Episode 108 | Dec 5, 2024

Redefining Women’s Fitness at Every Age, With Dr. Stacy Sims

How can resistance training enhance women’s health and longevity? This week on Health Coach Talk, Dr. Sandi welcomes Dr. Stacy Sims, an international exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist renowned for her work on optimizing women’s fitness and health. Together, they explore the critical role of resistance training for women over 40, busting myths about strength training, and offering practical guidance for incorporating it at any age.

“Teach women to take up space and to be loud… As a health coach, teach women the mindset of don’t be small and dainty but take up space. Be strong and own that space. Don’t move for people. Own that space because you deserve it.”

Dr. Stacy Sims

Dr. Stacy Sims has dedicated her career to revolutionizing how women approach exercise and nutrition, shining a light on the unique physiology of women and its impact on performance and health. Her TED Talk, Women Are Not Small Men, encapsulates her mission to redefine how women train, eat, and recover. Author of ROAR and Next Level, Dr. Sims blends her academic expertise with practical strategies to help women take charge of their fitness journey. She has collaborated with global brands like Nike and WHOOP, yet her passion lies in empowering women to live stronger, healthier lives.

In her conversation with Dr. Sandi, Dr. Sims highlights the importance of resistance training for bone density, muscle preservation, and brain health, particularly as women age. She breaks down how strength training differs from other forms of exercise, such as yoga and Pilates, and why lifting weights isn’t about aesthetics but functionality and longevity. Dr. Sims shares her personal journey as an endurance athlete who embraced strength training and explains why resistance and jump training are essential for optimal bone health and cognitive function.

For health coaches, this episode offers actionable insights into addressing client hesitations around resistance training, such as fears of injury or misconceptions about “bulking up.” Dr. Sims encourages coaches to help women move past societal pressures to be small and dainty, empowering them to claim space—both in the gym and in life. Health coaches can play a pivotal role in reframing fitness narratives and guiding clients toward sustainable strength-building practices that enhance overall wellness.

Listen Now

Dr. Sandi: I started getting interested in fitness probably sometime around the late ’70s when I was in my late 20s. And I spent years doing Jane Fonda-style aerobics, doing a lot of cardio, running on a treadmill. Then, for many years, I was doing yoga, and Pilates, and Body Sculpt-type classes, and thinking that I was on the right track but realized way too late in life that there was something missing, and that was resistance training.

So, now, I am an avid fan of heavy lifting, as well as doing things for balance, doing things for bone health, such as jumping. These are some of the topics we get into with my guest today. And she is phenomenal. I met her in person at a conference, was just blown away, not just for her talk but also when I was in the gym with her and was just amazed at her strength, at her power, at her dedication to training in a special way for women.

So, let me tell you a little bit about Dr. Stacy Sims. She is an international exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist dedicated to revolutionizing women’s exercise, nutrition, and performance. She has a PhD from the University of Otago and she’d led research programs, including one at Stanford. She is renowned for her work on sex differences in training and nutrition, looking at female athlete health and performance. This was encapsulated in her popular TED Talk, Women Are Not Small Men. She has authored many books, including “ROAR” and “Next Level,” which provide insights into optimizing women’s fitness and health.

Beyond academia, she’s collaborated with global brands like Nike and WHOOP and has been recognized as one of the top visionaries in the sports industry. Her mission: to empower women, to understand and leverage their unique physiology for improved performance and well-being.

So, I hope you enjoy this talk with Dr. Stacy as much as I enjoyed recording it. Welcome to “Health Coach Talk,” Dr. Stacy.

Dr. Stacy: I’m excited to reconnect and find out how all your pull-ups and stuff are going, so that’s fantastic. Love it.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. So, I should say, I had the pleasure of being in the gym… We were at a conference, and I was working on my pull-ups. So, you are an inspiration. And speaking of that, it is critical for women over 40, over 50, over 60—I’m 74—and my age range and beyond, to engage in resistance training. Can you talk about that? And is it ever too late to start? Because I hear all the time, “Oh, it’s too late,” or “I have too many issues. I’ll get injured.” I’d love for you to talk about this subject.

Dr. Stacy: It’s never too late to start. When we look at the older groups that are pushing back… I’m talking 45 onwards, we get pushback with resistance training. It’s because culturally and society has pushed back about women being in the weight room and thinking that, “Oh, if you’re going to be in the weight room, you have to push really big weights and you’re going to get bulky. And all that is a misconception.

So, when we talk about resistance training, we’re just really talking about pushing a load. And, ideally, we want all women to work up to lifting heavy and working in a power-based range. And it’s not about aesthetics. It’s about building bone and muscle, because we see that, when we’re looking at morphology from sex differences, the difference in muscle fibers, women have less of those fast-twitch fibers, and we need to really be able to maintain those. And this is where that power production comes from. And we lose those rather rapidly as we age. And why they are important is because they’re fast-twitch, they allow us to have more of that quick reaction time stabilizing but also they produce lactate. And why lactate is so important is we see that it’s the preferred fuel for the brain. So, if we’re looking at not only are we doing resistance training for bone and muscle, we’re also doing it so that we can have better brain health. And this is something that comes up all the time like, “How am I going to improve cognition? How am I going to improve cognition decline?” And when we look at brain metabolism and how we’re looking at neurons talking to each other, we bring it back to resistance training, and we bring it back to some high-intensity work because, one, we want to produce lactate, but two, when we’re doing resistance training and creating a stress for the central nervous system, we’re creating new conversations between our neurons and our dendrites and all the things that we need to improve cognition.

So, when I say it’s never too late to start resistance training, when you look at it, you can start with bodyweight and slowly work your way up to putting stuff in a backpack to then working with machines like Planet Fitness or some other kind of circuit-based training to then moving to dumbbells and then into barbells. It’s not taking someone and putting them right into a gym and saying, “Hey, here’s a barbell. Let’s see how many 50-kilo squats you can do.” It’s like, “Okay, well, let’s start with dumbbells and see how you move.” So, I think that’s the misconception when we talk about resistance training is everyone’s mind goes to the lifting platforms in any particular gym and they go, “Well, I can’t do that. I’m going to get injured.” And when we start looking at how we progressively get stronger, it prevents injury, it helps with those joint niggles, it helps with our metabolism, it helps with our brain health, it helps with all those things that we’re looking for to maintain longevity.

Dr. Sandi: So beautifully said. It is just extremely important. And I happened to be in the weight room today, and there was a bunch of women who were coming out of a group class because the group class location was right adjacent to the weight room. And I had been speaking to some of them before the class, and the class is something called like Body Sculpt. And that would have been me years ago. And regretfully, I was focused on appearance. I remember I was turning 60, my daughter was getting married. And why was I lifting weights like crazy or in these Body Sculpt classes? Because I wanted to have toned arms. I was wearing a strapless dress as the mother of the bride. That was my sole motivation was the appearance. And rather than focusing on doing this for health, I was just clueless back then and it wasn’t even that long ago.

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, we can always say that the aesthetics is the benefit focusing on your health. Because if you put the health idea first and you’re like, okay, let’s see how much more I can do, then the aesthetics of building the muscle and getting the tone look is just a secondary benefit.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, yeah. Another observation, which I see every time I’m in the gym, is that the room for the cardio, there’s women… There was one woman today like crazy. She was on the treadmill and didn’t look like she was enjoying it at all. The ellipticals were pretty busy, but the weight room, it was just me and the guys. So, what is the problem with over-emphasizing this cardio? And that was me many years ago. I had to do my miles on the treadmill before I started my day.

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, I feel like that’s all of us who are in that 45-plus age group, because we’ve been so conditioned to think about cardio and calories in, calories out and you get slammed with it from magazines around this time of year with Thanksgiving and Christmas coming up. All the women’s health magazines are like, “If you eat this, you have to spend this much time on a treadmill.” So, there’s all these connections between calories and cardio, because like, “Oh, well, you don’t burn a lot of calories when you’re resistance training.” But I need people to understand it’s not about calories. You cannot outexercise bad diet. You cannot outexercise the aspect of what people are thinking about with calories.

What we want to focus on is the fact that society has put it in our heads that women need to do cardio to look a certain way to be small. And if you’re looking at lifting weights, it’s the antithesis of that, where you’re putting women in the weight room, they’re taking up the lifting platform, they’re taking up space. They are building lean mass. They’re getting toned. And that’s contra to what people have been thinking about as what it means to be feminine and to be “a woman” where you have to do these cardio classes. If you want to lift weights, you have to do the Body Sculpt things. And it’s just this rhetoric that we’ve been pushed to think as the norm.

And I’m on that mission as you are to push and say that is not the norm. That’s a construct that we can ignore. And we can move forward and say, “What is the best for my body as we age?” And full disclosure, I’ve been an endurance athlete my whole life. I started as a ballet dancer, moved into running, did 20 marathons, did ultra runs at Ironman, race bikes, race XTERRA. But I’ve had strength training through it all. And now as I’m navigating and I’m one and I’m navigating things, I’m like, you know what? Endurance just doesn’t work. Unless I’m specifically training for something like a lot of my friends are, then there’s a time and a place for it. But for general health, you have to say, okay, wait, when we’re looking at the aspects of all the conversations around increased cortisol and sympathetic drive and not getting good sleep, it comes down to excessive cardio.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, I think we’ve all been there. So, how much cardio do we need? And what about HIIT training? HIIT training versus Zone 2 training?

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, yeah, yeah. So, it depends on what you’re after. If we’re looking at that subset of women who have been active their whole life, and they’re looking to keep going for ultra runs or triathlon or some other endurance race, then there is a time and a place for something like Zone 2. There’s also a really big push for polarized training where you go hard when you need to in your intervals and you bring it right back down. Strength training across the board.

But for the general population, we’re looking at women who are trying to be fit, healthy, maintain cognition, maintain balance, posture, good body comp. Then when we’re looking at what are the best outcomes, not only for all of the things I just listed but also we look at things like cardiovascular health because we know there’s that increase in cardiovascular risk factors after we hit menopause. It comes down to true HIIT training. So, that’s high-intensity interval training where your intervals are 1 to 4 minutes and they’re 80% or more of your max, and you’re having variable recovery.

I like to use the example of in the fitness circuit of doing every minute on the minute for five minutes where the first minute you might be doing thrusters, the second minute you might be doing dumbbell deadlifts, the third minute you might be doing burpees, and then the fourth minute you might be doing alternating V-ups. Fifth minute, completely off resting. You might be doing that twice through, three times through, and that’s a true HIIT class, done and dusted. The subset is SIT, sprint interval training, and this is that really super top-end stuff where we’re looking at 100%, 110% of your max, 30 seconds or less as hard as you possibly can go, and you’re looking at two to three minutes recovery because you want to be as recovered as you possibly can to be able to hit the next interval just as hard because that induces a greater stress on the body that creates what we call an epigenetic change over time to the muscle to increase the quality of the muscle, to increase how it is perceiving glucose, reduces insulin resistance, and all the things that we’re seeing that accumulate in women in a short amount of time.

So, those two things are the cardio that we want to do. What we don’t want to do is a gym-based HIIT class which ends up being 40 to 45 minutes of relatively moderate intensity because the intervals are not giving you enough rest, the intervals aren’t hard enough, the intervals might be too long, and this is where we see a lot of women who end up being overtired, overly sympathetically driven, so they’re tired but wired. They don’t see any body comp change, and they’re wondering what’s going on. It’s because they are not polarizing their training. They’re not hitting the intensities at a point that’s strong enough stress for the body to understand to overcome it. And they stay in this moderate intensity gray zone which again increases cortisol, increases that sympathetic drive, gives a stimulus for putting on body fat, and does nothing to improve lean mass, reduce body fat, or improve all the things we’re talking about with brain health.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah so they’re in that moderate intensity thinking that they’re doing something that is really beneficial. Whereas if they shortened it, if they were more efficient, I have started… Well, not started for the past probably six, seven years since I’ve been doing the carol bike as opposed to the peloton, which I never liked somebody screaming at me and it was too long and too intense, but the carol, it is just a sprint, it is an interval where you can choose but usually I’ll do like 20 seconds and two or three… but going so full out getting my heart rate up and then you rest in between. And then doing a walk every day, but I see that more as movement just as opposed to actual exercise and occasionally break into a sprint doing that.

But this, kind of, moderator, it also brings up something that I see a lot when I’m in the gym and that is women and they’re working with trainers which is great, but they are having a conversation. There was a woman today. She was doing the leg press, and I think she was pushing like 10 pounds literally and they were just having a conversation about where she was going to go to dinner. And she’s just doing 15 reps of this just moving but not paying any attention. I know you’ve talked about how you lower it, you do much less sets or less reps and can you talk about that?

Dr. Stacy: Yeah so when we’re looking at the typical 3 to 4 sets of 15 reps, this is more of a metabolic challenge. So, you’re not getting any of the neuromuscular adaptation things that we’re talking about. It could be a great entry into learning what resistance training is, but that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about resistance training. Resistance training is hard. It’s not something that you’re having that casual conversation about. You have to focus on form. And sometimes you’re like, “I just don’t know if I can lift this.” So, this is where you go, “Okay, I’ve got this for three reps,” and it’s a whole neural firing. So, we’re really hitting that neural pathway for brain health and creating that stress.

When I look at so many women who are like, “I’m resistance training. I’m doing 8 to 12 reps of bicep curls or tricep extensions,” and they’re not doing compound movements. They’re not doing unilateral work. I’m like, “Okay, you’re doing some resistance training but it’s not where we want you to be.” I was with my husband. We walk the dog every morning. We cut through this park, and there’s an outdoor boot campy type thing that happens every morning. And there’s a woman picking dumbbells from the back of the trailer. And I was like, “Put them down and get some heavier ones.” And she laughed. She goes, “Not for me.” And I was like, “No, come on. Seriously get some heavier ones,” because they were like two 5-kilo dumbbells. And I was like, “That’s just not heavy enough.” So, yeah. Build that challenge, right?

Dr. Sandi: Yeah. And the other thing that I have tried to do more is just functional movement throughout the day. So, I was at the grocery store and now I said, “Why aren’t you taking the cart out to your car?” I want to carry these heavy bags to the car. And the other day, they had a sale on a big case of sparkling water like these big glass bottles. And I was with my husband and he said, “Oh, don’t. It’s so heavy. I’ll get that.” No, I’m doing it myself. I want to pick it up off the shelf, put it in the cart and then getting to the car, putting it in the trunk of the car. So, it’s like, oh, yes, I’m doing deadlifts so that I can deadlift a big heavy case like this. And so there’s so many opportunities. But so many women… I want to talk about yoga and Pilates. I mean, I love yoga. I do it every morning. I love Pilates. I love the reformer, but I talk to so many women that say, “Yeah, I’m into fitness. I work out. I do yoga. I do Pilates.” Can you comment? And then they think that they are doing strength training from those forms of exercise.

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, it is body weight stuff and the reformer is more isometric. And we look at it as supplementary resistance training, the same as you might go for a movement focus in the gym to learn technique on barbell. It is moving but we don’t put it in that heavy resistance or true resistance training category. We’re not getting the same neural stimulus. It’s more of a metabolic challenge, especially we’re looking at isometric holds. And it really is not challenging enough to central nervous system to create those brain adaptations that we want or to have a stimulus to develop lean muscle. Great for postural muscles. It’s great for proprioception. And we can’t forget that the breathing exercises that go with Pilates and yoga are really good for helping with understanding how to control breath for parasympathetic activation.

So, there are benefits to it but it’s not the bread and butter. We look at it as a recovery activity day. People are like, “But Pilates is so hard.” It’s like, well, it’s hard but it’s not hard. Just the same as if you’re going to go for a hike on a recovery day, you might go up a hill. Yeah, the hill is hard but it’s not really hard. So, I need people to reframe it, and I always get pushed back from yogis and Pilate die-hards. They’re like, “What do you mean? It is hard. I’m working. I’m sweating.” It’s like, yes, you’re moving but that’s not what we’re talking about when we’re talking about building muscle, protecting bone, getting cardiovascular adaptations because it’s such a strong force on the blood vessel that we’re creating more nitric oxide responses for better blood pressure control. None of that stuff occurs with yoga and Pilates

Dr. Sandi: Those are my thoughts completely. In fact, I had been taking quite a few classes, and they’re veering away from the classic Joseph Pilates method to try and add in a lot what they’re calling strength training. It comes from the Bar Method where they’re being very creative and how to use the reformer and adding in weights for example, 30 little 30-pound weights. And so I love to do Pilates, but the classic Pilates, how it originated, which is for lengthening your spine, and good alignment, and posture as you said. And it’s very valuable and it’s fun. It’s meditative. It’s relaxing, so I love it.

So, I’d love for you to talk about jumping because we’re all concerned about bone health. And I am on a mission to tell people. Just today I was talking to some women, my contemporaries, about jumping. And they just said, “Well, I can’t jump. I have bad ankles,” and one said, “I have bad knees.” Another said, “Well, I’ll pee in my pants if I jump.” And so they’re very resistant. And I take ballet classes, and those classes that are meant for women over 50, they’re clear at the onset, “We won’t jump in this class so you don’t have to worry. No jumping.”

Dr. Stacy: No pirouettes or anything like that.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, no jumping. And I jump at home so I’ll do the ballet jumps on my own or take a class that’s not for older people, just a regular class where we’ll jump, a mixed-age class.

Dr. Stacy: I like that. Yeah, mixed age. So, jumping is that contention that’s coming up now. When we talk about jumping, we think about jump training and… Not Pilates, sorry. Plyometric-type training where you’re doing box jumps, you’re doing depth jumps, that kind of stuff. That’s jump training. Even jumping rope is jump training. And that’s great and we want to do that, but the other aspect is we look at a specific type of jump training that is learning how not to land with soft knees but to absorb the impact into our skeletal system so that we are creating a multi-directional stress that really does create stronger bones. We look at running. It’s not a strong enough stress. We look at resistance training, definitely a stronger stress than running for improving bone health but not as strong as 10 minutes three times a week of specific jump training.

I hear all of the same excuses you hear because, one, we haven’t been conditioned. Two, our bodies are a little bit more fragile for jumping especially our joints. A lot of women do have some incontinence issues. So, we have to address it and go, “Okay, well, pelvic floor health is super important so we have to learn how to breathe. We have to learn how to control the pelvic floor and get things to interact.” There are different companies out there that have aspects like the Buff Muff with different exercises you can do. You can work with a physical therapist that can see what exactly your issue is. But it’s not normal to leak when you’re jumping. But so many women think that it is, especially if they’ve given vaginal birth. So, that’s one thing to address.

And the other with regards to ankles and knees and joints that hurt, you don’t have to jump high. We’re looking at just a slight amount off the ground. And it could be a low. It could be either jumping down off a stair or maybe you’re just doing small bunny hops but you’re landing with stiff knees and Pogos where you’re landing on a flat foot because you want that multi-directional stress. So, there are lots of things that we have to educate and show women how to jump. And I think at the conference I was talking about, my colleague and friend Tracy Kissel who’s done a lot of research in this space and her app Osteogains is on the Apple store, and it goes through how to do this specific kind of jump training to improve bone density. And we see the research in jump training, and you can be osteopenic, osteoporitic, and you put in resistance training and jump training. And over the course of six to eight months, you’re in the low end of normal, so it’s very powerful. And I really encourage women to implement it. And, yeah, there are ways around all of these excuses to look at the individual and say, okay, joint issues, let’s do some modifications. You’re having a little bit of incontinence, let’s work on pelvic floor. But I don’t want women to be afraid of jumping because it is something that we should be doing on a regular basis.

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, that’s such helpful information. And what about rebounders? I have a rebounder I use every morning. What are your thoughts?

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, you’re not getting that multi-directional stress but you want that ground impact. It’s good for learning how to jump. It’s same like with assisted Pogos. We’re using heavy resistance band to offload some of the weight. Reformers are good for pelvic floor as well for pelvic floor control. So, there’s some good things around it. But for optimal bone, you really need to hit the ground because that’s where we’re getting that strong force. Because the ground doesn’t move, the body has to and has to absorb that force.

Dr. Sandi: That makes so much sense. And I think I’ve been doing it all wrong because in my ballet training, you jump toe-ball-heel. So, what you’re saying is you want to jump on a flat foot.

Dr. Stacy: Yep. Yep. So, you can look at Pogos YouTube and look at modified Pogos with the resistance band. So, it’s offloading some of your weight for people who are afraid of jumping flat-footed, but it’s a really good easy way of implementing some powerful bone-stimulating stress.

Dr. Sandi: All right. Well, I’m fired up to start doing more of that type of jumping and lots of my ballet jumping, although some of that is flat foot but it is always like you’re pointing in your toe-ball-heel. So, yeah. Let’s turn to protein. It’s another area where I go out to dinner with my friends and what I see is that they’ll order a salad with a little bit of chicken. And often they’ll split it with somebody else, and then they’ll take half of it home and absolutely undereat protein, which was me. For many years, I was a vegan and certainly not getting anywhere near the amount of protein. I’m protein-deprived. So, can you address that and what we can do about it for women?

Dr. Stacy: Yeah. So, I always bring this up when we start a conversation around protein, that the recommended daily allowance is based on the least amount needed to prevent malnutrition. And the recommended daily allowance for women was based on sedentary old men because they were like, “Oh, yeah, okay, they have the same body composition as these younger ladies. So, whatever they are, that’s what they need,” which is absolutely not true because we think about muscle quality, we think about sex differences, and the way that muscle responds to protein, and the fact that as we get older, we become less capable of getting anabolic or muscle building responses from exercise and protein.

So, we look at the newer research. We’re seeing that active women who are in their reproductive years need about 1.6 grams per kilo so that sits around that 0.8 grams per pound. And this is per day. When we look at women who are perimenopause, postmenopause, we’re looking at 1 to 1.1 point grams per pound per day. And this is evenly distributed throughout the day. And I try to get people to understand that you want palm and a half size amount of protein in each meal, and that doesn’t mean a big slab of meat or chicken. You can think about half a palm of chicken and then you’re adding in green peas, edamame, some nuts, some seeds. There’s so many other ways of getting protein. But not only that, when you start adding those other more plant sources of protein with the animal protein, you’re increasing the diversity of your gut microbiome which is really super important.

And I think we’ve gotten to this point in the protein conversation because we’ve never talked about it with regards to active women before. It’s always been the conversation around carbohydrate and fat especially when you look at the late ’80s, early ’90s and the low-carb… or, sorry, the low fat craze, right? And then we flip forward to the 2000s and then it’s the low carb craze. But now we’re like, “Wait, protein’s super important.” And we’ve seen research on the upwards of 3 to 4 grams per kilo. So, what is that? About 1.5 to 2 grams per pound, and there’s no negative effect on kidney or bone function. So, this is the new areas of research. It’s so important because we think about protein not only for our muscle but also for our neurotransmitters, our immune system all over the development that we have with regards to reparation of total body while we’re sleeping. And the protein conversation is one that needs to be pushed and let women understand that protein is so important. So, your friends are eating the salad. It’s like, “If you’re going to split it or you’re going to take some of it at home, eat the chicken and then bring the greens home.”

Dr. Sandi: Yeah, yeah. And a lot of this, I am very interested in eating psychology, and there are big gender differences regarding… Women are considered… They have smaller appetites, dainty. And even how restaurants were decorated like the traditional male. They go into a steakhouse and it’s dark and it’s very masculine-looking. And then women, they used to have these tea rooms which were these pink, pastel colors, and they’d serve these little tiny white bread and cucumber sandwiches. And so I think a lot of this is carried over. And I always comment about this but in my day, I’ve given a lot of bridal baby showers, events for women and fundraising events, and you never would ever serve a steak or a piece of meat in those kinds of events. It’s a luncheon. So, you do serve a salad with a little bit of chicken on it. But for men, if they go out, they have an event, they would have a big piece of misht. So, a lot of this is cultural, and our perceptions of women if they have hearty appetites, what does that say about them and other ways? So, a lot of this is just underneath the surface.

But this has been a fascinating conversation. What are your thoughts on the role of health coaches? And they’re not trainers. They’re not nutritionists unless they are by training and are doing that dual role, but how can they help women especially have that mindset to get strong both in what they’re doing at the gym and as well as in their life in general?

Dr. Stacy: Yeah, I always turn to people, especially health coaches who are trying to navigate, get the right information out to their clients. The biggest thing that you can do is teach women to take up space and to be loud. And they’re like, “What?” I’m like because we have been so conditioned to be dainty and small, and that’s how we are perceived in fitness. You can’t eat that. You have to reduce your calories. You have to do cardio. You have to shrink. You have to be a certain size. And all of that is based on a cultural concept of how women are supposed to be dainty. But we are not. We are people that are strong and empowered, and we want a voice. And so the best thing that we can do and I teach my young teenage girls this too, have a voice, take up space, be strong. And if someone counters you, you have the strength to be able to push back because we’re at a point where women still need to be heard. We’re fighting for better research and unfortunately with the election outcome, we’re going to be fighting harder for women’s rights. So, as a health coach, teach women the mindset of don’t be small and dainty but take up space. Be strong and own that space. Don’t move for people. Own that space because you deserve it.

Dr. Sandi: That is so beautifully said. Stacy, it is such a joy to know you. You are truly inspirational. So, thank you so much for being our guest today.

Dr. Stacy: Oh, thanks so much, and I appreciate the conversation.