The Truth About Nutrition & Exercise for Women | Dr. Stacy Sims & Dr. Andrew Huberman

00:00:00.000 | what is a good example of a, you know, a pre-training meal, if you will? What is the

00:00:11.160 | timing of that meal relative to training that works best? Yeah. I mean, like I'm the kind of

00:00:16.560 | person gets up and is out the door within a half an hour to go do whatever I'm going to do. So it's

00:00:21.320 | not like I'm going to have a full meal. I've heard of people like you. Yeah. Meaning I tend

00:00:25.600 | to move slowly in the morning. I wish I could, but the way my life is, it doesn't work that way.

00:00:30.340 | So, but I'm also one of the people that never really has an appetite till 11 o'clock.

00:00:34.160 | Okay. So we're similar in that way. Yeah. So how do you, how do you square that?

00:00:37.340 | So I make a double espresso at night and I put some almond milk and a scoop of protein powder in there.

00:00:43.020 | So the almond milk is sweetened and usually it's unsweetened, but sweetened for the carb

00:00:48.340 | and then the protein powder for the protein. Because if I'm going to go do an ocean swim,

00:00:53.300 | then I need some carbohydrate and protein on board. If I'm going to just go to the gym,

00:00:57.980 | then I'll probably just have the protein powder in the coffee. Yes, I'm caffeinating,

00:01:02.340 | but I'm also getting the calories for the hypothalamus and getting some more circulating

00:01:05.880 | amino acids. Abby Smith-Ryan out of UNC did some specific work looking at carbohydrate,

00:01:11.220 | protein before and strength or cardio and found that if you're going to do a true strength training

00:01:18.160 | session, you only need around 15 grams of protein before you go to really help you get into the idea

00:01:26.000 | that yes, you have some fuel on board and also increases your post-exercise oxygen consumption

00:01:31.660 | or your EPOC. So your resting metabolism stays elevated, giving you a better chance for recovery

00:01:38.520 | post-exercise as well. If you're going to do any kind of cardiovascular type work up to an hour,

00:01:43.640 | then you're adding 30 grams of carb to that. So it's not a lot of food and it's not a full meal.

00:01:49.960 | Other people are like, I'm starving right before I go training. Then yes, you can have your meal,

00:01:55.660 | giving yourself about a half an hour before. But it doesn't have to be major food that we're talking

00:02:01.760 | about. But that's just enough to bring blood sugar up and stimulate the hypothalamus to say,

00:02:08.460 | yeah, there's some nutrition coming in. And then you have your real food afterwards. You have your

00:02:12.120 | breakfast afterwards within 45 minutes. As a neuroscientist, I find it so interesting that

00:02:17.300 | at least some of what you're talking about with this pre-workout meal, and perhaps most of it

00:02:23.120 | relates to how ingesting those calories impacts the brain, protects those kispeptin neurons.

00:02:31.160 | And we'll talk more about kispeptin, very interesting peptide.

00:02:34.700 | As opposed to saying, okay, you need X number of calories because you're going to burn X number

00:02:39.960 | of calories. I hate that conversation.

00:02:41.380 | Right. Which is a very different conversation. Here, what we're talking about is the neural

00:02:46.160 | aspects of being able to generate intensity, also blunt cortisol, and get the most out of training

00:02:52.960 | without putting the body into kind of an emergency state.

00:02:56.660 | Yeah. And the longer someone withholds food after exercise, and the greater they stay in that

00:03:01.960 | catabolic or breakdown state, the more the brain perceives it as being in a low energy state.

00:03:06.900 | So the first thing to go is lean mass. When you start telling a woman that, you know,

00:03:11.240 | if you're going to do fasted training and or you're going to delay food intake afterwards,

00:03:15.000 | why are you training? Because the first thing that goes is lean mass. And it's really,

00:03:19.400 | really hard for women to put on lean mass. So once you start really nailing that and then saying,

00:03:24.200 | look, you just need 15 grams of protein to really help and be able to conserve that lean mass. It's

00:03:30.680 | a small, simple fix. People try it and they're like, oh my gosh, I feel amazing. So small little

00:03:36.040 | things when you're working with the whole system, because I get tired, especially around Christmas

00:03:40.220 | time when you're reading all the magazines, it's like two cookies means you have to walk for 30 minutes

00:03:45.300 | on the treadmill. It's like, it doesn't, it doesn't correlate like that at all. So that's why I was

00:03:50.940 | like, I hate the calorie conversation because it's just not applicable.

00:03:54.920 | Right. And it has its own kind of, um, elements of being laced with neuroticism about calorie counting.

00:04:01.880 | And then that can drift easily into the realm of eating disorders. I did an episode about eating

00:04:07.380 | disorders some years ago. And as I was researching that episode, um, I learned that people with eating

00:04:12.980 | disorders, women and men, um, especially anorexia become like calorie calculators, their eyes and

00:04:21.080 | their brain just are constantly evaluating the caloric load of food. And it can be, um, obviously

00:04:26.460 | very intrusive. It's also the most deadly of all the psychiatric conditions. So it's, um, that's a long

00:04:31.380 | way from hopefully what we're talking about here, but, but there's the opportunity for drift whenever

00:04:36.640 | talking about calorie counting in and out. We of course believe in the laws of thermodynamics and

00:04:42.020 | calories in calories out, but I love what you're describing here as getting the brain in a mode that

00:04:48.100 | the brain and body are protected so that one can invest in that high intensity exercise and get the

00:04:53.660 | adaptations that one wants, but not send everything down this pathway of, um, you know, just becoming a

00:04:59.860 | computer of, you know, how much am I exercising? What did I burn? What did I earn? It's, it's, it's,

00:05:05.340 | it's crazy. It's crazy. Um, as long as we're talking about food and food intake relative to training,

00:05:11.000 | what is the suggested post-training, um, window, um, in which one should either avoid or make sure they

00:05:21.300 | get nutrition? Um, meaning how long does one have after, let's say a resistance training session of

00:05:28.540 | about an hour? It seems to me that's what most people are doing. If they're investing in resistance

00:05:32.420 | training, maybe a plus or minus, uh, what, 20 minutes. Um, and they're hitting those, um, high

00:05:40.180 | intensity sets where they have maybe just one or two repetitions in reserve, maybe going to failure on a

00:05:45.280 | few of those sets. What do you recommend women eat after they train?

00:05:48.940 | So we know that women who are in their reproductive years need around 35 grams of good

00:05:54.180 | protein, high quality leucine oriented protein within 45 minutes. And we see that women who are

00:06:01.160 | perimenopausal onwards are 40 to 60 grams because we become more anabolically resistant to food and

00:06:07.800 | exercise as we get older. Um, when we look at like the recovery window for food, there are definitely

00:06:14.060 | sex differences because we hear all the conversation of there's no recovery window. It's, you know,

00:06:18.740 | it's old science, but we look at the research of when women's metabolisms come back down to baseline,

00:06:25.300 | meaning that they have constant straight blood sugar levels versus men, women it's within, uh, 60 minutes.

00:06:32.760 | And for men, it's up to three hours. So when we're looking at the data that says there's no

00:06:37.500 | mental window per se for getting food in, it's based on male data. So when we're looking at women,

00:06:44.120 | women, we have this tighter window to stop that breakdown effect and start the reparation.

00:06:50.080 | Um, so yeah, it's like when we're talking about the protein intake, it's really important not only to

00:06:56.740 | get that leucine content up in the muscle to start the reparation and repair, but also again, to signal

00:07:03.280 | that, yeah, we're in a building state. We're not holding that catabolic state and increasing all the

00:07:10.120 | repercussions that come with it. So women should try and get 30 or as much as 40, maybe 50 grams of

00:07:18.340 | protein depending on their age, post-training within an hour of training. Yep. Men seem to have a longer

00:07:26.620 | window. They could wait an hour, two hours, maybe even three hours before ingesting protein. What

00:07:32.020 | about carbohydrate? We look at mixed, but for men, it's more important because they go through their

00:07:37.680 | liver and muscle glycogen so much faster than women. So when we look at women, we want to get around 0.3

00:07:44.060 | grams per kilo, um, of carbohydrate within two hours of finishing. So we look at protein and people

00:07:51.160 | like, well, that's a big dose of protein. How do I get it all in? It's like, yeah, well, you can look at

00:07:56.180 | how we mix all of these things. You're also getting carbohydrate in with that. So that's why I say you

00:08:01.000 | could have your next meal after your training session. Um, yeah, there's a time and a place for

00:08:06.400 | protein supplementation, but if you're getting that real food and then you're also getting,

00:08:11.220 | you know, your magnesium and your potassium and your sodium and all the things that people supposedly

00:08:16.460 | lose and you're able to also repair a lot better. At some point, there was a lot of discussion about

00:08:24.380 | training fasted burns more body fat. Um, I think now most people accept that that's not the case,

00:08:31.820 | that perhaps the percentage of fat as fuel is increased when one trains fasted,

00:08:38.600 | but that overall in terms of loss of body fat, it doesn't matter if you train fasted or you train fed.

00:08:46.740 | Correct. Okay. I think, um, that can't be stated enough by experts like you. Um,

00:08:52.720 | that doesn't mean that if one prefers to train fasted or with a minimum of food in their gut,

00:08:58.440 | that they can't do that. Like I like to train fasted, but I, what I'm hearing is that women

00:09:04.220 | should probably ingest at least some protein, high quality protein, and maybe drink the protein in a

00:09:09.340 | protein shake form if they don't want to ingest solid food. Yeah. I think the easiest way for people

00:09:15.600 | to understand the basic idea of what low energy is and how this affects men and women is when we are

00:09:22.240 | looking at, um, a tipping point for endocrine dysfunction for men, we're seeing that tipping

00:09:28.840 | point at 15 calories per kilogram of fat-free mass for women, it's 30. So when we're looking

00:09:36.320 | at baseline calorie needs before you really get into that endocrine dysfunction, when you're looking

00:09:41.440 | at those parameters, you can see why men do better in a fasted state or a low calorie state.

00:09:47.140 | But for women, our intake and especially our carbohydrate needs are so much higher

00:09:53.200 | because we have so many other functions that are reliant on that kispeptin upregulation or

00:10:01.400 | downregulation, preferably upregulation. Um, so when we're just talking the basic calorie needs

00:10:07.980 | and what we're seeing, it's that dichotomy right there of 15 to 30. And when you start telling people

00:10:13.900 | that, they're like, Oh, okay, I get it. Is that a biological aspect? It's like, well, you could

00:10:19.420 | trace it all the way back where, you know, men went out to get the calories and most tribes and the women

00:10:24.700 | were home and it wasn't advantageous to be pregnant under low calorie intake. That's why you have

00:10:29.620 | dysfunction when the calories are too low. But, you know, you can also feed forward to modern day now.

00:10:35.360 | And you're seeing that all this perturbance of hormone and the way we regulate hormone across the

00:10:41.300 | circadian rhythm requires more calories for women than it does for men.

00:10:44.820 | I know some men that basically don't eat all day and then eat one meal in the evening and they'll

00:10:50.500 | train in the morning. That's inconceivable to me because within an hour or so of training, I'm hungry.

00:10:55.160 | I know some men that don't eat all day and they'll eat all day and eat all day and eat all day.

The Truth About Nutrition & Exercise for Women | Dr. Stacy Sims & Dr. Andrew Huberman

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