The Secret to Strong Bones After 50 (It's Not Calcium)

You know, as women, we, we, we get told that like, you have a baby, everything's going to be normal afterwards. But a significant portion of women do experience postpartum while raising a child and probably being a breadwinner, at least contributing and all these other things. And then, you know, most of the time, by the time we're in middle age, we're also either going to be caring for a parent or losing our parents. And there's. It's. To me, you know, at 55, I look at it and I go, sometimes it feels like a pyramid just got built on top of your head and, and you don't know it, right, because you just keep doing and going and doing and going and doing.

As women, I think we learn there are moments that, you know, where the shit really hits the fan, you know, and life gets really, really hard and we need to like, just gotta step up to the moment, you know, and that was one of those moments for me. And the cool thing about weightlifting and working with this bodybuilding coach and learning about nutrition was, you know, my whole life I had always thought of exercise and fitness and wellness as like a way to reduce yourself. So it's all about, you know, you go on a treadmill to burn calories. And you know, even the language that they use in the exercise studios, it's all like lean muscle and like lengthen and tone and it's all kind of coded language for making less of yourself. And like, you just never feel enough, like you can never do enough to make yourself less enough. And it's horrible messaging, you know. And in this world of like power lifters and bodybuilders and like athletes, I was suddenly in this world of moreness, right? It was all about building yourself and like fueling your body to eat enough protein and the more and making yourself more. And I just loved that. And to my surprise, it made me perform way better. Like, it was like within weeks it was like I stopped craving alcohol because I was like so well fed and pumped and I, you know, could hear it in my voice when I came back from a good lift and I got on the phone and I was reporting a story. Like, I could hear the confidence in my voice and I was able to say no and like put push back on editors who like, had made decisions that I didn't agree with. And like, it was just like this kind of new person was emerging and I was like, my God, like, why have I been chasing? Oh. And I was like wearing a two piece bathing suit for the first time. Like you know, it was like my body was taking shape into what I felt like it was supposed to look like. And so, you know, the reporter in me wanted to really understand, like, the sample size of one. Like, it was so clear that, like, something had changed, that I wanted to really understand, like, why my whole life had I been chasing this, like, less than thing, trying to chase skinny, when I should have been chasing muscle. So I really wanted to understand, like, what was the history of this skinny thing and why are we all chasing that when it's so obvious that the secret to success is muscle and building more of it. So.

No, you're absolutely right. You know, it's. I always think of that and I'm like, why do we tell women to be less than and to be smaller and to be seen, not heard? I mean, those are probably all messages you heard as a kid. I know they were mine.

Be polite, Keep it to yourself, you know.

Yeah. Because I was. I was a Maori kid.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

And so, you know, it comes from a patriarchal, driven society and that we need women to be seen, not heard, and to be supportive of a masculine energy person, because that's our role, when it's really not our role. And I think you had mentioned in your book that fitness and getting into really, bodybuilding and lifting wasn't just about the fitness. It was part of your survival. It was like, this is how I'm going to move forward in survival, which I think is amazing, because I think a lot of women don't think about their fitness as survival. They use fitness as their greatest form of punishment.

You know, there was this study that really I became enamored with. It was out of Cambridge, and it was this anthropologist named Alison Murray. And she did something kind of revolutionary, which was, you know, anthropologists study bones. Typically it's the male bones that are studied. But she went to, like, Neolithic and Paleolithic women's bones and compared them with a group, a sample of modern women's bones, to see how the body structure compared. And what she found was the early women's bones were the size of elite rowers today, with their developed upper bodies. And so that spoke to her that early women were an integral part of agriculture. They were lifting heavy things. They were working their asses off. They weren't like, out there picking berries in the field while men hunted. No, they were working hard. And when I read about this piece of research, it was kind of an aha moment to me. It was like, well, duh, of course, this is why I'm performing better because that is the OG body that we were meant to have. This is how we perform best. And you know, those early women weren't like sitting there trying to think of ways to become thinner and. No, neither should we. So.

Right, yeah, we were foraging and doing a bunch of other things while carrying children. You know what I mean?

Like hunting. We were hunters and hunting.

Yeah, we were doing it all.

Yeah, these like patriarchal systems of like, you know, there was another cool story in the book about a, a Viking grave that was found centuries ago. And this grave was obviously the grave of a warrior, a leader, because there were tactical chess pieces in there. The leader was buried with their horse, which is something that only leaders got, you know, so it was obviously the grave of a powerful person in, in an army. And it was only in 2017 that it was found that this warrior leader was actually a woman. So it was like these long assumptions, like a warrior leader must have been a man were these modern 20th century assumptions. It was only in 2017 that we found that there were two X chromosomes on that kick ass woman. Yeah. So it's really this, these ideals of like women as thin and quote unquote feminine. It's really only the product of the last 150 years. Women have historically been buff, badass creatures. And I believe we perform best when we allow ourselves to take that shape that we are badass. We are all athletes the way we multitask and kick ass and you know, juggle different things that we need to be well fed and our strength built upon because it's ultimately the thing that's going to help us live a longer and stronger life.

Oh, absolutely. You know, I think about. I was talking with a historian and they were talking about really the advent and then the explosion of bicycles and how particularly in the US that completely shifted women, the women's movement and the suffragist, because for the first time Victorian women were able to get from one place to another because the society was super patriarchal. But we got on our bicycles and we rode to meet other women and talk about, you know, the things that were important to us, you know, and so I think about like weight training as kind of being one of the next things. Like I know you talked about derby girls, like the roller derby, how much that was like women behaving badly. And I'm air quoting badly by, by basically doing roles that were perceived to not be feminine. But I. Weightlifting now and bodybuilding really is this next generation of women understanding how to become strong within their own world. Which doesn't mean diminishing the relationship that might be from a man and a woman. It means showing up in your true identity.