Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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Chapter 2: Why is strength important for women as they age?
Women need to get and stay strong, especially as we age. It's a health risk not to, says obstetrician and gynecologist Jamie Seaman. In her talk, she shares her own journey from collegiate athlete to mom of three and breaks down why muscle mass is crucial to overall health as you age.
Chapter 3: What personal journey does Jaime Seeman share about weightlifting?
Learn the truth behind the weightlifting myths that prevent so many women from getting serious about strength training and get inspired to start lifting heavy things now.
Chapter 4: What are the common myths about weightlifting for women?
As a little girl, I loved playing sports.
I also loved painting my fingernails and parading around my mother's house in her high-heeled shoes. From the beginning of time, I have lived in contrasting worlds, contrasting and often conflicting ideas about what women should and shouldn't do, or maybe how we should and shouldn't look. A pivotal moment came for me when I was a sophomore in high school.
My mother took me to an audition for a modeling agency. And I can't tell you how nervous I was that day or even what I was wearing, but I will never forget the way I felt the next morning.
Chapter 5: How does muscle mass impact women's health risks?
As I was walking into school, I got a phone call. They wanted to sign me as a plus-size model.
Chapter 6: What are the misconceptions about becoming bulky from weightlifting?
I was a size 10, by the way. If I could go back and talk to that 16-year-old version of myself, I would tell her exactly what my own mother told me that day. You were built for bigger and better things. So I turned down their offer, and I went on to play NCAA college softball, where I was a weightlifter of the year twice.
I loved being in the gym, and I loved throwing those heavy weights around, but what I really loved the most was the confidence that my physical strength instilled in me.
But there was always this nagging feeling, this sort of whisper in the back of my mind, and it sounded a lot like the voice on the phone that day, telling me that I was different, somehow not ideal, because I would shrink inside every time somebody commented on my muscular body.
Chapter 7: Is weightlifting too hard for women?
You see, at the time, the only social media we had was something called Cosmopolitan Magazine. And those Cosmo cover girls, well, they didn't have a lot of muscles. Frankly, they looked kind of frail, somewhat unhealthy. But to the world, they were beautiful, and they were idolized. And as a young girl, I let that frame the way that I looked and thought about myself. And this is the problem.
Chapter 8: Why is weightlifting often seen as a male-dominated activity?
Even though something like weightlifting has a multitude of proven health benefits, there continues to be a stigma for women based on cultural and societal myths about what women should and shouldn't do. 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. On average, after age 40, we lose about 1% of our muscle size.
With these age-related declines, we become weak, we become frail, and the risk of all chronic diseases starts to go up. In a study, they found the more days, time and effort that women devote to strength training, the better their body composition is. Myth number two is that weightlifting is hard or maybe too hard on our bodies.
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