Jaime Seeman

I believe that if we can create a new culture that shifts the focus from aesthetics to health, that women's health, and frankly everybody's health, could be transformed forever.

Now, I'd like to be able to tell you that after college, I continued to train really hard in the gym, ate a perfect diet amidst a family and children and a stressful career, but that is not what happened.

What really happened is I went to medical school, I survived residency, I got married and had three children, and I woke up one day dealing with the same metabolic diseases that I was helping my own patients manage through medication.

I could see it, I could feel it, but I told myself that I would just take care of it when I had more time.

And so many of us let ourselves believe that we have a lot of time.

Now, according to the CDC, the top three killers of women is heart disease, cancer, and stroke.

The major contributing factor to these causes of death is what I call metabolic disease.

And even though our modern, high-fat, high-carbohydrate, highly processed diets play a major role, there's one thing that women are not doing across their lifespan that could tremendously reduce their risk of death, and that is building muscle.

The data is actually very clear when it comes to resistance training.

So why aren't more women doing it?

The answer lies in three primary myths that continue to exert a powerful force and prevent women from doing just that.

Myth number one is that if we lift weights, we're going to get big and bulky.

Women think that if they pick up a 20-pound dumbbell that they will somehow look like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

Now, I can tell you that it takes years of very serious training

and steroids to accumulate that kind of look.

And if you take a look around the gym, you can see that achieving the physique of somebody like the Hulk is actually difficult even for most men.

Now, we're all born with a certain genetic potential when it comes to our muscle size and distribution.

But beyond that, it takes years of very serious training and a concerted effort to build and maintain that lean tissue.

Although women have a similar relative natural muscular potential to men, we're also prone to the same age-related muscle loss.

And the medical term for that is called sarcopenia.