that same high level are now coaches, and we want to get the best out of ourselves and our athletes and guide them in the right way. And so that's kind of been why I've taken this path of I want the information for women, I want women to understand their bodies, I want them to be empowered so that if things aren't working for them, they can push back and say, this is not appropriate for my body at this point in my life. So we need to change it up.

Michele Folan:

And you've been on Mel Robbins, you've been on Diary of a CEO. I mean, does it blow you away a little bit that we've got into this place?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. Uh when we hit, like when we got the invite to go on the panel for a diary CEO, and it was about the time like our Instagram was hitting close to a million followers, and my best friend is like, for the influence who are never wanted to be an influencer, I was like, that's exactly it. It's like I am not about, you know, the social media stuff. I just want to educate people, and it resonates. Like you were saying with the science space. So it's like I'm a scientist and I want people to know the information. And I think we've just reached a tipping point where the wave is no longer just a small wave, it's a tsunami. And everyone's like, I am on this and I want to know the information that's right for me because there's so much confusion out there.

Michele Folan:

And I see that with my audience, because these are 50, 55 plus women, and they want this information. And sometimes it's it's hard to swallow. It's stuff that maybe we don't always want to hear, but we've got to hear it, right? And you did a TED talk and you flipped the script with women are not small men. So for women 45 plus, what does that literally mean for how we should train, eat, recover, etc.?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah, I say that women are not small men because one of the things that I was told in my undergrad was, well, we generalize information from men to women because women are too complicated to study because they have a menstrual cycle. And I was like, but men don't have a menstrual cycle and they are not like women. So I don't get this from birth. Well, actually, from before that. In utero, there are sex differences, and we see this. After birth, there are still sex differences in muscle morphology and fueling and metabolism. And then you can have our hormones that come into play that can really exacerbate some of these differences. So if someone's like, oh, uh, you know, you're just the same thing, you know, we're just gonna generalize, like, that does not make sense. And all touch points around the world. You can see from the external touch points, you go into any shop and they have like men's deodorant, women's deodorant, they have men's clothing, female clothing. Well, it comes down to like the things that matter, like sex differences in brain function and brain metabolism, fueling and diet, exercise, exercise habits, the way that we interact with the environment, they're like, oh, just like a man. Like, no, women are not small men. So we have to understand not only that, uh, sex differences from birth, but as we age, we're different too. Because we have definitive points for women when we're thinking about, okay, puberty, there's a big, huge switch between the way that boys and girls respond to this exposure of our sex hormones and the way that we see girls interact with their environment and how self-conscious they are versus boys who would tend to be more aggressive and out there. And then we have our reproductive years, and what does that look like? Are we on any kind of birth control? Do we have any kind of undercurrent of PCOS or endometriosis? Are we naturally cycling? Do we have um times where we have more an-ovulatory cycles because of stress or not? So we have a whole bunch of stuff that's going on in our reproductive years. Then we get to perimenopause, and that can be seven to ten years, and then we get to post-menopause, right? Or we see men, they just have like this puberty, 60 plus aging. So we are, and our bodies are always changing. So when we're talking about how we're adapting, our bodies are really adaptable and stress resilient. So if we're talking about taking the same kind of stress that we put on male physiology to invoke a change in female physiology, we have to take that pause and say, hmm, it's not quite the right stress. If we look at thermoregulation, hot versus cold. Well, women's bodies are designed to perturbate between a lower and a high core temperature across the month of their menstrual cycle. So the environmental stressors are responses are different. So that's why we see differences in cold versus hot responses for women.

Michele Folan:

Oh, and I remember something you said about the cold plunge.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah.

Michele Folan:

How women respond so much more dramatically to cold plunge, where maybe it's not ideal for women to do as cold as men would do. Can you explain that a little bit?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. And I found that really interesting because I think that first came up on the Huberman podcast that you were talking about earlier. And I started as an environmental exercise physiologist. So I was looking at hot, I was looking at cold altitude, that kind of stuff. And it didn't really dawn on me that people didn't realize that there were sex differences in thermoregulation. It's like when you hear all the stuff about how women in the offices are always putting sweaters on because they're too cold, and men, you know, so I was like, but there's all this research out there. But when you come down to the cold water and cold immersion uh like trend that's going on, the results when you're looking at the science behind it, that's been around since the 90s, ice is too cold for women because it's such a severe uh sympathetic stress and survival stress. And it's because we respond differently to hot and cold. So we constrict a lot stronger, we vasodilate first, where men are pretty like standard in how they are, plus we have more body fat. And so there's just lots of different things. So when we're looking at cool water, so that's 14 or 15 degrees Celsius, around that 50, 55 degrees Fahrenheit. We can start to see some really cool, robust endocrine changes that we see with ice for men, but it's still not as strong for women as we see in men. But if you get them into the sauna, we see really cool, robust health benefits from being in the heat for women that aren't nearly as strong for men. Both sexes will benefit. Okay. But we see these differences in the way that women respond to hot and cold versus the way men respond to hot and cold.

Michele Folan:

All right. This is really cool. So what's happening physiologically in perimenopause and menopause that makes our old workouts and our old diets stop being as effective as they were when we were, say, 30?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. There's a whole cascade of events that happen. So we know that every system of the body is affected by estrogen, progesterone, and to some extent testosterone. So those feedback uh responses from those hormones that used to drive anti-inflammatory responses used to drive how fast our muscles can contract and uh produce power and strength, and uh how our bodies um respond to glucose and carbohydrate, those feedback mechanisms become dysfunctional because it's not having the estrogen, the progesterone, and testosterone drive it. So we start to see this dysfunction. We see the one of the very first things that goes is power. So women will say, all of a sudden, like I'm my running pace has gone from seven-minute mile to a nine-minute mile, and I don't know why. It's just happened over the course of nine months, and I just can't get faster. It's because our fast switch fibers aren't responding. Uh, one of our contractile proteins becomes a little bit dysfunctional unless we are doing stuff to counter it. We also see insulin resistance that comes up, and people are like, oh, I had a coffee and now I feel awful. Like my caffeine tolerance is really off, and I feel lightheaded, and we start to see perturbations in our blood glucose. You might get your blood tests back, and all of a sudden you have high cholesterol. You've never had that before, and you're like, what is going on? And that's because we're having a misstep in the way our liver is looking at our free fatty acids, and instead of having estrogen's influence on being able to change those free fatty acids to bring them into our muscle, we're seeing that's not happening. So the liver is saying we need to change these free fatty acids and store them as visceral fat. So we're seeing all these metabolic and body comp changes because of these nuances of feedback mechanisms.

Michele Folan:

And I do recommend that my clients get a fasting insulin because I think that's usually one of the first things that kind of rears its ugly head. And people will say, I haven't changed anything. Exactly. Right? I my diet's the same, I'm working out the same. Why is that changing? And it's like, ugh, I know it's frustrating.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

It's very frustrating. And I'll have women who I'll have them get a DEXA, right? Because those of us who are in our late 40s, early 50s grew up in the whole cardio in, cardio out, let's go for a smash fest. Yep, right there. And so you'll see these women who come in and they look pretty lean, but when you get a DEXA, their bones are really uh low in density. So they're osteopenic, some are osteoporitic, and they have a really high incidence of visceral fat, but it doesn't necessarily come out because you can't see it as well as subcutaneous or under the skin. And like, well, I don't understand what's going on. I'm doing all this cardio. And it's like, but that's not the answer because you're driving a stress response up that's not strong enough to invoke the kind of change that you want. So we have to take that step back and say, okay, well, we know that we want to change our gut microbiome diversity because that takes a massive hit about the four or five years before that one point in time of menopause. Because as we start having a dysfunction in our sex hormones, we start to have less of them. Then the gut bugs that are responsible for kind of metabolizing them and throwing them back out have gone. And unfortunately, we have an overgrowth of the bacteria that really like simple carbohydrates because our bodies under such sympathetic drive, we're tired but wired and we're always stressed, which makes our body go, I need more simple carbohydrate. So the first thing is let's change that gut microbiome, let's increase the diversity, because if we do that, then we also have all the cofactors that allow us to have better insulin control. We also see better cofactors for brain health and BDNF and serotonin for mood control. So then we can start looking at, okay, now what kind of physical activity should I be doing to create an extreme stress that's positive in my adaptation? And that's where people in our age group are like, what do you mean I have to lift heavy and do intensity work? Like, I'm so used to doing 90 minutes aerobic. What happens is learning classes, right?

Michele Folan:

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I, and I think that is one of the hardest adjustments. You know, and I'm like, I get it. You know, I'm very, I'm very empathetic because I know, you know, the the little pink dumbbells that we so religiously have used all these years aren't going to get the job done. But it's what you're saying is that our long deal on the elliptical is also in the rear view mirror.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Exactly. Exactly. So I bring strength to the forefront because it's it's having its heyday as more and more research is being done in strength training. So we look at it from how important it is for women of all ages. And if you're on a strength journey, you've never lifted weights, or maybe you've just done pink dumbbells, then yes, you're going to start there. But we want you to the eye of lifting heavier. We look at the power-based end of the training spectrum. And the reason why I keep going, we need this for older women and for older men too, is power is such an important variable for a health span. We see that you need to be able to produce power, so have that fast twitch grip strength, but also in some regards, understanding we need to protect our fast twitch fibers because that's what gives women more metabolic flexibility. And that's the big words of, you know, we hear this all the time, and you want to do zone two. It's like, well, no, men do zone two because they need to upregulate the amount of fatty acids that they can use and burn. But women need to do more high-intensity work because we need to keep and progress our fast twitch fibers to produce lactate, because we need that for our brain health. So there's all these little nuances within the training spectrum that we are like, okay, so let's look at systematically. Why strength training? Well, we see that one of the very first things, like I was saying, with our run pace that goes and the power that goes, is we have two contractile proteins. We have myosin and we have actin. Myosin grabs onto actin and pulls really hard to create a strong muscle contraction. And the faster that is, and the harder that contraction strength is, is how we produce power. But one of the very first things that goes is myosin's effectiveness of holding on to actin because it's driven by estradiol. So when we see that estradiol starts to decrease, we have a dysfunction in this myosin ability to hold on to actin. If we do heavy strength loads, it is one of the first protocols of a central nervous system or a nerve response to say, hey, myosin, we need to actually have you work. So instead of having estrogen drive myosin, now we're having a nerve response from lifting heavier loads that's making myosin grab onto actin and a very powerful, strong mechanism. So this is how we get our power back if we're working those lower loads. It's one of our first adaptations, right? So when women are so afraid of lifting heavier weights, it's like, yes, you can get strength in anything. It's a diminishing returns, right? So if you don't have a strength background, you start doing body weight, you're going to get stronger. You start pink dumbbells, you're going to get stronger. But if we're looking to actually invoke change for women who already have a strength training journey, we need to look at that heavier, power-based end and then throw in some explicit movements to keep and build that power that's so important for longevity or health span and keeping our muscle function. And it's also sarcopenia prevention. And then the other thing is people think about heavy lifting and getting bulky. No, you don't get bulky because it's not a metabolic stress to create hypertrophy. And it's really hard to build muscle when you're older. You're all about strength and power, right?

Michele Folan:

Tell me about it.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah, right.

Michele Folan:

Yeah. I'm working as hard as I can and I'm eating my protein and I'm 61. So it's it's it's hard. It's a challenge. It is hard, you know. And so on that note, I did I've I've had a DEXA scan and I know I have osteoporosis in my lumbar, but I did I did a full body DEXA where they looked at my body comp. That was eye-opening because I'm I'm a small person, but I have an opportunity, right, to build more lean mass. But you you mentioned a little bit about VO2 Max. Are you doing that type of testing as well to look at longevity?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

I look at VO2 Max, it's interesting how it's come into the conversation. Because being an exercise physiologist, like learning VO2 on the old Douglas bags and that kind of stuff, you're like, what? This is a lab-intensive test to be able to quantify the fitness level. So when we start looking at VO2 coming out in general population, it's like if you have a higher VO2, it just means you have more aerobic and anaerobic capacity. It means you're fitter. So if we're all striving to get fitter and have more stress resilience, then it's going to play out into having a better health span. So I don't put a precedence on we have to do specific VO2 workouts. I'm like, let's look at how we can increase our whole stress resilience and the top end part of our fitness. Because if we're doing that and focusing on all the modalities to improve that top end part of fitness, you're naturally improving your VO2. So if you improve your VO2 and your oxygen carrying capacity and your oxygen consumption and your ability to produce lactate and deal with it, then you are expanding your longevity and health span.

Michele Folan:

All right. I want to get a little differentiation from you on HIIT, so high intensity interval training versus sit. So and then also zone two. So kind of like where should a woman, say, who's 55 years old, be spending her time during the week?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. So if we're looking at it, I look at optimization, right? So if we're looking at people who are already active, who we're generally talking about women who are active and their workouts are no longer working for them. We have to look at optimization. So if we look at zone two, it's not going to optimize. And I say that because women are already really, really good at going long and slow. We have a really good mitochondrial capacity. We have more mitochondrial proteins and density than men do. We also have more slow twitch fibers. We look at zone two as like the soul food. You go out because it's social interaction, it's in nature, and it's more mental release rather than we're trying to invoke change. So it's not off the table, but it's not what we want to do to optimize. If we want to optimize metabolic and brain health and create epigenetic change, we have to really polarize our training. So this is where we have HIT and then the subset of sit. So if we're talking about high-intensity interval training, this is really specific to interval intensity and duration, not going to a CrossFit class or an F45 or an Orange Theory or any of those. We have to be really specific that we are working maybe one to four minutes at around 80, 85% of our max, and we have variable recovery. So this is where the Norwegian 4x4s could come in if we're looking at VO2 or we're looking at like true intensity, four minutes at around 80% and then four minutes off. And you do that four times. That's a true high intensity session. Another one would be taking a page out of the functional fitness where we do every minute on the minute for four minutes, and the fifth minute is off. So you do one higher intensity exercise, and then you switch to another, and then another, and then another. You might have 10 to 20 seconds between each one to switch, and then you have that full minute off, and maybe you do three or four rounds of that. So you have around 20 minutes of real work, and that's it. And you have a cool warm-up and a cool down. So the functionality of that high intensity is because, in order to maintain intensity, you have to work hard, but your body can only maintain that intensity properly for a short amount of time. If we're looking at the 45 to 60 minute classes that are called hit classes, the duration of the intervals and how long that class is isn't short enough to be able to maintain the intensities you need to. So a lot of women will come out feeling smashed and sweaty, but they've really only hit about that 70%, which is too hard to be easy, like our zone two zen out recovery. And it's too easy to invoke the type of change that we want, meaning that it's not true high intensity that's going to create a post-exercise response of increasing our growth hormone, our testosterone, dropping our cortisol, and invoking a lot of the changes that we want. So that's why we have to be really specific on the intensities. Okay. If we're looking at creating more of an epigenetic change so that we are getting crosstalk between our skeletal muscle and our liver so that we don't have visceral fats, which is really important. And we also want to improve our blood pressure because we start to have less blood pressure tolerance, and we see our blood pressure eking up as we get into late peri, early post-menopause. This is where sprint interval training comes in. Now, sprint interval training is a harder subset of high-intensity interval training where we're looking at a really good warm-up of 10 minutes where you're mobilizing, you're making sure everything is really warm, good range of motion, and then you hit 30 seconds as hard as you possibly can, and then you have two to three minutes full recovery so that you can hit the next 30 seconds as hard, if not harder, because the goal is how hard can you go? Because you need that upper, upper, upper intensity. And you might be able to do two at the most three, and then you're completely wiped out, and that's fine. Okay. Because we're looking for the quality, not how many you can do. Yeah, so assault bikes really good because that's a really good mechanism uh or mode to teach people how to go as hard as possible. Ski erg the same because it's really low technique, but high intensity. And when women first start doing it, they don't realize like, I never knew I could go that hard. I want to vomit. It's like, yay, you're doing it right. But it's it's such a, you know, it's it's such a powerful tool to improve cardiovascular health, to improve brain health, to improve the our body composition, all of the things that tend to go to the wayside when we hit perimenopause.

Michele Folan:

All right. I like sprint interval training, and I've been trying to do that. So can you do a treadmill on an incline with that?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

You can, but I'm really hesitant unless it's a non-motorized treadmill. Okay. Because when you start getting tired, right, then if you have it at a certain speed, you might fall off. Or maybe you can go harder than what the speed set. So non-motorized treadmills are really good. But again, sprint interval doesn't have to be just running, it can be any kind of mode as long as you hit that intensity.

Michele Folan:

All right, got it. Stacy, we're gonna take a quick break, and when we come back, I want to talk a little bit about protein and creatine. Quick pause, because if you're here, you already know this isn't just a health podcast. Yes, we talk about nutrition, strength, and taking care of your body and midlife, but we also talk about life, relationships, energy, boundaries, and what really matters in this season. This isn't about perfection or shrinking yourself. It's about staying strong, curious, connected, and actually enjoying the years ahead. If this resonates, share the episode with a friend who'd appreciate the conversation and follow us on Instagram at asking for a friend underscore pod. All right, we are back. I really want to dig into protein because this is one thing that I think there's a lot of misinformation out there about how much protein midlife women need, and is it more than what we needed when we were 30?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. Protein again is having its heyday because we've all talked about fat, we've all talked about carb, right? And remember the snack well era? That was funny. Oh, yeah. Heck yeah. Yeah, yeah. And now that protein's making its heyday, people are like, wait a second. So we have to look at the history. Like when protein RDAs came out, it was um soon after World War II when they were trying to see what was the minimal amount of macronutrients people needed so they wouldn't get sick. So when we look at the um RDA, it's the minimal amount a sedentary individual needs to not get sick. So we know that that does not apply to most active people. As we start to get older, we become more resistant to the antibiotic or tissue building properties to protein and resistance training. So we need more. We also have uh a higher amount of muscle loss just by the nature of getting older. So we need more protein and protein turnover to in order to keep building that muscle. So we start looking at the research, we know that women who are in the reproductive years need at least 1.6 grams per kilogram of body weight. So that hits about that 0.8 gram per pound, I think, if I'm doing the metric conversion properly.

Michele Folan:

Okay.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

As we start getting older, we're seeing that it's closer to 2 to 2.2 grams per kilogram, which hits about that one pound per kilogram or one pound per 1 gram. One gram. One gram of protein.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, thanks.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Thanks. One gram of protein per pound of body weight.

Michele Folan:

And that you would that be desired body weight?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Well, we we can say if we have your optimal body weight, right? Say you are 150 and you want to be 140. If you're hitting 150 grams of protein, that's gonna help facilitate body fat loss and maintain your bone and your lean mass. So it's hit or miss. If you're on the really high end of body weight, then yeah, hit ideal weight and try to be about 50% of your calories from protein. But ideally, we want to go, what's your current body weight? Let's hit about that one gram per pound. And as you are losing weight through a very small calorie reduction, you're gonna maintain lean mass and bone, which is what we're after too. All right. So we see that it does help with satiation, it helps maintain the mass that we want and helps facilitate our body fat loss.

Michele Folan:

And then how do you distribute that out through the day? Like ideally. So, Dr. Stacy Sims, you have protein at what times during the day?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

I uh try to have protein and fiber at every eating opportunity. So before training, I'll have um the infamous protein coffee. It doesn't have fiber in it, but it's really easy to digest. So it gives me about 20 or 30 grams of protein. That I mean, you don't need that much before training, but I'm like, if I'm gonna have coffee and it has protein in it, I'm gonna have a big whack. And then I'll have another 20 to 30 with post-training, which is part of my breakfast. And then at every meal I try to get 30 to 40, sometimes a little bit higher, depending on the meal or what I've been doing. Um, so I end up, you know, looking at all the different types of protein sources that are around. It can be from nuts and seeds and peas and beans and tempeh. And if you are more inclined to eat um animal products than you're looking at fish and chicken. So there's lots of opportunities to get protein in. It's not let's all have a big slab of red meat, which I think is where some of the confusion comes in when we're reading like New York Times and Washington Post and saying you shouldn't have that much protein. It's like those of us that are saying we need more protein, the research shows we need more protein, we're not saying get it from big slabs of meat. We're saying look at all the different sources, including a wide variety of plant sources. We have some dairy, we have some other ways of getting all that protein in because you can really easily get to 130 to 140 grams of protein in a day if you're looking at all the different types of protein that you can put into all your different meals. Do you eat animal protein? I do some dairy when I travel, but when I was 14, we went on a field trip to a pig slaughterhouse for a biology field trip, and uh that kind of put me over the edge of not wanting to have any kind of animal products.

Michele Folan:

Well, and it usually that usually happens when people are younger. They have that experience. There's something and it you're done.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. And being in San Francisco driving down the five towards Hollister, you smell the feedlots. So it's just the way that it all came together in the American food system where I'm like, yeah, no. But like my husband grew up on a dairy farm here in New Zealand, and he's like, What do you mean? We would kill our own cows on the farm. Like, yeah, that's completely different. So yeah.

Michele Folan:

So your protein coffee, is it just coffee with a scoop of protein in it?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Sort of. I'm a bit of a coffee snob. So I make a double espresso the night before, and then I stir my protein powder into cold almond milk so it doesn't get all gluggy. And then I pour the espresso into the cold uh protein and milk mix and put it in the fridge and have the next morning. I pull it out, I stir my creatine in it, and then I go. Okay. I like that. It's easy. It's easy, it's very easy and tasty.

Michele Folan:

Yeah, okay. Yeah, all right, all right. I'm liking this. I'm I'm gonna try that tomorrow morning. All right, creatine. You said creatine, we're gonna talk about creatine. I know there's a lot of studies out there. What are you hearing? What's current? Like, should all women be taking creatine?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

So it I love the fact that it's gotten out of the bodybuilding world recently and it's like made its heyday into um the health sector. It's one of the most studied supplements, which is really interesting that like everyone's after creatine, but the data that's coming out is really compelling because we're seeing every fast energetic system of the body uses it. So, for those who are not aware of what creatine is, when we're talking about our zero to 20 seconds of any kind of cellular activity, we need creatine because it's part of the whole fueling process in that very short amount of time. So, if we're thinking about brain health and all the brain function, we're thinking about the production of neurotransmitters, we're thinking about the way our heart beats, we think about how our intestines work and how we have to keep our mucosal lining so that we don't get kind of leaky gut or endotoxins translocating to places we don't want them to. Creatine is involved in all of that. Okay. Our body naturally produces a few grams per day, and it used to be that most people would eat enough of uh creatine-containing foods that they would be fine, but we're finding that that's not true. We know that women have about 70 to 80 percent of the stores that men do by the nature of having less muscle mass, which is the main powerhouse storage place of creatine. And women tend not to eat as much of our creatine-containing foods. I like to use the example of 20 chicken breasts is about two grams of creatine. So not very many people.

Michele Folan:

Yeah. Yeah, not doing that.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Not so when we start looking at the research, and you know, we know that creatine is so important for all this, we're seeing that when we're looking at randomized controlled trials for depression and anxiety, that women that are using creatine and also a serotonin reuptake inhibitor have less severe depressive and anxious uh episodes and come out of it a lot faster. We see women who are on the cusp of having severe clinical depression. If they're just using creatine, stay out of severe clinical depression. We also, of course, see better muscle function. We're looking at using creatine for sarcopenia prevention because if we're maintaining muscle quality and muscle function, then again, it reduces the sarcopeniaic muscle loss. We see it's involved in bone and bone health as well. Um, and then, of course, your your uh muscle performance from the bodybuilding stuff. So we see all of that. There was a couple of studies that came out looking at fatigue, especially with shift workers and people with jet lag, and they're under high pressure jobs where you start to have a misstep in concentration and using, I think it's 0.38 grams per kilogram, which ends up on that, you know, about 20 grams of creatine split across the day, okay, that it gives you back the focus, even under sleep deprivation and shift work. So we know that's really important for cognitive function. There's a call uh for uh call for proposals to look at creatine and its involvement in sarcopenia and Alzheimer's. So there's so much stuff when we're looking at the health benefits of creatine. I'm like, yeah, it's probably the one thing that every woman should be considered taking.

Michele Folan:

Yeah. And I I do I do suggest that to my clients. So but I'm also you know curious. Most most of the time, you know, starting dose is around five grams. And is that where you kind of stay, or are you pushing it? I mean, for you, I mean, you're more of an athlete.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

So well, I look at it as we know a base dose of of three to five grams per day is really a base dose that helps with every system of the body. I will have people go up higher if they're in heavy training blocks or if they're traveling immensely, or by shift workers. So, you know, our military who are on for three days and then you're doing my night maneuvers, or my firefighters who are on overnight shifts, even my um, you know, like uh medical staff, then we look at how we're circulating to keep that cognitive focus. Um, but for the most part, three to five is really good base dose to keep. And then life will tell you if you need more or not.

Michele Folan:

All right. You know, back to your protein coffee in the morning. I know women are kind of split out there about working out fasted versus not fasted.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah.

Michele Folan:

I think you are on that let's eat something before we work out camp. Absolutely. Um, but can you explain why that is your your philosophy?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. So if we look at the research and we're looking at sex differences and um, well, there's a few layers. First, sex differences in appetite hormone and appetite hormone control, and the way that that can drive the way our endocrine system works. We see that um when women wake up within that half an hour, you have your cortisol awakening response. We wake up and we have an elevation of our acylated garolin, which is our active form of our hunger hormone. We also have an uh elevated uh guess level of what we call peptide YY, which is ironically one that makes us feel not hungry. But if we don't eat something, then that acylated garolin and peptide YY stay elevated and it starts to affect the hypothalamus. And the hypothalamus is like, you haven't had any food yet. You haven't had any food yet. We're under a lot of stress. So it starts going, okay, we need to start conserving things. So we see that women who Hold a fast, will have this perturbance in subsequent appetite control throughout the day. We see that uh they tend to end up moving less throughout the day, so we end up having like the shoulder lean on the wall instead of standing upright, um, looking to sitting more instead of standing more, just subconsciously you start down-regulating all your movements. And we see that there's a significant increase in the craving for simple carbohydrate in the late afternoon. So people are like, I need sugar, I need caffeine in the late afternoon. It is because we have this perturbant in our appetite hormones. The other big thing when we're looking at circadian rhythm and circadian rhythm shift, we know that women and men have different circadian rhythm um lengths. And when we're seeing that the two major things that will drive circadian rhythm is light and dark and food intake. So for women who are getting up in the dark, they're exercising fasted, and then they're not eating, you're phase shifting. So your body's like, I'm awake, but I'm not awake. What's going on? So we see that our melatonin rise that usually starts to go about 8:30, 9 o'clock, that makes us start to get sleepy, it gets delayed. So if we're delaying that, then it's harder to get to sleep. And then we miss the second rise, which normally hits women about 11, it gets delayed even further. And then we don't get into our deep repetitive sleep because we can't. We can't get into that deep sleep. We've phase shifted. If we don't get sleep, then we lose all of the brain quote cleaning, which we like to say in our house, you know, when we're having the clear out of the towel plaques and we're having consolidation of memory and physical activity, as well as the impetus for metabolic control. So when we start seeing all this fasted information that's coming out, it's based on male data because men are different. So they can hold a fast. They're not gonna have the perturbance of the appetite hormones, they're not as sensitive to it. And we also see that men do better when they hold a fast because then their body gets into we got to burn more fat, so they start to become more metabolically flexible. But women, we are already metabolically flexible, so we don't have that response. We have an opposite response where we start down regulating all of our movements, our thyroid, our endocrine system, our appetite hormones get misplaced, and we phase shifts, so our sleep is perturbed, which then leads into feeling more fatigued, having lack of glucose control, having an impetus to put on more belly fat and exacerbates all of these issues that we have in perimenopause. Okay. I just want to hug you.

Michele Folan:

Thank you because I have never been a big fan of intermittent fasting because I'm one of these people that says if you're hungry, you should probably eat. I mean, yeah, because your body's telling you something. I, you know, if if one of my clients went to fast for 16 hours, I'm like, you still gotta get all your macros in. I'm like, that's a lot of food to eat in such a sh like little narrow window. You're not giving your body a break throughout the day. Eat earlier, make it a more normal cadence of eating. So you are you're saying that that's okay. Yep.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

I tell people like if you want to fast, then we look at a 12 to 13 hour overnight fast. Yeah. Right. Because then your body's gonna be able to do what it needs to do, you're gonna get into really good reparative sleep, you're gonna wake up and everything, you're gonna be hungry. And so you're gonna set right, your circadian rhythm is gonna set right, your appetite hormones are gonna set right, all the intricacies of our hormone pulses are gonna be set right. So if you want to follow the trend of fasting, what we do is we get up, we have breakfast, we fuel ourselves during the day when our body needs it. Then we have dinner, then we don't have anything after dinner, and then we have that like long fast overnight. Grandparents call it normal eating, but the trends call it fasting.

Michele Folan:

I know it's so funny. It's like, well, that's kind of how I grew up eating. What why do we have to change that? So I know. Yeah. All right. I'm I'm loving that. All right. I do want to talk a little bit about recovery because you you did talk about sleep. How should recovery change for women in perimenopause and menopause as estrogen drops?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

It becomes a little bit harder for us to recover from a day-to-day perspective because when we're looking at estrogen too, it helps with soft tissue. And we tend to have more soft tissue injuries and less tendon resilience. So we can tend to overdo it if we don't do recovery properly. So when I talk about recovery, um, yes, nutrition is really important, but also working the mobilization, so using resistance bands to get into the joints, open up the capsules, making sure that we're not hunched, that we're opening up, so we can get in all the soft tissues, which helps with recovery. We look at the timing of our workout. So if we're doing one early morning workout, then maybe we're not doing every morning an early morning workout, so we're not impending sleep. And if we do a morning workout and then like an evening workout, you have more recovery between. And then you can look at things like using some heat. So if we're looking at having a really hard workout and then getting into the sauna, one, it extends the cardiovascular stress, so you're getting more out of that workout. But two, it aids in recovery. So we're looking at let's use heat post-exercise. We don't use cold ever because that can impend some of our gains. So recovery can become a nuance. We also see that women who will spend time in a sauna or a spa will sleep better. So part of it is you drive your core temperature up through the heat exposure, and then it drops some plummets, and that's what we need to get to sleep. So we can time some of these recovery mechanisms with women who have difficulty sleeping. So I'll have women who are like, I can't get to sleep, I'm doing all the food stuff right, but I'm still having problems. It's like, okay, well, let's do a really light workout and then get you in the sauna before um you come home from work or right at six o'clock or something like that. So you shoot your core temperature up. So then by the time nine o'clock rolls around and you hit that wave of tiredness, your core temperature is on its way down and you're like, boom, I'm a I'm asleep. So the difference ways of looking at how are we going to use recovery.

Michele Folan:

And do you have a certain set amount of days you think are good for midlife women for recovery, two, three days? Like, what are you suggesting?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah, so it it depends on training history. Like if you're really stress resilient, maybe your body bounces back. But a lot of times people don't realize, especially women, that what you do on Saturday, you're gonna directly feel on Monday. So you might go on Sunday, yeah, I feel pretty good. And then Monday hits you, you're like, whoa, what happened? So, you know, you just have to listen to your body and say, okay, well, if I'm gonna go super hard on Saturday, then I know Monday I'm definitely gonna have to have a recovery day. Or maybe you feel fantastic on Monday, and then you don't realize that Wednesday, you're like, whoa, what happened? So you just kind of got to play around, like when you're planning your really hard sessions and know that it's usually the day after the day after that hit you hard. So maybe you go hard session, a moderate session, and a day off, and then a hard session, a moderate session, and a day off. And when I say moderate, I don't mean moderate intensity. I mean like we're doing some lifting and maybe it's more technique focused instead of heavy lifting.

Michele Folan:

Okay. And then back to the hit and sit, just how many days a week would you plug those in?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah. So um, if I were to look at a woman who is time crunched, like most of us, because you know, we have partners or we have kids, we're working, careers, all the things that go around it. I'm like, if you have three days of 45 minutes, this is what you do. The first day you go in, you mobilize for 10 minutes and warm up really well, and then you focus on one compound movement. So maybe it's your squat day. So you're doing uh you know, focused, heavy squats, and then you're complementing with maybe some single-leg bulb Bulgarian split squats, so you're really getting into that whole knee forward hinge motion. And then you finish with some plumetric or some sprint intervals. Then you can replicate that three times a week, not just squat, but you're changing the compound movement. So one's a squat day, another's a push-pull day, and then another is posterior chain day. That covers you, right? So you have your heavy lifting, you have your mobilization for recovery and joint and tissue, and then you have your high intensity and jumping, which covers you. But if you're like, okay, I want to do something a little bit different stays. Okay, then we're going, you do your heavy lifting, great. And then if we can get two sprint interval sessions or one sprint and one true high intensity interval session, you're good to go. So minimum three lifting sessions and one hit and one sit.

Michele Folan:

Okay. No, I I like that. I because I think that's that's doable. We're not talking being at the gym for two hours because nobody got time. It doesn't work for anyone. No, no, no. It doesn't work. How much sleep do you try to get at night?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Oh, I uh someone asked me, okay, what's your favorite thing as like sleep?

Michele Folan:

Me, me too.

Dr. Stacy Sims:

Yeah, I know. So I used to be, you know, like earlier, it's like, oh, I don't need sleep. I mean, I don't, but now I'm like, I need to be in bed by 9:30. I might read till 10 and I'm up at seven. So, you know, I know that I'm sleeping most of that time. Uh, when I'm traveling, it's a little bit different, but I really try to get that seven to nine hours. And there's sometimes where I need more, and then sometimes where I can get by with a little bit less. Do you have a daily non-negotiable? Yes. I am like a dog. I need to be outside every day. So I go outside every morning for about 10 minutes before anyone else is up, and I have my my coffee, and I just listen to the early morning and breathe in all that early morning, no one else is around. And that's my piece of the day. I love it.

Michele Folan:

That I love that. And I don't know, am I hearing the ocean in the background?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

We live really close, but what you're hearing is we are in a major windstorm. Oh, really? Yeah. This is the time of year uh that New Zealand gets the side currents of a lot of the fronts that are coming in. So there was some um massive thunderstorms yesterday and some tornadoes, and now we're having the wind. And this is normal for them. Oh my gosh. Anyone in the States would step outside and think we were in a hurricane.

Michele Folan:

Because I can hear it. I was like, oh, she lives right near the ocean. I was getting really jealous because I've got five inches of snow outside where I am. Yeah. No, no, no, it's wind. Okay. All right. Well, listen, I want to say to the listeners to check out Stacy's website. It is a gold mine of research. There's courses, there's practical tools for women. If a midlife woman wants to start implementing your methodologies today, what specific resources would you recommend on your site? Where should they start?

Dr. Stacy Sims:

So I would say go to our newsletter and our blog section because we have some specific things that will differentiate what's sit, what's hit, what's heavy lifting. So you can really get educated on it. And then we have links to if you want to do uh a Hayley Power Happens program that will get you started lifting, then you can do that. If you are looking at like what's hit and sit, we have guidelines for that too. How to eat. So it's like if you go to the blogs and you read about stuff, then we have links off that that will direct you on your path.

Michele Folan:

All right. That is perfect. Dr. Stacy Sims, I am so grateful to have you on the show today. This was so much fun talking to you. And uh thanks for being a guest. Oh, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Thank you. Before you go, thank you for being here. If you want to go a little deeper, make sure you check out the show notes for this episode. That's where I link anything we mentioned, resources, partners, or tools I actually use and trust. And if you're not already on the Asking for a Friend community newsletter, that's where I share practical midlife tips, favorite finds, recipes, and the things that don't always make it onto the podcast or Instagram. You'll find the link to join in the show notes. Take care, and I'll see you next week.