You've been lied to. Not by your body — by the system that profits from you believing it's broken. Dr. Stephanie names the real villain behind decades of failed diets, shrinking goals, and body distrust: the wellness industrial complex that told you skinny equals healthy. You're not broken - you were just given the wrong map. Here's the right one at https://youtu.be/RsIC6Gm0ETM
You've been lied to. Not by your body — by the system that profits from you believing it's broken. Dr. Stephanie names the real villain behind decades of failed diets, shrinking goals, and body distrust: the wellness industrial complex that told you skinny equals healthy. You're not broken - you were just given the wrong map. Here is the right one!
Episode Overview (timestamps are approximate):
(0:00) Intro/Teaser
(2:00) The Villain: Diet Culture & the Wellness Industrial Complex
(7:00) What Chronic Under-Eating Does to Your Body
(9:00) Debunking the Bulky & Toned Myths
(15:00) The Psychology of Shrinking
(17:00) Your Body Didn’t Betray You. It Protected You
(21:00) How to Rebuild: Strength, Recovery & Mobility
(26:00) Fuel the Build: Eating for the Body You Want
(34:00) You’re Building a 40-Year Asset
Resources mentioned in this episode can be found at https://drstephanieestima.com/podcasts/ep463
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00:00
You are not broken.
00:02
You are not lazy.
00:03
You are not undisciplined.
00:06
You are not hormonally doomed because you are 40 or 50 years old.
00:11
Okay, or or 60 or 70.
00:14
From when we were very, very young, the lie that we have been taught is that health equals skinny.
00:23
This villain that we're talking about teaches you
00:27
through society and through stupid Instagram posts that I've had the pleasure of taking down, that muscle makes you bulky.
00:35
So if you want your muscles to show, you need to build your muscles.
00:41
And building muscles requires eating.
00:45
Right?
00:46
Your body did not betray you.
00:48
You were taught to betray it.
00:50
If you chronically diet, your body will hold on to fat like an insurance policy trying not to.
00:56
to pay out okay yeah wanna change the way I look I'm gonna give myself six weeks don't give yourself six weeks give yourself six years play the long game you're not late you're not behind right you could be 49
01:09
59, 69.
01:11
Listening to this, you're not behind.
01:12
You're exactly where you are.
01:18
Hello my friends, welcome back to another episode of Better with Dr.
01:22
Stephanie.
01:22
It's me, your host, Dr.
01:24
Stephanie Estima.
01:25
And today it's gonna be just you and me, another solo sode, and I really want to talk to you about
01:33
Our goals and how we have been tricked as women, uh, who the villain really is in our body composition and dream body goals, and then of course what
01:45
we are going to do about it.
01:49
I want to get something straight right now.
01:52
Okay.
01:52
We're going to start off.
01:53
You are not broken.
01:54
We're going to start off by saying that you are not broken.
01:57
You are not lazy.
01:59
You are not undisciplined.
02:02
You are not hormonally doomed because you are 40 or 50 years old.
02:07
Okay.
02:08
Or 60 or 70.
02:09
And you're not bad at consistency, okay?
02:13
If you feel like you are confused about your body, if you feel like nothing works anymore
02:21
or what used to work is no longer working for you.
02:25
You feel like you've tried everything.
02:27
I want to tell you that it's not your willpower.
02:30
It's how you have been trained and conditioned, dare I say, groomed.
02:35
Okay.
02:36
And today we are going to name the real villain.
02:39
Not to be dramatic, but I mean, why not?
02:43
We are going to name the real villain because
02:45
Once you see this clearly, you cannot unsee it.
02:49
Okay?
02:50
And this is the moment where you're going to get your power back.
02:53
Okay, so from from when we were very, very young, the lie that we have been taught is that health
03:01
Equals skinny.
03:03
There was no other metric.
03:05
Okay.
03:06
If you were thin, you were good.
03:08
It wasn't
03:09
you if you were strong.
03:10
It wasn't if you were resilient.
03:13
It had nothing to do with your load capacity or the tendon integrity that you had.
03:19
It was being skinny, right?
03:21
The number on the scale
03:24
Had to go down.
03:25
That was the only metric that we ever grew up with.
03:28
The measurements must go down.
03:30
Your gene size must go down.
03:32
Everything associated with your body must shrink.
03:36
And we were told these things, right?
03:37
We were told eat less, move more, be small.
03:42
That is the only metric that women have ever been told.
03:46
Is health.
03:48
And let me tell you, friend, it isn't.
03:50
Okay?
03:51
Health is, I mean, there's so many things that make up health.
03:54
It's a physiological state.
03:57
Skinny
03:59
Being skinny, being small, having all these numbers move downward, that's an aesthetic outcome.
04:05
And they are not the same thing
04:08
But in our diet culture and we'll call it the wellness industrial complex has blurred that line so that most women cannot separate the two, right?
04:20
And when you can't separate the difference between being skinny and being healthy, you are only going to measure your worth and your health by size.
04:31
By size and size alone.
04:33
And that is the first manipulation that all women have been taught.
04:39
Okay?
04:39
That's the first trap.
04:41
Okay.
04:41
The second trap is this false binary that you have to choose between looks and health.
04:50
So you either are going to be this vain, full of yourself, someone who chases a s aesthetics, someone who shrinks herself, someone who restricts, who overtrains, who, you know, earns her food, right?
05:04
And then the other option is like literally on the other end of the spectrum.
05:09
It's like just accept your body.
05:10
There's nothing that you can do.
05:12
Don't care about how you look, because if you care about how you look, that's misogyny, right?
05:16
Stop trying.
05:18
Appearance goals are shallow.
05:20
And that's presented as empowerment, but I'm here to tell you that that's a false
05:26
Binary.
05:26
You are allowed to want both.
05:28
You are allowed to want to look good.
05:31
You are also allowed at the same time to want to move well with technical specificity.
05:38
Right?
05:39
You're allowed to want to build muscle and protect your joints and pursue aesthetics without sacrificing function.
05:48
The system, we'll say, at large, told you that these goals are incompatible.
05:54
That if somehow you care about how you look
05:57
That you are vain and full of yourself, and that you should never care about that, especially as you age, right?
06:04
And really the incompatibility is between short-term
06:09
aesthetic obsession, right?
06:12
And long term physical capability, right?
06:14
That's the difference between the two.
06:16
It's not when we chase aesthetics with these like six week boot camp, eight week shreds, seven pounds and seven days garbage.
06:24
then we start to actually sacrifice our long-term physical capability in lieu of the short-term temporary aesthetic gain.
06:33
But they don't have to be separate.
06:36
So I want to actually introduce you to the villain that in many ways has been hiding in plain sight this whole time.
06:44
And like I said, once you see it, you can't unsee it.
06:47
The villain
06:49
Teaches you that health is weight loss, right?
06:52
Above all else.
06:53
So what do women typically do?
06:54
And I've seen this thousands, maybe tens of thousands of times at this point.
06:59
You chronically under-eat.
07:00
Right?
07:01
What happens when you chronically undereat?
07:04
You lose muscle one for one.
07:07
Your resting metabolic rate drops.
07:10
for two, your leptin falls, which is the hormone that tells you stop eating, right?
07:15
So now as it drops, you are hungrier, right?
07:20
Your thyroid output may decline.
07:22
That is our master hormone for metabolism.
07:24
Okay.
07:25
Uh and a lot of times, especially in 40s and 50s, we actually see a lot of women dr run into thyroid issues because of this chronic overdieting, right?
07:33
Hormones like cortisol rise.
07:36
Now, I don't mind transient increases in cortisol and the other catecholamines that go along with it.
07:42
We actually need that, especially to do things like s sprinting and or
07:46
uh weight training, but it's the chronic elevation of these stress hormones that create a problem.
07:53
So you end up
07:54
feeling colder, you end up feeling hungrier, you end up feeling more anxious, more angry, right?
08:01
And even if the scale goes down in spite of all of those things, you think that
08:07
everything's working, right?
08:08
That the diet or the whatever the intervention, the under-eating, uh is working.
08:13
And then at some point, usually 40s, 50s, it doesn't, right?
08:18
The villain, this villain that we're talking about, teaches you through society and through stupid Instagram posts that I've had the pleasure of taking down that muscle makes you bulky.
08:29
Right?
08:30
Now
08:31
Obviously, if you are listening to this episode, I mean I'm kind of singing to the choir, right?
08:38
You know that women do not have
08:40
the testosterone levels to accidentally become Arnold, right?
08:44
And would you like another Arnold impression?
08:45
I'll find a way to inter integrate it, right?
08:48
We don't have testosterone
08:50
to accidentally become huge, right?
08:52
We're not gonna turn into Ronnie Coleman just because we've put a couple of plates on a barbell and benched it, right?
08:58
Muscle for women adds shape and curves, and then, you know, physiologically it improves your insulin resistance, it improves your glucose disposal, it protects your bone density.
09:09
Um by by the way, just like a little geeky aside, the reason why it protects your bone density is a couple reasons.
09:17
One is the mechanical tension, right?
09:19
So as you are weightlifting
09:21
And the mechanical tension that's exerted on the muscle gets transmitted through the tendon, which the tendon of course is tethered to the bone.
09:29
So the tendon is also pulling on the bone.
09:31
So the stimulus that your muscles are getting, you are also exposing it.
09:35
to the bone, but also through something called this is a little dark gross, but I just will throw it in here, FGF1, so fibroblastic growth factor.
09:43
Okay.
09:43
So when you start to secrete this FGF, you are also going to augment or increase your bone density, okay?
09:52
So this villain that tells you that muscles make you bulky, or even women who are like, yeah, you know, I started strength training and then I started feeling bulky.
10:01
It's almost that bulk feeling or maybe look that they're perceiving is almost always inflammation.
10:08
It's almost always water retention.
10:11
Or, you know, in some cases poor programming, and I will shamelessly plug my program lift here because it is
10:19
the program that I do that I have refined over the last twenty or so years than I do week in, week out.
10:24
So if you are feeling bulky, it is probably
10:29
flux, like we'll call it water flux, because when you are inflamed and stressed and you are not recovering properly, what happens more often than not is that you are going to retain more water
10:42
Okay.
10:42
It's not muscle hypertrophy.
10:44
Okay.
10:44
You need friends, you need years, years with a Z, okay?
10:50
You need years to get more muscle.
10:53
Okay?
10:54
But you were never taught that.
10:56
You were never taught that.
10:57
You were taught to fear growth.
11:00
Okay?
11:01
And you were taught to fear growth in lieu of being toned.
11:05
My favorite word, toned.
11:08
Toned.
11:09
Okay, let's talk about this.
11:11
This is not a state.
11:13
Being toned, okay, as someone who is trained in the neuromusculoskeletal system, when we say toned, the proper application of the word toned is
11:21
regarding your nervous system.
11:23
Are you hypertonic?
11:25
Hypotonic?
11:26
So t you know when you're testing reflexes, this is like how we might
11:29
record if we were doing a patella reflex, let's say, we would say, okay, the the reflex is hypertonic, hypotonic, atonic.
11:39
There's no reflex.
11:41
Okay.
11:42
That's not a that's not a comment on the muscles.
11:45
Okay.
11:46
What what I think most women want when they're saying I want toned, when I want to look toned, is they want to be able to see muscle.
11:56
And often this c this comes in this sort of era of Pilates princesses, uh, where we start to say, like, I want muscle, but not too much, you know.
12:07
When we're whether or not your muscle show is comprised of how much muscle you have and how much body fat you have sitting on top of it, right?
12:16
So if you are toned or going after a toned look, it means that you have enough muscle and low a low enough body fat percentage.
12:27
for that muscle to be visible in the first place.
12:30
That requires muscle.
12:33
Okay?
12:34
So it's not that you're just going to do cardio
12:37
And burn off all the fat and all of a sudden your muscles are gonna go.
12:40
Because we know that if you were only doing cardio, you're burning everything.
12:43
You just become a smaller version of yourself.
12:45
There's no shape change.
12:47
There's no body composition change, right?
12:49
And in order to have muscle, of course, that requires progressive overload.
12:54
So it's not
12:56
five pound pink usually dumbbells forever, although you can certainly start there, right?
13:03
It's not endless Pilates in a caloric deficit.
13:06
And by the way, I love Pilates, so don't come at me.
13:08
I do Pilates two to three times a week.
13:10
Hello, beautiful pelvic floor and core work.
13:14
But I think that the way that Pilates has been marketed is a little misleading for women, right?
13:18
Pilates is beautiful.
13:19
I love Pilates.
13:20
It has value.
13:22
But if you want that look, what you need is muscle hypertrophy that requires load and progressive overload, mechanical tension, right?
13:31
And you also need to reduce the body fat that sits on top of that.
13:35
And the
13:36
uh maybe uncomfortable truth about this is that you can't starve your way into that look.
13:41
Okay?
13:42
So if you want your muscles to show, you need to build your muscles
13:48
And building muscles requires eating.
13:51
Okay?
13:52
And this is where this villain tends to panic because women who build
13:57
Right?
13:58
And love themselves are harder to control than women who shrink.
14:03
Okay.
14:04
So I kind of want to talk a little bit about the psychology around that, maybe the psychology of shrinking
14:09
Because in our society, shrinking is praised.
14:13
Oh look, she lost weight.
14:15
Oh look, she dropped a dress size, two dress sizes.
14:18
She looks amazing, right?
14:20
That's what we always say to be, oh my God, you look amazing.
14:23
Do we ever say, oh my God, you've added 40 pounds to your deadlift?
14:30
No.
14:31
Oh my gosh, you increased your dead hang by 10 seconds?
14:35
Amazing.
14:36
You can hike for six hours without pain.
14:39
We don't talk about that.
14:41
We don't praise that.
14:42
What we celebrate is disappearance.
14:45
Right?
14:45
We celebrate being smaller, losing, you know, air quotes weight, right?
14:52
We don't celebrate expansion, we don't celebrate growth.
14:58
Right?
14:59
And over time, I think psychologically that conditioning creates something far more dangerous than body dissatisfaction and dysmorphia.
15:08
It creates like distrust, body distrust.
15:12
You stop trusting your hunger.
15:14
So if you're lifting weights and your muscles are like, damn, that was a good, that was a good session.
15:19
Okay, I need some building blocks now.
15:20
I need to rebuild.
15:22
You don't feed yourself, right?
15:24
When you're tired because you have been going at it at the gym, you don't let yourself recover.
15:31
Hashtag no days off, right?
15:32
What the hell is that stupid saying?
15:34
Like, no
15:36
You stop trusting your strength because you're worried about this bulk.
15:40
You override the signals of your body instead of interpreting them.
15:46
You know what I mean?
15:47
And that is how women end up when they're 45, 50 years old, they're exhausted.
15:55
They're injured, they're metabolically dysregulated and wondering what happened.
15:59
And then they go on Instagram and then everybody and their mother is like, it's hormones.
16:03
It's your hormones.
16:04
You need hormone therapy.
16:06
Okay.
16:06
And now I'm not saying that you shouldn't go on hormone therapy.
16:10
Okay.
16:10
I'm not saying that.
16:12
If you're on hormone therapy, like God bless, like if it is working for you, great.
16:18
But people are talking about why they feel so terrible
16:26
When nothing happened, air quotes, right?
16:29
But what has actually happened is the strategy has failed.
16:33
You stopped listening to your body
16:36
Right?
16:36
Your body did not betray you.
16:38
You were taught to betray it.
16:41
Okay?
16:42
So the long-term cost, okay, so the stakes, if nothing changes.
16:47
is you are going to continue to gain and lose the same 10 pounds over and over and over again.
16:55
And this constant weight cycling is going to usually have a net reduction of your lean mass over time.
17:02
Every diet that you lose weight on, if your muscle is not protected, reduces your metabolic reserve.
17:08
And of course, if you are over 40
17:11
The hormonal reality of some of your reproductive hormones reducing happens, like estrogen declines, testosterone declines, progesterone declines, muscle protein synthesis.
17:22
Becomes less responsive, meaning that your muscles are less responsive to mechanical and chemical stimulus from the diet.
17:28
Your bone resorption, right?
17:30
Your density of your bones starts to uh
17:34
We'll say it a different way.
17:35
Like your bone resorption increases.
17:37
So your density has a net decrease if you are not prioritizing muscle and bone.
17:42
If you're not loading
17:44
your bone and building muscle in this window when you're 40 and you're 50, you're missing a critical opportunity, right?
17:51
To safeguard and to future proof your body.
17:55
Osteopenia and osteoporosis does not happen overnight.
17:58
You don't just wake up when you're 45 with osteopenia.
18:01
It accumulates.
18:02
Same with sarcopenia.
18:03
It doesn't just show up.
18:04
On your 50th birthday, it just kind of like slowly happens over many decades.
18:10
The loss of independence in your 70s begins in your 40s.
18:16
And it's not because aging is like some cruel, you know, uh wicked, you know
18:23
person uh or some wicked terrible thing, it's because your muscle and your bone were no longer exposed to stimulus.
18:32
And if the stimulus, and of course in the when I'm talking about stimulus, I'm talking about in the form of exercising and eating, if that is replaced with more and more aggressive starvation.
18:43
That's, I mean, for me, that's the biggest tragedy for women, right?
18:49
So if I'm not being clear, let me say this very clearly.
18:53
It was never you.
18:55
The problem was never you.
18:57
We were just taught to ignore our bodies.
19:01
So if you're somebody who maybe feels like your body has stopped responding in your 40s or 50s, it's not because your body betrayed you.
19:08
Okay.
19:09
Your body is beautiful, infinitely intelligent, right?
19:15
What your body has done is it has adapted to the environment
19:20
Bodies adapt to scarcity by conserving energy.
19:23
If you're not feeding your body enough, she's not going to burn anything.
19:29
If your body has had to adapt to overtraining, she is going to increase stress signaling, right?
19:36
Your body will adapt to chronic dieting by defending fat mass much more aggressively.
19:43
Right?
19:44
I often say as a joke, it's like you you know, you try, and for those of you who've ever had to deal with insurance, it's like you if if you chronically diet, your body will hold on to fat like an insurance policy trying not to pay out.
19:57
Okay.
19:58
Your body is doing exactly what you designed it to do, right?
20:04
Or what it was essentially designed to do, which is to protect you.
20:07
If you're not eating, she's gonna conserve so you don't die.
20:12
Right?
20:12
But the villain here convinced you that that protection was a failure, that it holding on to the fat was somehow the wrong thing to do.
20:22
It wasn't.
20:24
That is exactly what the body is designed to do.
20:28
Okay?
20:30
So.
20:33
Now we know the villain.
20:36
Now we know that our bodies actually, we just need to put the right inputs.
20:40
We just need to love her.
20:41
We need to start trusting what she's telling us and what she's laying down.
20:45
So now we are going to rebuild.
20:48
Okay, not with aggression.
20:50
We're not going to punish ourselves.
20:52
Okay.
20:53
We are going to do it
20:54
in the way that we were designed to.
20:57
Okay?
20:57
The first thing we want to do is we want to reject that false binary that I was talking about.
21:01
You don't need to choose between aesthetics and longevity.
21:04
You can have both
21:05
It's like I feel like Oprah and it's like, and you get aesthetics, and you get longevity, and we all get aesthetics and longevity.
21:11
Okay?
21:12
You can have both of those things, right?
21:15
The second is you are going to, if you are not already, but I suspect you might might already be, you are going to build strength systemically.
21:24
Okay?
21:25
So what does that mean?
21:27
Progressive resistance training, which doesn't necessarily mean more weight.
21:32
Okay, progressive overload comes in many, many, many forms.
21:36
We are gonna train in full range of motion the way God intended.
21:40
Okay?
21:41
None of these half-ass reps, okay?
21:43
Long-length partials, different story, but full range of motion, okay?
21:47
Multi-joint movements
21:49
Many joints at once.
21:50
Think of a squat, think of a hip thrust, think of a lunge, think of a pull-up, think of a push-up.
21:56
These are many joints working at once because we also want to protect our joints.
22:00
You don't have good knees, you can't lunge.
22:02
You don't have good shoulders, you can't push up.
22:04
Joints are the key to longevity, okay?
22:08
And you're going to do this like three to four times a week.
22:11
If you are someone who's new to training and you're like, I don't either have the desire or the time to train three to four times a week, start at two.
22:20
Two times a week, phenomenal results.
22:23
I've seen it thousands and thousands of times.
22:24
All you need is two times a week.
22:26
But ideally, in an ideal world, you would do it three times a week or four.
22:32
I love the idea of tracking your lifts, not your weight.
22:36
And by the way, if you have a scale in the bathroom, can we all just like collect?
22:39
Can we have like world throw out the bathroom scale day or something?
22:43
Don't track your weight
22:45
Track your lifts.
22:46
Track how much lift, how much weight, and how many reps, how much volume you're doing.
22:52
That's what you want to be tracking.
22:55
The load, if you want to get heavier, sure, you can add load gradually.
22:59
But I'll say it like this way, anytime you manipulate any of the variables of progressive overload, whether that is load or reps or sets or density.
23:09
All the other variables are going to shift.
23:11
So if you increase load, you're like let's say you're doing like a back row and you were doing three sets of 12.
23:18
And let's say you were doing it at a hundred pounds.
23:20
I'm just making numbers up here.
23:22
If you increase that 100 pounds to like 115 pounds, you're not going to be able to do three sets of 12.
23:27
Right?
23:28
If you are able to do three sets of 12 at 100 pounds, if you pop it up to 115 pounds, you might be able to do three sets, but maybe it's six or seven.
23:36
Right?
23:37
So also just know that all the other variables around progressive overload are going to shift when you manipulate one variable.
23:46
Okay.
23:47
And then the other thing you're gonna do, my dear friend, is you're gonna respect recovery.
23:51
You don't have to earn recovery.
23:53
You don't have to be like bed-ridden or couch-ridden, doom scrolling on Instagram.
23:58
You are going to build in recovery every week.
24:02
Every week.
24:04
You don't need to earn it.
24:06
Okay?
24:06
You're gonna rest like you're paid to.
24:08
Okay.
24:09
And the third thing, uh and this comes from my
24:13
20 plus years in practice is mobility.
24:16
Okay.
24:16
Again, I've been kind of hinting like joints, joints of the future.
24:19
Okay.
24:19
But you're gonna prioritize mobility, right?
24:22
So mobility is strength expressed through range.
24:27
When you have full range of motion, I know your joints are healthy, I know your tendons are healthy, I know your ligaments are healthy, right?
24:34
So that means that you're with mobility, you are going to train your hips
24:38
When we think about hip mobility, we think about flexion.
24:42
Everybody's pretty good at hip flexion.
24:44
I never had a problem, many problems with hip flexion.
24:47
Where most people run into issues is hip extension, true hip extension, not extension from the spine, but hip extension.
24:53
And then the other area that a lot of people run into is internal and external rotation of the hips.
24:58
So you want to be training mobility in those ranges.
25:01
The thoracic spine, one of my favorites.
25:04
We are sitting constantly in a flexed position.
25:07
We need to extend the thoracic spine.
25:09
The thoracic spine is the mid-back.
25:12
And then the secret unsung hero for mobility is your ankles.
25:15
I know we don't ever think about our ankles.
25:17
But dorsiflexion in particular, which is the ability for the leg bone to translate forward in space.
25:24
over the foot is happens that moment arm happens at the ankle, uh the ankle mortized joint.
25:30
That's called dorsiflexion.
25:32
Okay.
25:32
These are in I mean there's m every joint.
25:34
There's mobility to do it every joint.
25:36
But these are the three main areas I would start with.
25:39
Because moving pain-free is not a luxury.
25:44
Okay.
25:44
It is insurance again for independence when you're 60, 70, 80, 90.
25:49
Okay.
25:50
The last thing I'll say is you need to fuel properly.
25:53
We all know the protein story, okay?
25:55
1.
25:56
6 to 2.
25:57
2 grams per keg, or about one gram per pound of body weight, okay.
26:03
Uh throughout the day, no special timing around protein, just making sure you're getting that in every day.
26:08
I really love carbohydrates to support training and intensity.
26:13
And so if it's possible for you to take carbs prior to your training or after, that is ideal.
26:20
Although I will in the in the vein of transparency and honesty say that I don't always get that in
26:25
So when I can't eat, if I'm training at some ungodly hour in the morning, which is often, I usually will have ketones and then I follow my workout.
26:35
with a very high carbohydrate, high protein meal, okay, because you have used up the micro uh the muscle glycogen during that time.
26:42
So if you can eat before training, great
26:45
I typically eat before I train on the weekends, just because my schedule is a little more flexible on the weekends.
26:53
Uh during the week, I typically, I'm typically training fasted or with ketones
26:58
And then I want you to be thinking about dietary fats as a way to support hormonal signaling and also as a way for beautiful skin, hair, and nails.
27:08
Okay.
27:09
You don't have fat, your hair's gonna fall out, your skin's gonna be brittle, uh your skin's gonna be dry, and your nails are gonna be brittle with all those like ridges on them.
27:16
Okay, fats are really, really important.
27:18
It's also important for your brain, okay
27:20
Undereating, like no one is gonna give you a medal for undereating.
27:26
It is not discipline, okay?
27:28
It's sabotage
27:30
Undereating is completely sabotaging your dream body.
27:36
If you are on Instagram or you have an idea of how you'd like to look and maybe that is
27:42
you know, more shapely legs, more defined glutes, a smaller waist, maybe you want to cap off the shoulders, you want to have an hourglass figure.
27:49
You need to eat for that.
27:50
Okay.
27:51
If you don't eat, you're sabotaging your efforts.
27:55
And it's like, why even bother?
27:56
If you are going to train like a maniac, but then you're not gonna eat, like you have to eat.
28:01
You have to eat like you're building something because you are.
28:04
Okay.
28:05
The other thing I'll say is just consistent training.
28:08
Uh I think that that's probably easier than the eating part, although I will say that
28:13
These like 75 hard.
28:16
God, don't ever do 75 hard, please.
28:20
But any no 12 week, eight week, six week, whatever boot camp, blah, blah, blah.
28:26
Just
28:27
Surrender to the monotony of doing the same thing f every week, week in, week out, for the next couple of years.
28:35
You know what I'm saying?
28:36
So I think that what we typically do when we're like, I want to change uh my body, I wanna change the way I look.
28:41
I'm gonna give myself six weeks.
28:43
Don't give yourself six weeks.
28:44
Give yourself six years.
28:46
You know?
28:47
Like give yourself a longer runway so that you can accommodate for life because life gets lifey.
28:54
Right.
28:54
That you can accommodate for things that you could not predict when you were really motivated and set that goal.
29:00
And that you can also accommodate for your muscles and your body catching up to your brain's goals.
29:06
Right
29:07
The reason why we admire people with muscle is because it took them years, again, years with a Z, okay?
29:15
Because our muscles have to make these like new little protein factories and then once those little protein factories, then they can create more pro like it takes a really long time to build muscle.
29:23
It's hard work.
29:25
But you do that on repeat and you do it consistently, I pro I double pinky promise you, that is how muscles build.
29:32
That is how bone density improves.
29:34
That's how your metabolism stabilizes
29:37
Right?
29:37
It's not through crazy fasting and undereating.
29:42
So going forward, if I may be so bold to ask you to do this, I want you to start measuring.
29:48
I want you to start measuring your strength gains.
29:51
So tracking your workouts like I was talking about before.
29:54
Track your volume, track your sets, track your reps, track your weight, track your outside of the gym, your energy levels.
30:01
Okay
30:02
Energy is this sort of like wishy washy term.
30:05
It's like, how do we even measure it?
30:07
You know, it's not like we have like a mitochondrial
30:10
Test.
30:11
But if you typically find yourself like crashing at like two to three in the afternoon, right?
30:17
Or you need more than a cup of coffee.
30:20
If you need the cup of coffee like first thing before you even speak to anybody, you know, I would say maybe there's some energy work to to be done there.
30:29
Or if at the end of the day you're so tired and wired.
30:33
Like again, these are all like small little clues, right?
30:36
Looking at your sleep quality is another way, right?
30:38
Are you able to
30:40
A initiate sleep, like can you fall asleep when you want?
30:44
And then B, are you able to maintain that sleep?
30:47
So if you're waking up, let's say overnight, you know, what time are you waking up?
30:51
If you are waking up overnight, typically it's between two and four in the morning.
30:54
That's like my clinical observation with people where they have like dysregulated cortisol or like chronic chronic stress.
31:01
And then your sleep quality as well.
31:04
So how many hours of deep sleep are you getting?
31:08
How many hours of REM are you getting?
31:10
A lot of times if you have some type of wearable, it's going to give you that data.
31:14
But if you don't want to do that, then just like do you wake up feeling refreshed.
31:19
Like sleep is one of the, I would argue, easiest things to monitor because we all know when we've slept poorly.
31:28
Right.
31:28
And it the goal is not to sleep perfectly all the time.
31:30
God Lord knows I have bad nights of sleep.
31:32
There's some days where I wake up and I just my mind's racing.
31:35
I have an idea or I'm like just something, something, and my mind's going.
31:38
So the goal is not to sleep perfectly.
31:41
It's just to, you know, it's like the 80-20 rule, right?
31:43
Like you're doing it most of the time.
31:45
And then do we have a recovery
31:49
protocol in place.
31:50
And what does that look like?
31:52
So recovery for me can be anything from sauna to walking.
31:58
And I'm gonna present something maybe a little uh with a little bit of controversy or controversy, depending on where in the world you are.
32:05
I like to just sometimes just sit on Instagram.
32:07
Like I have uh these compression boots
32:10
Um, that I love, they I love them after leg days.
32:13
My legs are usually sore, so I strap on the compression boots and they just kind of like massage my legs
32:17
And I'll just sit there for forty-five minutes like, well what am I gonna do?
32:20
I'll do a duolingual lesson, I'll do language, and then I'll get on Instagram and I'll scroll.
32:24
That's recovery
32:25
That's recovery too.
32:27
Um, so what are some things that really make you happy?
32:30
Right.
32:31
So recovery should be like light.
32:32
I like active recovery, so I like walking.
32:34
But you know, Instagram scrolling, also okay.
32:37
Um
32:38
Can we track our waist to hip ratio?
32:42
I love this because you don't need to be on some wait list for some influencer doctor to be able to figure out what your you know W
32:51
TH ratio, waist to hip ratio is.
32:54
Get a doll go to Dollarama, the dollar store, whatever.
32:57
Buy a tape measure, measure the smallest part of your waist, which may or may not be your belly button.
33:02
Ladies who've had children, we know that the belly button tends to
33:05
Move south after pregnancy, but just the smallest part of your waist and the widest part of your hips.
33:11
Divide the waist into the hip.
33:13
Is it less than 0.
33:14
8?
33:14
Your waist should be at at least 80% of the size, or I'll say 80% of the size of the waist, ideally like 0.
33:21
6 to 0.
33:22
8, somewhere like that.
33:24
And then the other thing you can track is, yeah, how you look, you know?
33:27
Do you feel like your skin is glowy?
33:30
Do you feel like your hair is denser?
33:33
Do you feel like your nails are strong?
33:35
Do you like what you see in the mirror, right?
33:37
But I want you to also contextualize it, right?
33:40
Like how do you want to look when you're 70?
33:42
Is the one of the questions that you can ask yourself, right?
33:45
Because that question will change your behavior.
33:47
You're not building a uh a bikini body.
33:50
It's like, oh you know how you build a bikini body?
33:52
You put a bikini on your body, okay?
33:54
But you're not building a summer body.
33:56
You're building a 40-year asset.
34:00
Right?
34:00
You're gonna be here for another 40 years, God willing.
34:03
Right.
34:04
So just like an investment portfolio, how can you ink, how can you make deposits into that into that asset over the next 40 years?
34:15
So what happens if you do all this?
34:18
Now let's paint a let's paint a nice picture of unicorn, sparkles, and rainbows.
34:21
Okay
34:22
If you do decide to change course and do some of the things that we've been talking about, you will begin to build a body that not only looks good, so it's the dream body that you've always wanted but couldn't get because you were starving yourself, but it also moves well.
34:36
Right?
34:37
And you're gonna stop like oscillating, right, between obsession and like forceful motivation and surrender, right?
34:46
You're just going to like I really like the
34:51
I really like this phrase, and I've said it multiple times on the show over the past couple of years.
34:56
Surrender to the monotony of doing the same things.
34:59
So, you know every it's not like, okay, I got this new seventy-five hard thing.
35:02
I got it's just you're just you're not gonna you're not gonna vacillate between
35:07
Like, I'm obsessed, I'm gonna do it, and then I failed.
35:09
And then I'm obsessed, and I'm gonna do it, and I failed again.
35:12
Because then that reinforces this idea that you're a failure and you're not, right?
35:17
The other thing that you're going to become is metabolically resilient.
35:20
You're going to maintain your bone density.
35:22
And when you're 70 or 80, you're going to be able to maintain your independence.
35:26
If you're a mother of daughters, you'll model sanity for your daughters and for the sons that are watching you, right?
35:32
Because if you are mother of sons, they're going to choose a woman like you.
35:36
Right?
35:37
So you model sanity for your daughters and you model a woman with earned confidence for your sons
35:45
You model a woman who's figured it out.
35:48
Not because you were freaking chasing skinny and chasing small at all accounts, but because you chose yourself, because you chose stronger.
35:59
The villain.
36:02
So the villain is not you, right?
36:04
It's the system that's profited from your insecurity
36:09
Right?
36:10
I think that's important.
36:10
I'm gonna say it again.
36:11
The villain is not you.
36:12
You are not the problem.
36:13
You are not the failure.
36:14
Okay.
36:15
It is the system that has profited from your insecurity.
36:19
It's the messaging that has equated being skinny and essentially freaking disappearing with virtue
36:28
Right?
36:28
It's the fitness industry that sold you urgency, 75 days, 75 hearts, six week boot camp.
36:35
Urgency over sustainability.
36:38
Play the long game.
36:39
You're not late, by the way.
36:41
You're not behind.
36:42
Right?
36:43
You could be 49, 59, 69 listening to this.
36:46
You're not behind.
36:47
You're exactly where you are.
36:48
You're not broken.
36:49
You're not misdirected.
36:50
Okay
36:51
Now you know.
36:52
It's like thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
36:55
Right?
36:55
Because once you know it, once you know it, you can't unknow it.
36:59
Like once you see it, you can't unsee it.
37:02
Right?
37:03
Your job is to build
37:05
something.
37:06
Fuel the build, right?
37:09
You want to be lifting.
37:10
You want to be moving and repeat, right?
37:12
Lift, move, repeat.
37:14
I feel like that's another t-shirt.
37:16
That's the long game
37:17
Right?
37:18
Take it or leave it.
37:19
That's what it is.
37:20
So that is sort of like everything that I stand for.
37:25
This is something that I have observed not only with the women that I've had the privilege of working with, but also myself.
37:31
Like these are also the same demons, the same villains that I have also been exposed to.
37:38
And
37:39
As I have been writing this next book, like all of these things have come up for me in my research.
37:44
I'm like, why do women think like this?
37:46
Why do we always feel like we're the problem?
37:49
Why is it whenever we
37:51
start and quote unquote fail, uh a diet or a program.
37:55
It's like, oh, it's my fault.
37:56
There's something wrong with me.
37:57
It's like, there's nothing wrong with you.
37:59
It's just you were set up to fail from the beginning.
38:02
And that perpetuating or perseverating schema that you are a failure gets reinforced over and over and over again.
38:12
And I will not stand for it for one more minute.
38:15
So
38:17
Let me know what you let me know what you thought of my this is I've been journaling about this guy.
38:24
I've been journaling, I've been dreaming about this.
38:26
This is like when I tell you that sometimes I don't sleep and I
38:28
I am like literally thinking for hours in the quiet of you know 1 a.
38:31
m.
38:32
and 2 a.
38:32
m.
38:32
I'm like, why do we think like this?
38:34
So I would love for you to let me know what you think of this.
38:38
um episode.
38:39
Would you like more of this?
38:40
Because let me tell you I got more.
38:42
I got more.
38:42
There's more where this came from.
38:44
We read all we read all the reviews, by the way, on Apple and Spotify and all the places.
38:48
So
38:49
Good, bad, and ugly, let us know.
38:51
So I hope that you enjoyed and we will catch you next time.
38:55
Thank you so much.
38:56
Alright, alright.
38:57
I hope you enjoyed today's episode.
38:59
And I must give you the obligatory legal and medical disclaimer.
39:04
here.
39:05
This podcast, Better with Dr.
39:07
Stephanie, is for general information only.
39:10
And the advice, recommendations we discuss
39:14
Do not replace medicine chiropractic or any other primary healthcare providers' advice, treatment, or care.
39:22
In the consumption of this podcast, there is no doctor-patient relationship that has been formed, and the use and implementation.
39:29
Of the information discussed are at the sole discretion of the listener.
39:34
The information and opinions shared on this podcast are not intended to be a substitute for primary care diagnosis.
39:41
or treatment.
39:42
In other words, guys, be smart about this.
39:45
Take it with a grain of salt.
39:46
Take this information to your primary healthcare provider and have a discussion with him or her to make the best choice that is for you.
39:55
Remember I am a doctor.
39:57
but I am not your doctor, and these conversations are meant for educational purposes only.