Dr. Stacy Sims

I mean, like a lot of people who listen to your show, Stephen, are interested in health and their body and achieving certain goals.

And so certainly, you know, I have practiced –

Fertility in North Carolina and in Austin.

And I see a completely different patient population, you know, in Austin, Texas, which is a very fit area.

Women are constantly overtraining.

But to Stacey's point earlier about this maybe evolutionary what happens.

Women go into this hypothalamic dysfunction even before it's what we call like amenorrhea.

Hypothalamic amenorrhea is essentially where the brain, where the hypothalamus is, shuts off, says can't reproduce right now, X, Y, Z reason, no FSH and LH are coming out, you're not ovulating, you're not making estrogen, you're not going to get pregnant.

So it's a survival mechanism.

Pregnancy is dangerous in hunter-gatherers.

But modern medicine acts like you're perfect or it's turned off.

And the reality is there's all these shades of gray in between where these different chronic stressors and your insulin resistance and your inflammation and your overexercising and your underfueling come in and make it so the hypothalamus is not responding correctly.

Correct.

And that's what we're trying to get people to intervene there before it gets too bad.

And I see a large number of women who do fall into that zone where they are trying their hardest to be healthy.

But what they are choosing to do is actually having a negative impact on their hormonal health and how their brain is interpreting their hormones.

And it's very rare to see that in a man.

Meaning the number one reason why I will see low testosterone is purely because many men are taking testosterone or because of other exogenous factors like marijuana use.

It is very rarely my brain is not sending out the signals to cause my testicles to make testosterone.

You're laying down grain pathways and neural fibers.