Dr. Stacy Sims

So until a woman can identify what her own normal is, we can't rely on this graph to actually explain to them.

And from like an exercise and sports point of view, when we get into this, the progesterone's job is to build this lush endometrial lining.

And it –

creates a lot of glycogen storage.

So we often hear about glycogen in the muscle, and that's what we're using for fuel.

It has a way of shuttling a lot of the carbohydrate away and storing it into the endometrial lining, which is why we see differences in intensity and the way that a woman can respond to exercise if she has ovulated.

Yeah.

I often put it with my athletes that it's a marker of health, that if you are able to take on the load of training, the load of travel, and maintain your normal menstrual cycle, then you are robust enough to be able to progress.

But if there becomes a misstep in your menstrual cycle, then we need to look at all the stressors and the allostatic load and pull you back and see what do we need to

Do you need to eat more?

Do you need to recover more?

What are the things that are missing to bring you back to normal?

And this is where we look at the sociocultural effect of what a woman is supposed to look like.

And that's the thing that I'm really pushing out.

It's like,

We want to think about how strong we can be and how much muscle we can build because muscle is a massive metabolic help.

And as well as bone, right?

We talk about it.

And then when I get the pushback of, oh, I'm going to do fasted training or I'm going to fast till noon, I'm like, wait a second.

not only are we going to interfere with our circadian rhythm and our hormone pulses, we're also acutely interfering with our appetite hormones.