Why a 1200-Calorie Diet Fails Women Over 40

Stacy: So when we get to postmenopause, we have those patterns into play. But if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I'm well past perimenopause, it's not too late to start. If we start lifting heavier, we're putting stress on the ligaments and the tendons and the muscle, and we're also building bone to support that. And when people are like, oh, I'm 62, how can I lift heavy? Well, we don't want you to go in and do a heavy deadlift right now. Let's look at where you are and phase it in a relative way, just like we would any other person in any other phase of their life.

Nikkiey: All right, you guys. Today is a really special episode of The WarriorBabe Show because I've got someone on who I've followed, respected and learned so much from over the years: Dr. Stacy Sims. If you don't already know who she is, she's a world-renowned exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist who's flipped the script on the one-size-fits-all approach to fitness and performance, especially when it comes to women.

She is the author of Roar and Next Level, and her mission is grounded in one of the most powerful truths out there: women are not small men. We need to train, we need to fuel and we need to recover differently, especially the women listening right now who are navigating hormonal changes as they go through perimenopause or menopause. So today we're diving into how women can build muscle, lose fat, feel strong and actually understand their bodies. This episode, guys, is going to be packed with truth bombs, and I can't wait to get into Stacy's brain and have her drop all of this knowledge here.

Dr. Sims, welcome to The WarriorBabe Show.

Stacy: Thanks for having me. I've been looking forward to this.

Nikkiey: Let's go. I want to kick it off with training first. I've got buckets in my brain that I want to go down with you. I want to do training, nutrition, supplements and recovery. And then I've got a little fun game we can play at the end, if you're open to that.

Stacy: Okay. Sounds good.

Nikkiey: Cool. So first, I want to kick it off with training, because I feel like this is where most women feel totally lost. The things that worked in their 20s, their 30s, sometimes even their early 40s, it's just not cutting it anymore. A lot of women do cardio. They do HIIT. They do light weights. The WarriorBabe community is super hungry to build muscle, to feel strong and to stop spinning their wheels in the gym. But a lot of them just don't know where to start or what's actually best for their body now. So what actually changes in how women should train once they hit this stage of life, like perimenopause and menopause?

Stacy: I like to bring people back to that conversation around puberty. We've all been through it. We know that your body changes, you have all these things that happen, and then you get your menstrual cycle. Now we're on the other side of things, where our body is unwinding our ovarian function. So what does that mean? We're having more and more anovulatory cycles. We're not dropping an egg, and when we don't drop an egg, we don't produce progesterone. We're also seeing more flux of estrogen.

Our body has been affected by a continuous cycle of estrogen and progesterone for decades, and now every system of the body is starting to be affected. We see brain changes and cardiovascular changes. You go get a blood test and all of a sudden you have high cholesterol, and you're like, I've never had that before, I don't have a family history. It's primarily because of estrogen and progesterone and how they interplay in every system of the body. When we talk specifically about skeletal muscle, estrogen is tightly tied to how our muscles respond and how strong and powerful our contractions are.

On the other side of things, with aging our body is becoming less and less responsive to protein intake and to resistance training. So all these women who up to this point have been like, oh yeah, I get 20 grams of protein after training, I've done my HIIT, I've done my CrossFit metcon, I've done my 3x10s or 3x15s, I've gone to fatigue. None of that works now, because our body's like, wait a second, we need more protein to stimulate anabolism, or building muscle.

We also need to find a different stressor that's going to create an adaptive response, because our bodies are kind of used to not being threatened. If we can create a stress that the body reads as a threat, the body goes, oh, I've got to build more muscle, I've got to have a powerful contraction. Then it's going to respond in kind. So when we translate that, what are we doing? We want to look at that power-based range of lifting, or we want people to learn how to lift heavy properly.

We want to do compound movements. We want adequate rest between our sets because we want a central nervous system response. If we're having a central nervous system response, it's the nerve saying, hey, wait a second, I need to be able to stimulate all of these muscle fibers for a really strong contraction. How am I going to do that? Okay, I need more of this neurotransmitter around so I can actually jump and contract these muscle fibers.

In these muscle fibers, I also need my myosin and actin to be really on point. So let's stimulate the myosin a bit more so the myosin and actin contract strongly and bond together. And if we have continuous stress from the central nervous system and the peripheral nervous system, the body is like, okay, I need to build more mass to keep up with what's happening from the brain. So when we look at the training scope, it's no wonder that people who are used to doing HIIT and higher reps with lower weights aren't seeing a change.

It's not the right kind of stress we need when we're starting to have these changes in our hormones.

Nikkiey: That makes total sense. So for the women doing those types of activity, you're saying focus more on compound movements and put more stress on the body with the weights. How about women who are in menopause? Is it the same thing, strength training and compound movements? Is there anything that would be done differently during that phase of life?

Stacy: No. What's happening is we're having that wind-down during perimenopause. So we start to put those new patterns into place and the body responds, because the biggest change in body composition occurs over the menopause transition.

When we're doing heavier weights and actually loading the body properly, not only are we stimulating lean mass development, we're also stimulating bone. Both of those are really important. So when we get to postmenopause, we have those patterns into play. But if you're listening to this and you're like, oh, I'm well past perimenopause, it's not too late to start. If we start lifting heavier and putting stress on the ligaments, the tendons and the muscle, we're also building bone to support that. And when people are like, oh, I'm 62, how can I lift heavy? Well, we don't want you to go in and do a heavy deadlift right now. Let's look at where you are and phase it in a relative way, just like we would any other person in any other phase of their life.

Nikkiey: So what you're basically saying is lifting is essential. It's not optional, really.

Stacy: Right. Exactly.

Nikkiey: Amen to that.

Stacy: Even with young kids, right? We have that fear of lifting and development, but it's about functional movement and getting them used to pushing and pulling, because we don't do that in a natural environment anymore.

Nikkiey: Yeah, totally. Why is it so important? Why is building muscle so important? Why is resistance training so important?

Stacy: Because cardio has had this vibe for a hundred years, right? We have to do all this stuff for our heart. And trust me, I know, I'm a retired endurance athlete. But when we start looking at being able to age well and not get old, we want brain health. We want cognitive function. We want to be able to carry our groceries into our kitchen. We want to be active with our grandkids and grow old with our partner, or not grow old, but age well with our partner.

It's become muscle-centric. When we look at the push, pull and load, what muscle does for us, and how metabolically active it is: the more metabolically active tissue we have, the better blood glucose control we have and the better our blood lipids are. We're not looking to store that visceral fat, so we have less of a threat from cardiovascular risk factors. We also want to build muscle so that we're pulling torque on the bone, because then we have strong bones and we don't have that risk of having chalk for bones and stepping off the curb and breaking a hip.

We're in that bubble where we're like, yes, strength training for the win. But we also want to remember it's not just for now. It's protecting us so we age well and don't get old.

Nikkiey: Yes. I got full body chills there. So much alignment. I love the knowledge you have, how you dive into the science and what you stand for. This message just needs to keep getting louder and louder. What would you say is the ideal weekly training split for someone who's 50 years old and wants to build muscle?

Stacy: We see that the minimum is two times a week, and that's total body movements. If we're doing total body compound movements, we're really focusing on strength, and that's great. If we want to start accumulating more lean mass, and that's bone and muscle, then we're looking at three times. That's the minimum. You don't really want to eke it out to going every day, which some people do because they think more is better, because we also need to focus on recovery.

You can't build without recovery. People are always like, oh, I can't spend that much time in the gym. If you have an hour a week divided into 20-minute segments three times a week, you can get a lot done in 20 minutes in the gym when you're strength training.

Nikkiey: Heck yeah. So many women think it's about moving the body more. They've come from the age of I need to eat less and I need to train more. And now the narrative is that less is more, right? We see women who want to train six days a week, and they have a hard time breaking that habit and understanding that less is more, that two or three times a week is all you really need. How would you navigate a situation like that with someone and say, hey, we need to pull it back, and here's why?

Stacy: I feel like that's a conversation I have every day, many times a day.

Nikkiey: I bet. Same.

Stacy: Same. I should just be like, go to this podcast and listen to it, and the answer is right there. Coming from the endurance background, a lot of my friends are still in that world, and I have friends who are coaches, so they're still locked in that mentality.

Then the general everyday person is like, oh, I need to get X amount of steps per day and go to the gym and do this and that. I'm like, well, actually what we want to do is polarize. If you work out every day, can you hit a max intensity on one of those days? And they're like, what do you mean? Can you do sprint interval training on one of those days? Can you go 30 seconds full on, as hard as you can, and repeat that a few times? Most people are like, well, yeah. Then they go try it and they're like, no, I'm always too tired. That's the thing. You're always at this moderate intensity.

If you're exercising every day at the same intensity, trying to do the same thing with the idea of burning calories to lose weight and change body composition, you're not. You're just creating a cascade of sympathetic drive and stress that won't allow your body to understand exercise stress. From a mental standpoint, sure, maybe we want to go outside every day, but that doesn't mean doing the same intensity every day. So we pull it back and say we want three key training days in a week.

And these are the intensities we want. When you go to lift and you're only lifting, it's hard. You leave feeling like you've done some work. It's not about supersetting to try to get the burn. It's about actually putting in the hard work, because that's how the body responds. So when we start putting in these little teaser tests of how hard you can go and how well you can recover, people start to get it. It takes some time, but it's all about seeing how you can polarize it. Here we have a hill that everyone likes to walk up.

I ask, how long does it take you to walk up the mountain? People are like, oh, I don't know, I go up and down a couple of times. I say, let's go up once and try to get up there in 12 minutes. Most people are like, no, I can't do it. I'm like, if you're rested and recovered, you can do it. So then people try, and they're like, oh my God, that was so hard, but I feel so good. And I say, yeah, but don't do that every day.

Nikkiey: I love that. I love that you touched on sprint intervals too. I've been loving your recent content about sprint intervals. What's your take on that versus doing LISS, steady-state cardio?

Stacy: I don't want to take away people's soul food, right?

Nikkiey: Yeah.

Stacy: People like to do low-intensity work because it's a social thing and a stress relief. That's fine. But when it comes down to the bread and butter, what we're trying to do with regard to maximizing cognition and attenuating any kind of cognitive decline, as well as better metabolic health and body composition, we have to put in that sprint interval work. So it's that balance. I'm not a huge fan of sprints.

I like the feeling afterwards, and I know how beneficial they are, so I'm going to do them. But then on the weekend, I'm out on my bike for hours with friends because it's fun and it's social. That's what I mean. Pick your quality during the week if you can, and then find that soul food as a way to feed your soul, but not as the be-all and end-all of what you're doing.

Nikkiey: Amen. I love that. And I love it so much more because you have that endurance background, so you can speak to blending the best of both worlds.

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Stacy: And I find that when women in particular are in their mid-40s and they used to do endurance, they get into it now and they're like, I feel slow.

I don't feel like I can run. I can't ride very well. I don't know what's going on. And they become disenchanted with what they used to love. I say, well, let's just pull it back. Don't do it every day. Don't do it for hours and hours. Let's look at the quality. Let's look at where you want to go. And you can find your soul food again.

Nikkiey: One last question on training, and then I want to dive into the nutrition bucket. Is there a best time to train based on the hormone fluctuations we expect? Say we're not in perimenopause or menopause, with fluctuations that are, like, normal. Not normal, that sounds terrible. You know what I mean. We're still getting our menstrual cycle.

Stacy: Reproductively.

Nikkiey: Yes. Still in the reproductive years. Is there a best time to train during the cycles we go through on a monthly basis?

Stacy: Yeah. The science has evolved over the past six years, which I'm happy to see, because now we have more and more research on women. We know from a molecular standpoint what happens when we have low estrogen and progesterone. This is when we can really go hard. We recover well.

We have all these great things going for us, including our immune system. Then after ovulation, we start to have a change, and we have to be a little more cognizant of what we're doing. But we don't know when people ovulate. Even women don't really realize whether they ovulate or not, because you'll still have a bleed, but the bleed pattern might be a little different. So what we're saying now, from an applied sports science point of view, is that we want you to track and understand how you feel across the cycle. That gives you more insight, and it empowers you to know, well, I have this training session I want to do, it's really high intensity and I want to nail it.

But it falls around the time when I always feel a bit flat, so I'm going to move it. You still have the opportunity to do that session and get the training benefit, but you don't have to do it on a day when you're fighting it. You find your own patterns, because some women feel really awful mid-cycle and then start to feel better on either end, and some women feel really bad the week before their period starts. So let's not fight it. Let's really understand how we feel and how our body is responding to these hormone fluxes, and dial it in that way.

Nikkiey: Damn, I feel like that could be a whole other podcast right there.

Stacy: Absolutely.

Nikkiey: So that's totally good. I've got so many questions for you and I want to pack it all into this one episode. But let's shift gears to nutrition, because that's where I feel a lot of women are stuck. Every conversation I have with someone on nutrition, I'm looking at them like a deer in headlights. Women are eating 1,100 or 1,200 calories thinking it's going to help them drop fat.

They think it's going to help them drop weight. But they're not seeing the progress they want to see. In fact, they're gaining weight, they're losing muscle or they're feeling constantly exhausted. And they think something is wrong with them. That's a narrative I hate to hear, and I want anyone listening to know that's not the case. You're not broken. I want this conversation to help them see that, one, it's not their fault, and two, they just need the right strategy for where their body is at now.

So with all that being said, many women are eating 1,100 or 1,200 calories and wondering why they aren't seeing progress or losing fat. Can you speak to the danger of that, especially for women in menopause, and more broadly the danger of eating just 1,100 or 1,200 calories?

Stacy: Yeah, it's not enough. We've been caught in this narrative, probably from the 100 years of cardio stuff, of calories in, calories out, eat less, burn more.

We have to remember that we are inherently biological beings that require food. If we're not eating enough to support general health, the body perceives it as a threat. The body is like, wait, I want to stay alive, so I'm going to start conserving every possible high metabolic cost I can. If you're only eating 1,100 to 1,200 calories a day, that's not really even enough to touch your resting metabolic rate. We see that, on average, resting metabolic rate is around that 1,100 to 1,200 calorie point.

That's lying in bed and not even blinking. That's the basic amount your body needs to survive: breathing, heart rate, blood circulating, the brain and everything. As soon as you get up to pee, you need more calories. Your body needs food for all of these energetics. And if you're not eating, your body is like, I'm bringing it all down. I'm only going to allow the essentials to work well. I need to preserve the brain.

I'm going to keep trying to fuel the brain. I don't have enough blood sugar, so I'm going to start using free fatty acids or ketones and amino acids. Where does that come from? It comes from your lean mass. Your lean mass is very metabolically active, and it's one of the first things the body is going to go after and say, hey, you're too metabolically active, I can't conserve you, so I'm going to break you down and use you for the sum of your parts. So when we see women who aren't eating enough, we see this.

They put on belly fat. They put on a lot of extra subcutaneous fat. They look a little puffy. They're losing lean mass. They're not responding to training. And then they can't sleep well, because they're in sympathetic drive, where the body is in a highly stressed state: there's no nutrition coming in, I'm getting ready to fight or flight. That's the continuous feeling. When we get into the menopause transition, unfortunately, we see a big shift in body composition with the change in hormones, because the body is under sympathetic drive.

That's why we're always feeling tired but wired. We're having these shifts, and the body is under a bit of normal stress from them because it's starting to find a new biological set point. So we start seeing conversations between the liver and the free fatty acids floating in the blood, where the liver says, I need to store you in and around the organs in case I need to access you. That's why we get visceral fat. We also see that insulin has less ability to pull sugar into the muscle.

We have more insulin resistance, because the body is like, I need to conserve blood sugar, I need it for the brain. So there are all these things going on because we're under a bit of stress. If we say, let's feed the body and train appropriately, we start to see better conversations across the organs. That allows us to not store visceral fat, but to take fatty acids into the skeletal muscle to be used at rest, and to increase our body's ability to pull glucose into the skeletal muscle and the liver without insulin.

So we start to see better metabolic health. If we're not feeding the body, we don't even start to have an impetus for that.

Nikkiey: I feel like everybody needs to rewind that whole last bit and listen to it over and over again. I'm over here with chills, screaming yes in my head because of everything you just said. I'm so glad you said that. The way you broke it down makes it so understandable what is actually going on. A lot of women don't know, hey, this is what's happening around my liver.

That visceral fat equals this. The brain doesn't compute like that for women who don't have the knowledge you have, or aren't in the bubble we're in where we eat, sleep and breathe this stuff. So thank you. That's exactly the message I want to keep hammering home, so women can understand how important it is to eat food and eat the right amount of food.

Stacy: And enjoy it.

Nikkiey: Exactly. And enjoy it.

Stacy: I don't like the stigma. We all grew up in that stigma: no carb, low carb, high carb, low fat.

There's always a stigma around one of the macronutrients. So everyone has this disconnect about what it means to be nourished versus what it means to eat ultra-processed food and be overfed and undernourished. I want people to come back to a relationship with food that makes them feel good, to eat well and to have the benefit of being fed well. You can't expect to build a strong body while you're underfeeding it.

Nikkiey: No.

Stacy: You need abundance. Not overabundance from crappy food, but abundance to stimulate the hypothalamus to say, yeah, let's go build this muscle.

And let's get rid of this extra fat, because we want more metabolically active tissue to help us do all the things we want to do.

Nikkiey: Yeah. Let's dive into the flip of that. We talked about what happens when you under-eat. When you start actually giving your body the food it needs and wants, what happens in the body at that point?

Stacy: This is where I've been having lots of protein conversations recently.

Nikkiey: I was going to dive into that eventually.

Stacy: Yeah. We're starting to see the spotlight on protein as a macronutrient.

And people are wondering why. Why are we all of a sudden talking about protein? Because we're having more and more studies around it. We're seeing that if you increase your calorie intake with a higher percentage of protein while you're trying to change body composition, you get a benefit, because protein isn't just for muscle. It's for neurotransmitters. It's for nerves. It's for so many other things, even bone. Protein is a building block of almost everything in the body. So if we eat higher-quality protein more often during the day to increase our calories, we're also stimulating the growth of bone, muscle and neurotransmitters, and reducing sympathetic activity.

We get a whole bunch of benefits. If we increased by fat, we wouldn't get the same thing. If we increase by ultra-processed carbohydrate, we definitely don't get the same thing. So when we start increasing our calories, we want to think about two things. One, how are we promoting the growth of positive tissue? And two, most importantly, how are we helping our gut microbiome? Because if we have a relatively non-diverse gut microbiome, we don't have any kind of change.

We don't have any kind of impetus for better health. So when women say, well, I don't even know how to increase my calories, I tell them to reach for protein and fiber. Lots of colorful fruit and veg. If you're also adding nuts, seeds and legumes, you're putting in some protein. Then look at all the other types of protein you can bring in. If you're on 1,100 calories a day, I don't want you to go tomorrow and say, oh, I need 2,000 calories. Slowly eat it up over the course of a month. Find eating opportunities.

Most people don't know what it means to be fed. They only know what it feels like to be hungry, and they don't even tie into that. We see a disconnect in our appetite hormones. The more we hold on to elevated cortisol, the more it reduces our ability to feel hungry and our ability to feel full. So we have to reteach the body that. Having an eating opportunity that includes protein, some fiber and carbohydrate allows the hypothalamus to understand that.

That means better connection with our appetite hormones and a reduction in cortisol production.

Nikkiey: Love that. I love that protein is getting the highlight nowadays, as opposed to before, when it never really did.

Stacy: Never did. Not until the past three or four years, when people started going, okay, I can't do carbs, I'm scared of carbs, I can't put in fat. We've seen the trends of keto and all that stuff, and now the focus is on protein. And people are still afraid to eat more protein.

I don't know if it's the fear of eating more, or the myth that it's going to cause kidney issues. There are so many things around it that we need to unpack, and make people understand that our general recommendations for daily protein intake are based on the minimal amount you need not to be undernourished or malnourished in protein. So that's the bare minimum if you're lying in bed watching Netflix. As soon as you start to move, you need more.

Nikkiey: What is that real target? People say 0.8, people say one gram per pound of body weight, 1.2. It varies. So what is the real target?

Stacy: It does vary depending on where you are in a training block and how old you are. For younger women, it's about 1.6 grams per kilo. That's about the 0.8, if you're recreationally active and not in a heavy training block. That's your bare minimum. But as soon as you put in a really heavy training block or you have a lot of stress in your life, you want to eat that up to about one gram per pound.

When we start to get older, when you hit your mid-40s, you become more anabolically resistant to protein and exercise. So this is where the low-end target is definitely that one gram per pound. Heavy training, heavy stress, heavy travel: eat it up to 1.1 or 1.2. But it can fluctuate depending on where you are and what your lifestyle is with regard to stress and building.

Nikkiey: I hear you. It's so individual.

This journey of eating and training comes down to the lifestyle needs of the individual, to make it sustainable for them. If I could pinpoint one avatar for somebody listening to this episode right now, so you could give some immediate guidance on what they may be struggling with: maybe they're traveling nonstop. They're experiencing symptoms of menopause, going a couple of months without their period and then getting it back.

They're stressed, and they're training five days a week. What would be a good protein intake for that individual? That may be really hard to answer.

Stacy: Yeah, I know. I think you just described my life.

Nikkiey: Honestly, I'm thinking about one of my babes, and I just want to be able to help her right now, you know?

Stacy: Yeah. So definitely hit that one gram per pound.

That's the target. People think it's really difficult, especially if you're traveling. How do I get that protein? You're looking at different eating opportunities, and you're bringing stuff with you. If you're traveling internationally, you can't have nuts, but if you're traveling nationally, you can. You can have protein powders. You can have little individual packs of edamame and green peas. There are things you can have on planes. You can stop at a gas station, get a yogurt and stir in your protein powder.

There are things you can do. At every eating opportunity, you're grabbing some protein. And if you look at the different types of protein, you're also getting fiber. When you're under that travel stress, going from hotel room to hotel room and through weird time zones, having that protein helps you get into a parasympathetic state and into good sleep too.

Nikkiey: I love that. Be resourceful.

Stacy: And look at options.

Nikkiey: Okay. We talked a little bit about carbs. I want to hear your take on carbs, because so many women, like we just said, are terrified of them. There are myths around them, like you shouldn't eat them because they'll make you fat.

Stacy: I know. I'm like, oh, no. Again, it's the type of carbohydrate. Women need more carb than men just by the nature of having a more robust endocrine system. That's not just sex hormones. It's thyroid as well, and our appetite hormones. We're also more sensitive to low blood sugar because our body uses blood sugar faster than men's does.

I think the fear came from the super high-carb diets that were in vogue in the 80s and early 90s. It was pasta and rice and bread, and people who weren't active were trying to follow that too. Then it morphed into a higher sugar content. So we have to unpack what carbohydrate means. We want a lot of variety in carbohydrates. Yes, that's fruit and veg. It's whole grains. It's also sprouted grain bread or sourdough bread.

Don't be afraid of it, because it's all super beneficial. If you're having protein with it, it helps moderate blood sugar. If you have a sweet tooth, find a time and a place. Right after training is a great time to have higher sugar content, because that sugar gets put into your liver and your muscle even without insulin. We know that post-exercise is an acute recovery period where your body just soaks it up. So there is a time and a place for the things you think you shouldn't have.

But for the most part, you should have lots of different colorful carbohydrate foods with your protein at every meal. Again, that helps the gut microbiome, and it also helps stabilize blood sugar.

Nikkiey: Love that. How about cycling or timing carbs around workouts, like you just mentioned? What's the deal there? Or should it just be: focus on getting your carbohydrate intake balanced throughout the day from fruits, veggies, whole grains, sprouted grains, all that kind of stuff?

What do we do?

Stacy: I'll scope it two ways. One, if it's a recovery day or you haven't had time to train, you want to eat with your circadian rhythm. Eat within half an hour of getting up. Have carb and protein at pretty much every meal. When you get toward the end of the day, you really want the carbohydrate to come from fruit and veg, because then you have the fiber component and you don't get big spikes in blood sugar right before bed.

We also see that a higher protein content at dinner helps feed forward to more metabolic recovery and repair while you're sleeping. So think higher carb moving into higher protein throughout the day. If we're looking at training, and you're going to train first thing in the morning, you get up and have a little bit of carb and protein. Not a lot: 15 grams of protein, 30 grams of carbohydrate. People ask, what does that look like? A couple of tablespoons of low-fat Greek yogurt and a little bit of honey.

There you go. Then you have your real breakfast half an hour to 45 minutes after training. With that breakfast, you want a good hit of protein and some carbohydrate. We're taking advantage of that open window to pull carbohydrate in and to signal the hypothalamus that we're not under exercise stress anymore. Let's start rebuilding and repairing. It also tells the hypothalamus, hey, you don't have to start conserving things. You don't have to stay in a breakdown state because there is nutrition here. And then you can go on with your day.

We want to use training as a way to manipulate signals to the brain to really change body composition. So many women are like, I'm going to do fasted training, and then I'm not hungry after training, so I'll withhold food until my next meal. You're staying in this big breakdown state that's a threat to the hypothalamus, the central area of the brain that controls so many things, like thermoregulation, appetite hormones, sex hormones and thyroid. If you're in that big hole of no food, the brain goes, yep, not enough.

I'm going to start turning things down. So let's use eating opportunities in and around training as a way to maximize our ability to hit the intensities we want, recover well, and help the brain understand that we are not in a significant famine. We have the opportunity to build muscle.

Nikkiey: Mic drop.

Stacy: Yes.

Nikkiey: Say it louder. Let me eat some food, please. Yes.

Amen to that. I remember when I first got into the fitness space and was learning all of these things, over a decade ago now. I told someone they should try giving their body a little bit of food before they work out. And they were like, no, I've never done that before. I can't do that. I'm never hungry. I feel like I'm going to get sick. The way I would explain it is, well, your body has just never been used to that. You've been doing it this way your whole life. Your body needs to try something different.

You need to put something into your body to do exactly what you just broke down scientifically.

Stacy: I still get pushback: I can't eat that early in the morning. I'm not telling you to have a full meal. I'm just saying bring your blood sugar up.

Nikkiey: Exactly.

Stacy: Give it some amino acids. Just a little bit.

Nikkiey: A couple of bites of Greek yogurt and honey. It's like nothing, but it's just the perfect amount that you need.

Stacy: Exactly.

Nikkiey: Hey, while you're listening, if you're getting value from this episode, take a moment to tap that review button or share this podcast with a friend. It's a small gesture that goes a long way in helping more women find their way to feeling stronger and more confident in their skin. I appreciate you so much for taking the time to support this show.

All right. How about food? Are there any foods or nutrients women should focus on specifically to support estrogen, cortisol and thyroid function? Are there specifics you could hammer out, like three or four?

Stacy: When we look at whole food nutrition, the big thing is taking care of the gut.

That's all of our fibery fruits and veggies and whole grains. Protein, which we've talked about. And the timing of our food to work with our circadian rhythm, so fueling for the day and then winding down. We're not eating after dinner, so we can sleep well. I see a lot of people who misconstrue this and hold food until noon, or they eat something in the morning and then have a big hole in the day because they're too busy, and then they stack their calories at night. They're resetting their circadian rhythm, and they're not going to sleep well, because now the body is like, oh, there's all this food, okay, I've got to use it.

So I really try to get women to understand that we want to fuel for the task at hand, which is our daytime activities, whatever we're doing. Then we want to allow the body to rest overnight while we're sleeping so it can do what it needs to do. When we look at specific foods that are really beneficial at this point, we see omega-3 fatty acids, through fish, walnuts, flax, that kind of stuff, or even supplementation. And then we can talk about supplementation, because the other really critical thing is creatine.

I know women aren't going to eat 20 chicken breasts in one day to get the amount of creatine their body needs. So this is where supplementation comes into play.

Nikkiey: Okay, I want to dive into that next. That was my next bucket with you. That's another area where I think women get pretty overwhelmed. The first question I typically get asked is, what supplements do I need to buy? They're spending money on green powders, collagen, fat burners, random menopause blends, who knows what the fuck is out there now.

Stacy: I know.

Nikkiey: And half the time they don't even know what it's for. So I'd love for you to cut through the noise. What's actually worth it? And since you just brought up creatine, I'd love for you to dive into that, because creatine is getting a lot of attention right now, in very positive ways, and I'd love your take on it.

Stacy: If we think about supplementation, it's the icing on the cake. It's highly unregulated, and people think, oh, I need to take this and that and this and that. I need my multivitamin. I need my greens.

But let's look at the diet first. We can really get what we need from our diet. A supplement is called a supplement for a reason. It supplements whole foods. It's not there to take the place of what we're eating. So if you know you're low in magnesium, then take it. But for the most part, we know most women will really benefit from omega-3s, vitamin D, especially in postmenopause, and creatine, creatine monohydrate.

Those are the big three. So why? We want omega-3 fatty acids because they're really good at antioxidative properties. When our cells are under a lot of stress and we get free radicals, omega-3s come in and help mitigate some cellular damage. And when we think about peri- and postmenopause, when our body is under a lot of stress and our cells are going through a lot of changes and relying on different signaling, we want to support that with omega-3s. They're also really important for brain health.

Then we think about creatine monohydrate. Again, this is one that's getting a lot of press. It's the most studied supplement in all the research across years, and it's super beneficial for health and performance. It used to have that big bodybuilding idea, where you load creatine to increase bulk and your muscles' ability to do work.

But we're not talking about those high doses. We're looking at three to five grams a day. Over the course of three weeks, your body will fully saturate. And what does it do? That's the big question. I should take it, but what does it do? Creatine is really important for every fast energetic in the body. Think about the brain and how fast our neural connections are. All of that relies on our ATP-CP fueling system, and creatine is part of that. We think about our gut. We think about our heart.

We think about muscle performance. All of those require creatine. Women have about 70% to 80% of the stores men do, by the nature of having less muscle mass. And unfortunately, women don't eat enough to supply what they need. When we look at the research and understand how important it is, we also see that as we get older, we store less. So it's important to get that creatine in. More and more studies are coming out showing that when you're under fatigue and high stress, dosing creatine at five grams twice a day improves your capacity to be more stress resilient.

We see people who have IBS or gut issues, and we see a lot of uptick in gut issues in perimenopause because of the disconnect with our estrogen receptors. Creatine helps maintain the integrity of our intestinal cells, because the creatine that's there helps keep the mucosal lining intact, even under stress.

There are so many benefits. We also see that it's beneficial in pregnancy, because pregnancy is a fast-energetic state with a lot of calorie requirement, since you're trying to build something. You have all these energetics happening, so creatine is very beneficial. And that brings us to vitamin D, vitamin D3. A lot of us don't spend enough time outside.

And even the time we spend outside isn't enough to bring our levels up to where they need to be. It's really important for things like osteoporosis prevention. It's important for muscle and immunity, and really important for brain health. The research on vitamin D is still growing. So those are the big three for women.

Nikkiey: Back to creatine really quick. One question I have is about rest days. Should you take it every single day?

Stacy: Yeah, absolutely.

Nikkiey: I love the positive press it's getting.

Stacy: I know. I love it. It's great.

Nikkiey: How about supplements you'd say are overhyped or unnecessary?

Stacy: Almost everything else? No, I'm just kidding.

Nikkiey: That's a fair response.

Stacy: Pre-workouts. I get questions on pre-workout all the time. It's a way to jack you up. But if you look at what's actually effective in your pre-workout, it's beta-alanine and caffeine. Those are the two things that let you feel less fatigue and improve muscle function, because beta-alanine is a vasodilator and also provides some of the essential coenzymes your muscles need for faster contractions. Pre-workouts are astronomically expensive and not very efficacious. And I get asked about all the menopause hormone supplements out there, things like Menoprove and black cohosh.

No. Let's look at other things first. Nutrition first, right?

Nikkiey: Nutrition first.

Stacy: And collagen is the other one. I get frustrated with collagen because people think of collagen peptides and collagen protein as dietary protein for muscle and neurotransmitters.

Nikkiey: Yep.

Stacy: But it's a specific structural protein that goes to hair, nails and joints. There is some research saying that taking collagen supports those structural things, but it's hit or miss depending on what kind, what type and when you take it. So people say, I get a lot of protein from my Vital Proteins, my collagen proteins. No, it's not the same.

Nikkiey: So just to be clear, it doesn't count toward your protein intake for the day.

Stacy: It does not.

Nikkiey: Thank you. It does not. I appreciate how clear you make all of that, because there's a lot of confusion out there. Get the foundation right, and you don't need to waste your money on all the things.

Stacy: Right.

Nikkiey: Okay, cool. Let's go to the next and last bucket before we play a myth-busting game. I want you to tell me, is it BS or is it true?

Stacy: All right. Okay.

Nikkiey: But before that, I want to talk about something you've touched on throughout the episode: recovery. Sleep, stress, cortisol. We always say inside WarriorBabe that training is only half the battle. I love saying that you don't build muscle in the gym. You break it down there, and then you build and repair it afterwards.

Stacy: Yeah.

Nikkiey: Where the results actually happen is in recovery. But a lot of women are dealing with poor sleep, high-stress lives, cortisol through the roof and hormonal chaos, and they're always wondering why the weight won't budge or why they can't see the results they want. So I'd love to talk about those pieces and how they play a role. The first question is, how does recovery need to shift for women in menopause?

Stacy: We need to put more focus on recovery, because we have this sympathetic drive and a higher baseline cortisol. So how do we look at recovery? One, it's bookending your training with nutrition, because food is how we help with the signaling for repair, especially before and after training. We also think about mobility, foam rollers and those kinds of things. Super important. I think I spend more time warming up and cooling down now than I did before.

I spend less time training and more time mobilizing. We kind of laugh about it, but it's really important.

Nikkiey: I need to become more like you. I can feel it in my body now. I need mobility in my life.

Stacy: Exactly. Once you start implementing it, you can do some mobility between your squat sets and you get more out of your training. But then there are all the things circulating about NormaTec boots, cold plunges, saunas, all these other things that are supposed to be for recovery.

But are they really, or do they add more stress? It depends on how much time you have. If you have to specifically go somewhere to do a cold plunge, does that stress you out? We think about going to a sauna specifically because we see people on social media stepping out of their sauna. If you have one in your house, that's great. If it's really close and you can tie it into your training, fantastic. But don't put an extra stressor on yourself just because you think you have to.

So it's not necessarily about what's available. It's about how it fits into your life. And I think one of the biggest things women don't do is own time for themselves. When you start taking ownership of what you're doing and own your own time, it's like a weight is off your shoulders. Guilt has no room. I struggle with it, of course. I think every woman struggles with it. But it's an emotion that doesn't do anything except break us down.

I try to reteach people how to deal with that by looking at 10 minutes. Surely you can find 10 minutes. Maybe it's 10 minutes when you first wake up, with no noise. No one else is up, and you have those 10 minutes just to be up with no noise, go outside if you can. If not, don't worry about it. Just have those 10 minutes to recenter and find that time for yourself. And for training, write it in your calendar as a wellness meeting. It's a non-negotiable.

It's your time, because if we can't show up for ourselves, we're only half-assed showing up for other people. When we start owning that for ourselves, we start reducing the stress, because now we're not going, oh shoot, I have to train, but I feel like I have to go pick up my kids and this and that. So you schedule it. It becomes time for you. Training doesn't have to be scheduled every day, but that 10 minutes is non-negotiable every day. Because if you're able to find that quiet for 10 minutes, when you get into a highly stressed state, you can bring yourself back there and remember what it was like.

Yes, it's part of the mindfulness training people do, but it's really beneficial. Okay, I have these 10 minutes. I can calm down. I wake up and I'm not blasted by all this noise. Then later in the day, when you are blasted by all the noise, you can say, okay, I'm just going to take myself back to those 10 minutes. Even when you wake up in the middle of the night and your brain is circulating, you can go back and say, I remember what that breeze felt like.

Or, I remember opening the door and feeling the cold air or the warm air. You bring yourself back to those moments in time, which lets your body relax.

Nikkiey: Back to sleep.

Stacy: Back to sleep. Yeah.

Nikkiey: Oh, so good. That was such a powerful response. I'm so happy you touched on that. Taking that time throughout the day for yourself can make a huge difference. And it compounds over time.

Stacy: Yeah. I find a lot of people are driving around with the radio on or the news on, and it takes a lot for them to turn it off and just drive.

It's amazing when you turn it off and just have the windows down a little bit. Even if you're in traffic with all the noise around, roll your windows up, turn the air on, but try to have no noise in the car. All of a sudden it's not road-ragey, because you don't have that constant chatter. You might not like the music. You might not like the DJs or what they're saying. It's just another level of stress. I'm not saying you have to do it all the time, but it's very helpful to just say, let's turn it off.

Nikkiey: Totally. There's a reason why, when I drive home after the gym, I don't want any music on. I really enjoy it when it's super quiet in the car.

Stacy: Exactly.

Nikkiey: Okay. Can you speak to the impact cortisol and chronic stress have when you're trying to lose fat and build muscle?

Stacy: I think cortisol has gotten a bad rap, because we need it. It's an essential hormone. We have a cortisol awakening response: it naturally comes up and lets us wake up.

It also winds down so we can relax and get to sleep. And it lets us respond to stress, like if we all of a sudden have to slam on the brakes.

Nikkiey: Right.

Stacy: So it's really necessary for our survival. And with weight loss as well, it's good.

Nikkiey: It's a good response.

Stacy: Yeah, totally. What's not good is when we're in that highly stressed response and our baseline cortisol is elevated, so we're fluctuating between an elevated baseline and a new high. We need to find ways of turning that down, because if we don't, we're always in that tired-but-wired state, which is a stress state for the body.

If we're in that stress state, it's not going to allow you to lose weight. It's not going to allow you to change body composition. So how do we mitigate that? Again, let's look at our circadian rhythm. Eat half an hour after waking up. You don't have to have a full meal, but have some food half an hour after waking up to tell the brain, yep, we're up, we're ready to go, we have some food, it's fine. That lets cortisol start to calm down.

When you get into a stressful situation, like a really stressful meeting at work or the kids around you fighting, take a deep breath. It really does help. We talk about breath work in some situations, but taking a deep breath and controlling your breathing helps you relax and brings more of a parasympathetic response, which makes you more stress resilient. So there are small things you can do during the day when you see the stress points to bring cortisol down.

And when you get more control of that upper baseline and bring it down, your body says, okay, now I can concentrate on manipulating the things I don't need, like bringing more active tissue up and getting rid of some of the less active tissue.

Nikkiey: That totally makes sense. Thank you for breaking it down. I think that's so important. A lot of women don't realize how much of an impact stress can have. It's a silent killer of progress. You can't out-train a nervous system that's in overdrive, essentially.

Stacy: Exactly. And the other thing is, give yourself permission not to train. Give yourself permission not to rush. Give yourself permission to go outside and sit in the sun with a cup of coffee, or just stare at the sun. It's okay. You don't have to jam your day full of go, go, go all the time, because we're not designed to do that.

Nikkiey: I love that you touched on that, because I think a lot of people, women and men, try to power through their day and don't slow down and soften a bit. It's okay to do that.

Stacy: It's a hustle culture we live in.

Nikkiey: It is.

Stacy: I was at the gym this morning, and I'm the American surrounded by all the New Zealanders, the Kiwis. They asked, what was your last trip like? So I explained my days in the States, because my days in the States are really jammed. I know it's a short period of time, but they're super jammed. And they all turned and said, oh my gosh, they workhorse you to death. That culture is just go, go, go. I couldn't live there. And in my head I'm like, yeah, but it's a bit too slow here.

It's the mix, right? I've had to work the California mindset out of me to understand that things take a little longer, and it's okay.

Nikkiey: It's funny that you touched on that, that it's a Western culture thing. It's totally the US: hustle, grind, push. That's just the vibe here.

Stacy: I know. Now we have a society of underslept, overfed, sick people, and we need to reverse that.

Nikkiey: Amen. Yes. It's been a breath of fresh air having this conversation with you. I love your brain and the way you break things down and make them really simple to understand, and the message you continue to pour out to the people who need to hear it. Thank you for your work and what you do.

Stacy: Thanks. I appreciate it.

Nikkiey: All right, let's have some fun with a little rapid-fire myth-busting round. You cool with that?

Stacy: Sure. Let's go.

Nikkiey: I'm going to throw out some common beliefs, and you tell us if it's true or not. You can't build muscle after 50.

Stacy: That's totally not true.

Nikkiey: Cool. You should fast longer in menopause.

Stacy: No.

Nikkiey: Protein needs increase with age.

Stacy: Yes.

Nikkiey: Cool. Creatine is beneficial for women, especially postmenopause.

Stacy: Yes.

Nikkiey: Carbs cause fat gain in menopause.

Stacy: That depends on the carbohydrate, but generally no. If you're looking at the good carbs, no. If you're looking at ultra-processed protein Pop-Tarts, yes.

Nikkiey: Fair. Thank you for that added specification. Lifting heavy will make you bulky.

Stacy: No. I wish. I wish, but no.

Nikkiey: You need HRT to see results after menopause.

Stacy: No.

Nikkiey: You can't lose fat during menopause.

Stacy: No. You can.

Nikkiey: Eating after 7 p.m. makes you gain weight.

Stacy: No. It interrupts sleep, but it doesn't make you gain weight.

Nikkiey: Wait, say that one more time.

Stacy: It interrupts sleep, but it won't make you gain weight.

Nikkiey: It won't make you gain weight. That's it. And the last one: sleep quality directly impacts fat loss and muscle gain.

Stacy: Absolutely. Yes.

Nikkiey: Let's go. So many people need that. Everything you shared in this whole episode, I want people to go back and listen to the whole thing over and over again. I want to play it for all the bro science guys too.

Stacy: Yeah.

Nikkiey: Please, please, please. The message you're putting out there about women not being small men is a breath of fresh air. So please keep going with that message.

Stacy: I will. Nothing else to do. Let's just keep fighting.

Nikkiey: Amen. I'm on your train, girl, for sure. A hundred percent.

Stacy: Thanks.

Nikkiey: This has been an awesome episode. Seriously, thank you so much for bringing the fire. You're an absolute force. I appreciate the science and your knowledge, and more importantly, I appreciate the empowerment you're giving women on a daily basis. I know our listeners are going to walk away feeling educated and, more importantly, seen.

I think in this industry, in this field and in what we're doing right now, it's so important that this continues, because women are feeling seen and heard and ready. I know they're ready to take action. So where can people find you? Add your plugs in here: where they can grab your books and where they can dive deeper into your work. Where can we find you, Stacy?

Stacy: The website, drstacysims.com, has everything. You can sign up for our biweekly newsletter, where I try to put out new science and what's going on. I'm also on Instagram and Facebook.

We just removed ourselves from TikTok. I'm not a fan of that platform. Anyway.

Nikkiey: It's okay.

Stacy: So you can find me there. And if you want to order the books, I always tell people to try to find them at a local bookseller, because they can get them in for you, and you support small businesses. But if you can't, because you live in the middle of nowhere, you can always find them on Amazon or Barnes & Noble's websites.

Nikkiey: Cool. Thank you. And hey, everyone listening, if this episode hit home for you, screenshot it, share it, put it on your Instagram stories, tag me, tag Dr. Stacy Sims and let us know what clicked the most for you, because I know for damn sure this is the kind of information that can totally change lives. Thank you for being here, Stacy, and for your time from all the way across the world, already into the next day. I appreciate you. Please keep pouring out the message you have and spreading it.

It's so important.

Stacy: Thanks so much. And you keep doing what you're doing, because it is actually teamwork.

Nikkiey: Amen to that. Let's go. Thank you.

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