Dr. Martin Picard

Three weeks, you're going for like 5,000, 7,000 calories a day.

You do this for three weeks.

There's a reason why the Tour de France is not four weeks and five weeks, right?

There's a cap.

And there's beautiful data showing that the longer the event, the athletic event, the lower the max output per day.

And if you look at that curve, you know, the first point, max power output you can develop over 10 seconds is what you see in the 100-meter sprint, right?

And then you get the 400 meters, and then it goes down.

And the Tour de France is, you know, marathon is here, Tour de France, three weeks is here.

Then you get that crazy run across America, multiple weeks.

And then at the very end, nine months,

Pregnancy.

And it costs energy to grow a human being.

And some of the data suggests that when you grow a human being for nine months, the woman is basically operating at the max of her capacity if you integrate over a nine-month period.

The brain remodels, exactly.

There are different demands, right?

As a mother, if you're pregnant now, you need to start to care about different things.

Maybe it's adaptive to start to think about the world a slightly different way.

And that's not just about yourself.

And so there are certainly even long lasting brain changes that happen in the woman's brain.

So this economy of energy between organs is likely what explains if you're a young woman and you exercise a lot, you lose your menses, right?