Dr. Vonda Wright

If we talk about the evolutionary biological theories, and there are a lot of sociologists that will counter when I'm getting ready to say, so I'll apologize in advance.

When we look at original hunter-gatherer type communities, the male body was designed to go out to find the calories.

The woman body was designed to stay and take care of the offspring and make sure that home was set.

If it was low calorie, menstrual cycle would stop because you didn't want to reproduce in a time of low calories.

Body fat would come on because there weren't a lot of calories.

Exactly.

An energy deficit.

So with the male body, and we see this, their brain and hypothalamus is not as sensitive to those nutrient deficits as much as a woman's body because we have menstrual cycle and menstrual cycle function.

A man will lean up and get more cognitively focused in times of low calorie intake.

So this is what we see with fasting data and we see with restrictive diets.

And that was, we need to bring it back to that biological lens, low calorie.

I have to go find the calories.

I have to be fit to go find the calories.

Low calories, I need to not have to eat as much.

So I need to store fat and I can't have a baby because we don't have enough calories.

And then stress?

When we add modern stress onto that, that's a comprehensive addition of cortisol and addition of inflammation, and that also perpetuates body fat.

I like to frame it where women are under recovering, not over training.

So if we're under recovery, then it makes it more acceptable to fuel.

And I always want to bring it back to, it doesn't matter, like, because I come from high performance, I'm going to use those words where it's like, you're not recovering enough.