Balancing Act: Hormones, Health, and Happiness with Dr. Stephanie Estima

Can you talk about the relationship between the physical body and the physical performance and the mental side of things and how we can use our physical performance to help support a positive mental performance as well? If you're looking to build something, an empire, or be a leader to multiple people, you need, you deserve, and they deserve for you to be in a position where you have the energy and the ability to lead them in a great way. Foreign. Welcome to the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. My name is Bob Govreau. I am your host today. I'm excited to bring in a guest who we're going to talk about all things health, physical and mental performance. But before I jump in there, I just want to remind you this is the place where we dissect the elements that contribute to entrepreneurial success for mindset and leadership, to profits and revenue. My special guest today is going to be Dr. Stephanie Esteema. And we're going to be talking about optimizing health and wealth, integrating fitness into entrepreneurial success. Now, I've had the privilege to know Dr. Stephanie for quite a few years now. We're going to talk about her story about how she started in a bricks and mortar practice and moved into the online space and is now, in my opinion, one of my favorite health practitioners. And she specifically focuses on women's health and the integral parts of maximizing physical and mental and emotional performance. She's the author of the Better Body book and has a extremely successful podcast called better with Dr. Stephanie. I am so excited to bring my friend in today, Dr. Stephanie Esteesta. Okay, so welcome Dr. Stephanie Esteesta. I gotta tell you before I let you loose because I can't wait to absorb all of your wisdom because you have so much. When I first started this podcast, which is just over a year ago, in fact, every week for over a year, I think we're in the small percentage of being able to continue that going. But ever since the beginning of this podcast, you have been on my list to say, oh man, we need to share your wisdom and insights with our audience. So what I would love to kick off with is, is just for you to share your story, where you sort of started, maybe all the way back to the beginning, how that sort of evolved and where things are at with you now.

Awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm thrilled to be here and thank you for the invite. It's my pleasure to be on your show in terms of my journey or my story, if you will. Practitioner for 16 years in physical practice, in private practice in Toronto, Canada as a chiropractor. So we had the biomechanics, the brain health, the nutrition, all that stuff. We were doing that in house, in the clinic, and did that for many years, very happily, and also started well, actually, I'll back up even before I get into sort of the nutrition. But I'll say that this doesn't happen to a lot of practitioners, but for. For the handful of you that it does, where you have some sort of devastating event, one of the things I'll say is that it can be absolutely grieving. We were sort of talking about this in parallel with, like, our children growing up. Like, there's certainly, like a grieving that can happen when something catastrophic happens, and it's also an opportunity for growth. So my particular story, you know, in practice, very happy, had practitioners and massage therapists and other doctors working in the clinic. And then the clinic burned down. So there was like a mishap with the. There was an electrical fire. Something happened with the dryer. You know, massage therapist at the end of her shift threw some towels in, and then something disconnected. There was an explosion, and nobody was hurt. She was already long gone. But the clinic burned to the ground. There was no more clinic. And it was sort of a moment of reckoning that there were a couple other things that were happening in my life at that time. I was going through a separation with my husband at the time. I had young children. And of course, when it rains, it pours. So not only was I sort of seeing an untangling in my personal life, but then my. Had no. I had no way to make money to pay all the lawyers that I had, you know, that I had to hire. So like, kind of scrambled to find a little temporary place that, you know, a working space that I could see patients out of and then find a new lease and renovate that, et cetera. Turned that around after about six months. So reopened the next iteration of the. Of the clinic in a similar area with the larger rehab. And then I was there for about a year, and there was this gnawing feeling because I was running nutrition programs in the clinic. I was running, you know, squat challenges and fitness challenges in the clinic, and was really noticing a big difference. And I'm sure we'll talk about this, but a big difference in outcomes between my female patients and my male patients. So started really focusing on how I could. And my male patients were doing much better, just to be clear, my male patients were doing much better on the programs and. And the programmatics than my female patients were. So I was very curious as to why that was and started dabbling in the online world a little bit. Ran a nutrition program for women, you know, various fitness programs for women as well. And there was a point where my, you know, online revenue, let's say, had far surpassed the clinic revenue. And I'm. I'm very conservative, you know, like, you've known me for a long time. Like, I'm a very conservative person and I'm not. I want to hedge, right? So I didn't want to be like, all right, that's it. I'm done with the clinic and all this, you know, all this day to day stuff, I'm done. I really wanted to make sure that the online business was sustainable. It wasn't just like a drop in the pan kind of thing. It took me. I actually hired a coach, Dr. Jeff Spencer, who you should also get on the show, by the way. But I'll. We can. I can make that introduction if you don't have it. But he was my sort of mindset mentor while I was in this transition between wanting to close the clinic and not having announced it and not doing it yet. So there's sort of this. I'll just, I'll just spend a minute explaining this because I think that everybody at some point in their life is going to experience something like this, where you've been gnawing at a decision for a long time. Maybe it's you want to move neighborhoods or you want to move to a different country, or you want to leave your marriage or you want to leave your job and you want to. Or you want to start a new career or something. And you sort of hem and haw on it. You sit on it, you dream about how nice it would be to open up this new business or to, you know, live in this new country or to speak this new language or whatever. And then you make the decision. You're like, all right, I'm done with my corporate job. I'm going to become an entrepreneur and I'm going to go out on my own. And there's this phase between the time that you've admitted it to yourself that you are actually going to do this and. And the time that you actually do it. There's that Delta. And that Delta, that piece of time feels like eternity because you finally have admitted it to yourself. You're like, finally I admit it. I'm not happy. In my case, I'm not happy in private practice anymore. I find it boring. I've been doing it for 16 years. I can tell you what your problem is before I sit down with you, but I still have to kind of go through the whole thing. And I was finding it a lot more interesting to kind of dive into female health, like female medicine, women's health. And so I hired Jeff to help me close the clinic. Because once you. And then once you decide, like, all right, I'm gonna close the clinic, like, you just wanna do it yesterday, right?

How quick can I move on?

Yeah, how quick can I move on this. Right. How quick can I start getting on this other path, chasing my dreams? And so, of course you can. You. You certainly can do that. But I wouldn't recommend doing that, because one of the things that Jeff said to me, and I still remember it to this day, was, you know, right now, there's a lot of tension. Like, you feel this tension between the clinic's still open and you realizing that you don't want to be there. And in five years, when that tension no longer exists, like, you're doing your thing online and you're, you know, happy as a clam. You want to make sure that you. When you look back on that, that you can be proud of the way that you behaved in that time, right? That you closed it with integrity, that you did it in accordance with your values. And so it took me about six. Very wise. Very wise, right? And at the time, like, you're so. You. You're really fighting that impulse to sort of chase, you know, the thing that you want to be doing. And so he. He was on the phone with me every day because I would come home crying, and, you know, you can speak to my husband about, like, I was come. I was crying, I was miserable. And then also wanting to make sure that I did right by my patients. I did right by, you know, making sure that they all found doctors and they all found clinics that they can continue their care with, et cetera. So there was. There was that. And then once that was closed, you know, just in the sort of spirit of honesty and transparency, I was really sad. You know, like, even though I was like, this is what I want, you know, there was, like, this death of my. Of who I was, right? I was no longer this community leader. People will come to the clinic for advice or, you know, sometimes would, like, drive many, many hours to come and see me several times a week. And so there was this kind of death of identity for me. And I remember we closed the clinic. It was April of 2019. And then I. It was like, very good timing, by the way, right before COVID and all that stuff. But I. I took the Summer off. Like, I. I didn't do anything that summer. I literally would grieve. And it was kind of ugly. Like, there was a lot of, like, crying, laying in bed, like, feeling lost.

Probably a lot of questioning yourself of, did I do the right thing?

Yeah, yeah, a lot of that too. Like, it was. It was so easy. It was like good money. We were established. Like, what am I doing? Am I crazy? You know, all of that. And then sort of picked myself up towards the end of the summer, launched my podcast. As you know, we. I think we launched it. It was like the last day or two of September of 2019, and then we've been doing it ever since. And it's like the main. It's my main work now. It's the thing I most love. It ticks off all the things for me. Learning, prep, conversation, you know, connection, all the things that I love. And we still were getting ready to relaunch the original Nutri nutrition program that I had launched that so many years ago. We're sort of revamping it. There's some new science or some new. There's some different categories of people. So we have women who are in their cycling years. We have women who are perimenopausal, which have sort of a different issues that they're dealing with. And we have menopausal women that have sort of their own set of concerns that they're. They're trying to do. So we sort of have like, the program, we're revamping it for all those three different categories of women.

And, you know, like, it's interesting. I had. And, you know this story, but back when we connected, which would have been rate, I didn't know about the fire, so that's interesting. It would have been right around when you were rebuilding the practice and getting it ready for transition time. And I had. I remember the first time we were on a zoom call, and one of my employees came in and said, Is that Dr. Stephanie Esteema? And I was like, yes. Oh, my God. I listened to all her stuff. I read all of her articles, and they were like, a little bit blown away, really. They were blown away with the fact that I was attracting such incredible people. So I'll get. I'll first take a little bit of credit in there. But no, honestly, you know, the. The knowledge and the science that you have in specifically related to women's health is just something that is so incredible and so admirable. So maybe let's jump in there and let's talk about the Betty Body and women's health. What is the Betty Body?

Yeah, the Betty Body is a bit cheeky, the name. Everybody asks me that. So the. So that's either a complete failure in marketing or it's genius. I haven't decided which one it is yet. So the podcast is called Better. And my community, like people who listen to the show, started calling themselves Betty. It's like, oh, like, I'm a Betty. I listen to the better show. And I was like, oh, okay. And it was. So it sort of spoke to my, like, vintage heart, you know, like Bette Davis, Betty White, you know, all these different sort of icons through, you know, American and Canadian history. And then I was like, all right, so let's, let's name the book after them. So the Betty Body is really named after my fans. And what it really outlines is how women can live in alignment with their menstrual cycles, which is something that I think we're seeing a lot more conversation about it now. When the book first came out, it was a bit. Still a bit, you know, taboo and talking about sex and talking about the different hormones and how that affects our mood and our libido and our sleep and all, you know, our, our desire to work out and all that kind of stuff. So it's really about nutrition in accordance with your menstrual cycle, how that change, how that might change your training, your exercise patterning, like how you might structure workouts over the course of the, over the course of the month. And then, of course, understanding the emotional landscape of your mind and again, how that changes over the course of the month. So there's certain times of the month where we're just sharper. We just, we have more vocabulary available to us. We have, we're more risk takers. And of course there's different times of the month where we're more risk averse. And that's not true for everybody all the time. But I think one of the big pieces when the book came out that, that I think filled the gap that was missing at the time is for women to start tracking their cycles and understanding where they are. And it's for women, but it's also for the men who love them, right? So it's for, you know, women who, so they can better understand themselves. I often joke and I'll say, you know, it's weird, like every four weeks my husband's chewing just drives me nuts and so weird. So is it like, is his, is it his breathing and chewing or is it me? You know, so, you know, I'm like, God, you're chewing so loudly, you know, and it's like, oh, no, you also.

Did this four weeks ago.

Yeah, you did this four weeks ago. Exactly four weeks ago. Stop chewing like that, you know, and. But four weeks. But it's not him. It's. It's where I am and my sensitivity, my sound, you know, all that kind of stuff. So that's what we talk about in the Betty body. So that's for a woman who's in her cycling years. We also parse out some things for perimenopause, but I'm currently writing, you know, at the time of this recording. Anyway, I'm currently writing my next book, which is on perimenopause specifically. And some of the metabolic changes, body composition changes, mood changes, hormonal shifts, all the stuff that happens for women in our 40s and what we can. How we can sort of stack the deck in our favor, what the conversations need to happen with our primary healthcare provider and what we need to be doing at the gym that our primary healthcare providers have no idea how to cancel us on. So that's sort of what. That's what the next book is about as well.

Well, and maybe to lead in with that, because this is definitely fascinating with. With me and just understanding how people operate. Right. What are your thoughts related to doing hormone testing and taking supplements? Related to that, to sort of hit the ideal state of body and performance to be living life at the top of your level. What's your take on. On that? Because I know for me, I get blood testing quarterly, and I always want to try and.

Bravo. That's awesome.

Well, it's wonderful. And I do it quarterly to make sure that, one, if there's anything going sideways with me, I want to be able to identify it early. But two, how do I continue to push those levels up to the point where I'm not an athlete, but if I were one, I would be performing, you know, at the peak levels. How do you feel about that?

So, like, the NFL, if the NFL calls tomorrow, you're like, I'll be ready.

Yeah, NFL would definitely not be the one. You know, body. Body size 5, 9. You know, 165 pounds isn't going to.

Do it in the.

In the NFL, but yeah, sure. If anything else that I'd be eligible for. Called. Yeah, I wanted to, you know, I want to be.

Want to be ready. Yeah. You want to serve your country? Yeah, I love it. I love it. Yeah. I would say this is true for men and women, so I actually applaud you for doing quarterly. I will often say to people, get some testing done at least twice a year. So once every six months. Quarterly is phenomenal if you're able to do that. And I would include hormonal testing in that as well. And a lot of that can be captured in a blood draw. So you can, you can capture free testosterone in that. You can, you can get, you can get free, you know, estradiol and progesterone and everything. Uh, there's certain times of the month for a woman, if she's looking specifically to look at estrogen and progesterone that she wants to be testing on, Typically you can look at, you know, day one to three of her cycle or day 21ish day, you know, 19 to 21. If we're, we're evaluating progesterone. Cause we wanna see the peak. Cause that's usually the peak of the progesterone curve. But yeah, I think if you can get it done quarterly, man, that's amazing. And certainly if you are in perimenopause, because things can change so drastically. In our 40s, like we pretty, we cruise along sort of our 20s and our 30s in terms of like, flex like that, the sort of the normal hormonal flux that we see over the course of the menstrual cycle. But in our 40s, it's up and down, around, sideways and backwards. So if you're taking, if you're looking at things quarterly, you can sort of, you can really start to, to pull out patterns that might be happening. It's up, it's down, you know, and if you're also tracking your cycle because you still are a cycling woman. Most women are cycling still in their 40s if they've had oophorectomies or they, they're in early menopause, let's say from surgery or chemotherapy or something, it's a different story. But mo. Most women in their 40s are still cycling, albeit some of. Many women will start to see irregularities in the second half of their 40s. So where. Let's say they were cycling like 29, every 29 days was a cycle. Now they might see 26, 27, something like that. And the question of hormone therapy always comes up. So I'll, I'll sort of pre answer that and say I'm a huge fan. I don't know why it continues to be so controversial for women. I think we have some idea. We have some ideas. Like there's. There was a really big study that came out in the early 2000s around breast cancer and cardiovascular risk. It was called the Women's Health Initiative. Terrible science. It has since been sort of debunked, as they say. But for men, hormone replacement therapy, like, if. If you were to look at your testosterone, let's say, and they were to determine that for whatever reason it was low, it. That could be clinical signs. Like you might be saying, hey, I'm not motivated, or my libido or my energy levels or my brain fog, or all the things that might be associated with low testosterone. You would have no problem getting on trt. And it would be like, oh, great, yeah, here's a prescription, like, whatever. And it's like, not a big deal. But for whatever reason, it still remains extremely controversial. Just hormone replacement therapy in general. So micronized progesterone, estrogen, and then certainly t, like testosterone replacement therapy for women. It's like, good luck finding a doctor that is gonna, that is going to consider giving a woman testosterone. Like, right now, the only sort of recognized reason why a woman might get testosterone replacement therapy is for hypoactive sexual desire disorder, which is basically like, she walks into the clinic is like, I have no desire. You know, the husband's suffering, she's suffering. And then they, you know, they might put her on some. Some dosage of. Of testosterone.

Interesting. And I had no idea about any of that. So that's, that's fascinating. And I agree. You know, for anyone, why not live life feeling your best at all times? And how dare society suggest that there's something wrong with that?

And no one's saying you should have your period until you're 75. Right? Like, no one. Like, we're not giving you hormones so that you're menstruating until you're 80. Like, God, who freaking wants that? But like, it's just replacing some of the losses. Hormones that help with your cognition, that help with your body composition. Like one. You know, I'll say really quickly, I'm sure you have other questions, but I want like, one of the things that we lose. You know, menopause in some ways is defined as an estrogen deficient syndrome, right? So the cardio protective health, the anabolic health, the bone density health, like these are things that are very, very important for women. We actually see cardiovascular risk start to exponentially increase at the time of menopause, which is for most women, somewhere around 51 or 52 years of age. So we start to see that risk accelerate such that it actually, like, we catch up to the guys, like, the you know, the male and female risk of cardiovascular disease is very different when we look at men and women under 50, and then over 50 women will catch up to that same risk. So estrogen is very cardio protective. And then of course, one of the things that we really worry about for women is frailty. Right. So falls, you know, trips and falls on, you know, if you're living in Canada on ice, you know, or on the east coast, like you have proper winter, you know, like ice, or you might even just trip on like the corner of a carpet or your grandson's Lego or something like if you fall down and break a hip. The stats are terrible on, on the prognosis of hip fractures. And most hip fractures are female. Right. Three quarters of individuals who are hospitalized for hip fractures are females, and 95% of those of that number is usually from a fall. So we want to be protecting against frailty for women because we are in again, that estrogen deficient environment. And there's a lot of different ways that I like to talk about how you might protect, like lifting weights and calisthenics and, you know, weight bearing exercises, weighted vests and that kind of thing. But for a lot of women, we've sort of been for many years, I mean, myself included, I sort of grew up in the cardio section of the gym. I wasn't. I didn't grow up in the weight section of the gym. Didn't want to get bulky, didn't want to look like the Hulk. All that kind of stuff that we hear. Even though that's my dream now, but anyway, I will. A gal can continue to dream. Yeah, but. Yeah, so we want to be thinking about, like, you know, back to the original point around hormones. It really shouldn't be as controversial as it is. We're talking about restoring quality of life. And for that woman to be able to participate in her, what we call ADLs, like her activities of daily living. Right. We want her to be able to participate fully and meaningfully in, in her life in the way that matters to her the most.

Absolutely. Okay, shifting gears a little bit, but not far off. I know in your book you talk a lot about the common misconceptions between diets and health and also about how intermittent fasting can impact men versus women. Wondering if you want to maybe share a little bit about that? Cause I think this is very important as well.

Yeah, this is actually some. So this is my. This is my humility hopefully coming through, where I've changed my opinion on fasting. I was really, really gung ho for fasting. When it first came out, I was, and I would see a lot of my heroes, like who've, you know, since become friends, I would see a lot of men like fasting for seven days and doing the thing. And I was like, I could do that. If Dom d' Agostino can fast for seven days. Like I'm gonna fast for seven days because he's, you know, the king of keto and he's the king of fasting and all the things. Of course, completely ignoring the fact that he's a man and I am not. And so fasting, I think it's a bit, I'll say it's, my opinion has softened in terms of the application of it for women, I think we can look at fasting as a tool for caloric restriction. Nothing more, nothing less. It's not a magic pill for women. So this is my answer here is for women, for men, it seems to skyrocket, testosterone, skyrocket, brain performance and Scott, you know, all the things. For women, it doesn't seem to confer the same benefits. And I would say that it seems like fasting's primary benefit is a tool for restricting total calories. So if you're for example, fasting for 16 hours, you only have eight hours now out of the 24 that you have in a day to get the calories in that you might, that you want to. So that's gonna be marginally more difficult for you to do in eight hours than it might be in 14. Right. So you can, you can see where it, it's gonna give you some body composition benefits. But it's because it's a caloric restriction tool. Where I tend to get a little bit of an ugly twitch is when I see online people are like, fasting does all these things like autophagy and it's, it's cellular cleans up your cells and it's the only way to lose weight and all this kind of stuff. And I, I would, I would say that yes it, it does. But we have no way to measure autophagy. So we actually have no way to measure. So autophagy is just like fancy word for cleaning house, like cleaning up dead cells and nuclear debris and stuff that's like, shouldn't be there anymore. That's like old and not functioning well. So we have no way to know if a 12 hour fast is better or worse than a 16 hour fast is better or worse than A 24 hour fast is better or worse than a, we have no way to measure autophagy, that's one. And then the other thing is that there are many other things that initiate autophagy, like sleeping, like lifting weights, you know, so there's, there's a lot of different ways that we can still clean house. And it doesn't have to be only through fasting. And there's actually, it's funny that you ask about fasting because I, I put out a newsletter every week and this week there was, there was a randomized control study that came out a couple weeks ago and I've just had the time to go through them the paper now and they basically were looking at, it was 91% women. So like the, I think the n was like 40 or 45 subjects. They divided them into. You basically is the same calories in both groups. So they had the exact same amount of calories, the exact same nutrients. So same macros, like same amount of fat, same amount of protein. The only difference was when they had their calories. And what they found after 12 weeks was that there was zero difference between the two groups in terms of body composition change and, and zero difference between the two groups in terms of metabolic markers. So blood glucose regulation, insulin insensitivity, which tends to happen more and more as we age and some of the other, like gly, you know, glycated albumin and all this other stuff. So basically what they're saying is there's no difference between the two. Right. So fasting is a. If it's something that you like to do and you enjoy doing it like you do, you boo, like continue to do it. If it's a tool that works for you. But I think we need to stop.

Pretending it's not the be all end all. Definitely not.

It's not the be all end all. And then the other, the last caveat, I'll say, I know I'm rambling, but I'll just say one more thing. For women in their 40s and 50s and beyond, your primary focus should be muscle preserv. Lean tissue preservation, but specifically muscle preservation. So that means that in the morning you should be waking up and eating because over the course of your natural 8 hour fast that was we call sleep, you're breaking down your, like your muscles are actually in order to feed your brain, there's like they're catabolic, meaning that they're breaking down so that they can give amino acids to the body so that you know, your body can form proteins and all the things that it needs to. So you need to be thinking as you are aging. What are some of the, what are some of the shifts in my diet and shifts in my lifestyle that maybe I was doing when I was 25 or 35 that no longer serve my current physical form? And I would say fasting is one of them where we need to, we need to be very careful about sacrificing muscle at the altar of fasting and.

Thinking of some of those shifts in diet of things that maybe no longer serve us. And, you know, we all think, you know, I did this 10 years ago. Well, we know a lot more now than we knew 10 years ago as a society. But what are some things that, as we head into our 40s or 50s that we should be looking at and going, okay, we really need to start to focus on eliminating some of those things from our life?

Yeah, I would say whenever I'm thinking about diet, I always like to ask the question, instead of thinking about what we need to eliminate, what are the things that we need to include in order to thrive? So I would say that one of the big things that changes as we age is our protein requirements, right? So this for the same reason that we want to be preserving lean tissue. Our protein requirements increase as we age because our muscles actually start to break down faster. So do our bones. Everything starts to break down faster. So consuming more protein is going to help slow that breakdown process, like that net muscle protein breakdown and net bone loss breakdown by consuming more protein. And I think that we need to be thinking about healthy fats. I think for women in their 40s. Like, I kind of grew up in the 80s where fat was really demonized and it was like low fat everything. A snack was like four almonds and 10 grapes. You know, like, I, I remember that, you know, I remember counting out my grapes, you know, but we need, we need fat, right? We need at least some basic amount of fat for, you know, cell structure. You know, the cells, there's something called a bilayer. It's just like the outer lining of the cell needs fat. We need fat for our skin, hair, nails, for those to look good. If you're, you don't care about the phospholipid bilayer in your cells, like you're going to have nice skin if you're having a little bit more fat. And then the other thing with carbohydrates is I think carbo, I think carbohydrates have their place. I think we can be a bit more strategic about the type of carbs that we're having. So I know carbs are Often demonized, particularly for women in dieting. But potatoes, rice, vegetables, starch, like, these are all technically carbohydrates, primarily carbohydrates. And there's so many polyphenols in berries and the green leafy vegetables and all that stuff that I don't think that it's. I don't think you're better off by eliminating that. But you can eliminate the Ben and Jerry's tub of ice cream and the wine. Right. That's also carbs. Right. So we can eliminate that and swap those out for sweet potato fries and all the things. So that's how I like to look at diet, is like, what do I need to include to make sure that I'm thriving?

Absolutely. Okay. And thank you. Those are extremely insightful. And for our ladies out there, talking about wanting to perform at the highest level, like, considering all of this and, you know, forming your own path, for sure. Follow Dr. Stephanie and her podcast. We'll make sure that the link is in here as well. But, you know, these are just all things that. Male, female. We're always looking at how we can be high performers and what it is that we can slightly tweak to make ourselves perform at a little bit higher level. And physically, it's super important because it drives into our mental side, which is where I want to shift into. Stephanie, can you talk about the relationship between, you know, the physical body and the physical performance and the mental side of things and how we can use our physical performance to help support a positive mental performance as well?

I love this question. Yeah, I'll say that for many years. So as someone who is kind of always been a personal development junkie to so. So to speak, like, always wanting to.

Know, like, that's how we connected.

That's. And that's why we're friends. I. I think that the. I remember learning it was sort of the order of things was you have to be the person that you want to be so that you can do the things that you want to do, and then you can have the things that you, you know, that you're aspiring to have. So it was always like, be, do, have, Right? Be the first, then you get to do the do, and then you get to have the have. I actually think it's. I don't agree with that. I think that we have to switch the be and the do. I think you have to do the thing first and put in the miles and become the expert and gain the confidence, and that allows you to be the person so you can have the Thing, you know, you know, the outcome that you're looking for. So people talk about, like, be, do, have. I think it's do, be, have. And the do part is. The physical part of that is. Is the physical part. I know that you've probably experienced this as well. You might wake up on the wrong. Maybe you've had a bad sleep or, you know, stressful, you know, work week or whatever, big deadlines, and you make the, you know, 45. You carve out 35 or 45 minutes to get to the gym. And then after the gym, like, all is right. You're like, I can handle this. You know, like, faith in humanity restored. Faith in myself restored. Part of that is there's actually a chemical reaction that's happening when you are lifting weights. Even. Even if you're doing, like, sprinting or you're on the, you know, you get to the cardio machine, you're on the treadmill or whatever. Like, the endorphins that are being released. The endorphins that are being released during your cardiovascular exercise or if you're lifting weights, there's a molecule called a myokine that's being released from the muscle. It's a subset of a cytokine, which is a subset of the immune system. These all cross the blood brain barrier and activate areas in our brain that are involved in hope and joy and happiness. And I think that that allows you to make better decisions in your day. Right. One of the things I sort of half joke about is, like, nothing is gonna ever be harder than my leg workout. Like, if I. If I do my leg workout in the morning, right? It's brutal. But everything that happens after that is, like, it's a piece of cake because I've already voluntarily put my muscles, exposed my muscles to tearing and all the things with all the lunges and the squats and all the things. So I am going to be much tougher mentally for the. For the next day or two as I'm. As I'm recovering from that workout, and my mood is gonna be elevated as well. Like, this is another really big thing for entrepreneurs in general is you are typically the face of your business. Like, unless if you sort of. You've grown into sort of a larger enterprise, you know, for the most part, you're the brand. Like, you're. You're the brand, you're the face, you're the brand. You're everything. And so if you go down, everything goes down with you, right? So treating yourself like Cristiano Ronaldo or like, what do they do? Right. Are they getting in the weeds of the emails and are they. No, they're making sure that their training sessions, in that they're sleeping, when they take midday naps, they, you know, and granted they have health, they have nutritionists and all that stuff, but there are things that you can do that mimic that. Maybe you're not going to have exactly Messi's or Ronaldo's or whoever's. Lebron, whatever it is, whoever it is, you're not going to have their routine. But there's things that you can borrow from them, right? Like you can optimize your sleep. You can make sure that you carve out time before your day starts to get your ass to the gym. Because everything that follows that, you're going to be much sharper, you know, your brain. You're going to promote blood flow all over the body, but in particular to your brain. And cognitively, when we look at our sharpest time, it's usually somewhere between two to four hours after waking. So if you wake up, let's say at 6, you're at the gym by 7, you know, you work out for 45 minutes, an hour or whatever it is, and you're back at your office, like, that's prime. You not only are in prime cognitive time, but you've also primed your brain because your brain responds to movement, right? We are designed to move so kind of getting up, rolling up. And sometimes I do this too. Like you roll up coffee and you roll over to your desk. But, like, you're not going to have as good a day if you haven't moved. Even just a morning walk, like, just get out, like grab a cup of coffee, like do a lap around the block, something like that.

Yeah. Oh, man, I love that so much. And it's, it's incredible thinking. And I know this personally as well, that when I'm exercising, like, I come in, my energy's higher. People, people feed off of that who are around us. Quick side note, if Tom, the trainer, if you're listening to this at all, don't mock me. Because the last leg day I had, he told me the day after, he said I, the door wasn't closed and I heard you go, oh, shit. Before you went up the stairs to exit, he's like, I heard you. And I was like. Because those stairs were like death after. Because leg day is so hard. But it's one of those things where it's like, you know what? We choose to do hard things in our life. And you know what? Let's put ourselves in a position where we're volunteering to get in and we're embracing this tough moment and exercise. And then you feel like you conquered it. There's no better feeling when you come out of that than, oh, man, I've just conquered one of the things that I didn't want to do. First off, I showed up for myself. I did it, I completed it, but now I've got all this energy and a sense of accomplishment. So absolutely love that. Okay, so we've talked about the diet, exercise, the physical. We talk about how it impacts the mental side of performance. What does the future look like for healthcare, and even what does the future of entrepreneurship in health look like as well?

Oh, that's good. Yeah, I think. I think that the conversation is changing, certainly. I think that there's more tolerance, let's say, or more curiosity around how we can think about women's health in a way that we haven't in the past. So making topics like hormone replacement therapy not as controversial as they are getting women lifting heavy weights in the gym, like, having them not scared of turning into she hulk. Although, like I said, still a dream. Still working on it 10 years in, hasn't happened yet. But a girl can dream, right? So getting. Getting women to think about their health and the way that they age. And I think this is actually true for men. And women accept, like, accepting that aging is a privilege. Right. Like a lot of, you know, and certainly women, too, because we're. Or maybe, and I've never been a man, so I can't comment, but it just feels like as a woman, we are judged very harshly on body and face and how we age. And, you know, there's always like some smutty magazine talking about JLo's wrinkles versus so and so, you know, whatever. Like men, when they, when they age, it's like, oh, look at. He's. You look at his beautiful gray hair and the little wrinkles around his eyes. Like, look at Brad Pitt. He's so. He's so wonderful at 60. And then they'll look at Jalen, be like, look at that hag. You know, like, look at the. Look at. Even though she's, like, incredible, she's gorgeous, she's beautiful. But, you know, the way that we're judged, it seems like at least my perception. Feel free to redirect me if I'm. If I'm off here. It seems like we're judged a little bit more harshly.

I'm not going to argue with you over that. I'll tell you.

Yeah, well, I mean, that's just what I see. It's like, you see, like, oh, look at, he's so, he's so, you know, what's the word that they use for men? It's like they're so polished and they look so distinguished. And, you know, this like little, the little gray hairs. He looks so great. And then women, it's like, ugh, what happened to her? You know?

But it's interesting. I feel like women are hard on other women.

Oh, we are, yes. Yeah. It's not, it's not just men. It's not men doing that. It's. Women are sometimes terrible to each other. And that's partially because we haven't learned how to love ourselves and we haven't learned to embrace the aging process. And that's something that, that I like to talk about. It's like we live in at least right now seems like a free country. Right? So there are many countries where there are people that, you know, went to bed last night that didn't have the opportunity to wake up this morning. There was bombs, there was, there's a war, there's the, you know, like, aging is a privilege. So yes, I'm gonna get wrinkles, yes, I'm gonna have cellulite, yes, my skin is not gonna look the way that it did when I was 25. But I still, I get to see my children age and I get to see, you know, my friends and my community and I get to age along with them. So kind of reframing this anti aging to more aging, well, I think is a bit like, you know, aging with vitality and aging with energy and being able to sort of see the circle of, you know, being able to participate in the circle of life, I think is important. So that's, that's what I would like to see in terms of healthcare and then in terms of, as it relates to entrepreneurship, I would love to see, and I think that it's happening. Entrepreneurs really understand the role that their health plays in their productivity and ultimately their success. Because if you don't have a brain that's healthy, you won't make good decisions. You're going to self sabotage. You're going to have all of these. If you're not aware of the things that you like, because you're your own worst enemy. Right. It's either physically, you're not where you should be in terms of your, you know, your fitness, your VO2 max, your muscle mass, etc, or you have stories, you know, which we didn't really get into today. And I'm sure you have other experts who can speak to this, you know, far more eloquently than I, but you have stories and triggers and you know, things that are, that are, that happened in the past that are now influencing your decisions today. I think that those also influence your ability to grow a team and be a leader and have a profitable business and not spend, you know, as soon as you start making money, not to start spending it, you know, foolishly. So I think that that's how it relates to entrepreneurship. I think the more entrepreneurs start to take their health seriously, like this is the number one thing that has to be a priority for me if I want to expand and grow into a successful long term. Like with a business with longevity, not just the individual, but the business itself has legs. I think that we'll see, you know, much more success listening and you know, even working with individuals like yourself who can, who can help facilitate that for them as well.

Yeah, and I, you know, for my audience who's listening, I can tell everything that Stephanie has just said, I've lived it. I, a few years ago dedicated and started going to a personal trainer where I was like, you know what, I need that accountability partner. I won't let him down. I would let me down, I won't let him down. So I started working with a trainer, you know, started putting on muscle mass, started eating healthier because as soon as you start exercising, you automatically start eating healthier because you're like, I want to make sure that my nutrition levels are, are good, my energy level was higher. I became a better leader because I had the energy and the resiliency, the ability to deal with tougher things because my energy was higher, was, was way better. So you know, if you're looking to build something, an empire or be a leader to multiple people, you need, you deserve, and they deserve for you to be in a position where you have the energy and the ability to lead them in a great way. And so for me it's been something that is, I've been dedicating my time to it. In fact, now I've got my 17 or my 16 year old son joining the gym with me with a trainer, which is amazing. And I gotta tell you, I highly recommend for anyone who's in a leadership spot wanting to take their personal fitness more seriously. Have a 16 year old son, that is the easiest way to get your butt kicked. To say, there's no way I'm letting him beat me at this and I'm trying to Stay this much ahead of him. I don't know if I'm succeeding, but.

Well, there's a new revenue stream for you. It's like I can lend out my 16 year old to anyone.

He was looking for a more, a more full time hour summer job, so yeah, maybe he could just train all summer. Stephanie, it has been an absolute pleasure having you. Thank you so much for your insights, for everything you share in your community and for your insights. For me to be able to share this with mine, I want to maybe just give a quick shout out to your book, the Betty Body. I want anyone. And you know what, I'm going to make sure that I have multiple copies around my office too to make sure that anyone who wants to, to realize their full, you know, physical and emotional potential and to live their life feeling the best they can, you know, read this book. Check this out. So many great insights. Your podcast, I want to make sure that I point everybody there. It is called the Betty Body as well, right? Or the Better Body.

It's called Betty better. Better with Dr. Stephanie is the name of the podcast.

Better with Dr. Stephanie. We'll put a link in here as well. For all of my female entrepreneur friends. You should definitely be listening to this. Like, make this part of your regular listening material for sure. It's going to identify key points in your health and in your performance where you can do better for you and for those that surround you. So we'll make sure we have a link in there. How else, Stephanie, can people get a hold of you?

You can head over to my website, drstephanyastima. Com. We have a sign up there if you want to be part of the Mini Pause newsletter. That's my little cheeky take on menopause. We call it the Mini Paws. It's a weekly roundup of action items for women over 40. And we sort of structure it. Like if you don't want any detail, we put the summary right at the top. It's like this is the action item. And then if you're a nerd, then you know, the more you read, the more nerdier it gets. So if you're like, I just want the. Just tell me what to do. It's right at the top. And then the more you read, kind of the more detail we give you. So the Mini Pause is something that I put out every week and then the other place you can find me is on Instagram first. You know, Dr. Stephanie. So Dr. First Name, last name. And I'm there pretty regularly as well.

Amazing. Thank you again. We'll make sure for everyone that all of those contacts are in the links below. Thank you, Dr. Stephanie. And for all of you who have been listening, this has been the Wealthy Entrepreneur Podcast. I'm your host, Bob Goverow. I'm super excited that you're here sharing this journey with us today. If there's something insightful in here, which I know there is, there's so much gold, make sure that you like it. You comment and share it with somebody who you know. This could have a positive impact on them, their lives and their future. Make sure that you subscribe to our podcast so that you're here with us next week when we offer our next episode up. Once again, Dr. Stephanie, thanks for joining me today. And everyone else, have a fantastic day.