2 Big Obstacles to Gaining Lean Muscle and Fat Loss After 40

Real quick, before we dive into this episode, I have a little sleep secret I want to tell you about. Look, sleep is crucial for your fitness, but it's crucial for just plain old everyday life and function.

And I find I sleep great unless I have a migraine.

And I've had more than my fair share since perimenopause all the way through postmenopause. My secret weapon was Blue Sky CBD sleep gels. Each gel contains 25mg of CBD and 25mg CBN for deep restorative sleep. Something about it helps to reduce inflammation, which I believe for me was key in helping me get to sleep. But the biggest thing is so many of the over-the-counter solutions, whether for sleep or migraines, can ruin gut health, and liver health. Neither one of those did I want to be problematic for me. So this option is recommended by healthcare providers worldwide and backed by thousands of happy customers, many of whom come from our Flipping 50 community. There is zero THC, so it's non-habit-forming. It's made by a trusted family-owned company that we all can feel good about. Third-party tested for purity and potency. And if you're interested, you too can try a sample for just $6. But even better, you can get 30% off forever with discount code FLIPPING50. That's FLIPPING50. Just go to flipping50.com/blueskycbd. We'll put that link in the show notes and you'll find it everywhere on Flipping 50 at My Favorites.

What are you waiting for? Good night. There's a really good chance that if you tuned in based on this title and you're a newbie here, first of all, welcome, but you are probably not exactly where you want to be right now. Fat loss after 40 could be a challenge in spite of your best efforts at this moment. Gaining lean muscle could feel like it's slipping through your fingers and you're not quite sure what to do. I'm going to answer the question, why is this happening? What is so easy and why is it so hard?

Why is it so easy to gain fat?

Why is it so hard to control that loss of muscle? That's this episode. So stay tuned no matter where you are. If you think you're doing it right, you're on the right track and you want confirmation, or you indeed struggling.

I've got you.

Chances are if you tuned in to this episode based on the title, you're not exactly where you want to be right now. Fat loss after 40 could be a challenge in spite of your best efforts. Gaining lean muscle could feel like it's slipping through your fingers. To those regular listeners who are here no matter what, you're not necessarily here on purpose because of the title, but you listen because there's a new post. I appreciate you so much. So even if you're not necessarily dealing with failed results or effort, maybe you're loving life right now. Someone you know may be struggling with this or do so in the future. So stay tuned and I hope this will either answer questions that you don't know yet to ask if you're struggling, confirm that you're on the right path. And for any of you who find right now, you're not on the path I'm discussing, but not yet having negative side effects, not seeing negative results. It takes a minute. It takes a minute. And it's kind of like before GPS, like you're driving down the road and you think, Oh, I'm making great time. I'm going to be there. And then you realize I'm going down the wrong road. So we don't want to get there. That for us means wasted time, a loss of muscle, meaning wasting muscle, and potentially a lost opportunity to reverse bone losses. Time is really precious, and our bone and our muscle is expensive real estate right now. Invest in that stuff right now. Spoiler alert, I'm going to tell you the two biggest obstacles, endocrine-related reasons, right up front. I'm not going to wait to the end or the middle even to reveal it. What I will do is spend the rest of the episode backing it up and explaining what those mean. And there's a little bit more always behind it. It's never one single thing, but for you, you may find a thing that you can latch onto that makes sense that you could make a change that will have a positive domino effect in knocking down the rest of them. There's always more to the story because just knowing isn't enough. Can we all agree on that? If you do know the right thing to do, and I don't just mean being a woman in midlife thinking, I've known this for 20 years, I know what to do because the rules did change and a lot of women entered their 40s, went into their 50s thinking, I know what to do, I'm just not doing it. And in fact, if they were doing what they knew to do, that actually could be backfiring on them. So it has changed. The rules have changed. The hormones changed that game. And now we've just got to respond and pivot and say, okay, wait a minute, new strategy. I'm going to go in a different direction. And your body just may be saying to you right now, what you're doing right now isn't working. It's just data. It's not failure. All we have to do is keep going, but potentially not in the wrong direction. So listener, it's possible that you have limiting beliefs acquired simply by living and being subject to the environment you were in. You may be listening and have always worked hard or believed hard more is the answer, or you may be under the impression girls don't run or don't lift or fear an injury from exercise more than you fear the benefit from exercise. Wherever you are right now, there is something for you. Please stick around. How ironic that we have all grown up in the same era. I'm willing to bet that listeners to this podcast are somewhere between 40 and 70. Now, I know you're out there, by the way, You are an outlier because you're a young 77 and I love it. And so stick around, please don't go away. We need you. We need you leading the way. And we also need you to turn around and tell us how it is. Okay? So we're leaning on you. And for those of you who are 40-something in your early 40s, stick around. We are not ashamed to admit we're jealous of you. Because if you are paying attention sooner, your 50s and your 60s are gonna be so much better. You're gonna have figured it out. You're gonna lay down the foundation to have a better journey through. So go you. And look, we have grown up, most of us in the same era approximately, but we have such diverse beliefs. It's still possible that whether we've got two 56-year-olds here or we've got a 64-year-old and a 48-year-old, we're going to have diverse beliefs simply because of what we were exposed to— the media, the music, the fitness trends at the moment when we were at a really impressionable age. They were slightly different, but there is definitely a wide continuum of belief about exercise success. I'm going to take one little detour here, and if you haven't read it, the book Mindset by Carol Dweck, and she talks about fixed versus not fixed mindsets. Fixed meaning you actually believe that things are the way they are, and that's the that. And here's the thing. And not having a fixed mindset is truly the asset, believing that I know it's fluid, so I could change my mind. And again, because I changed my mind, the thought actually triggers the emotion. We feel a certain way because we're thinking a certain way. As soon as we change our thinking, it changes everything, everything. And realizing that someone may be coming at you, attacking you, and you feel like they're picking on you and they're angry with you. You know, if you stop and think, wait a minute, what's going on for them? They were nervous, they were scared. And it's all they knew and it was their reaction. That changes how you would respond to them to be most effective and have the communication go well. My hope is that I'm doing that for you here, respectfully listening, meeting you where you are, no matter what that is. So let's go. So why is gaining lean and fat loss both after 40 so much more challenging. First of all, I want to say that they're not for everybody. Some of us out there, and I would say I got lucky for a while and then I didn't because I didn't stick with what was working. I thought, oh well, I can do something else and I don't have to actually listen to this stuff I'm preaching. And I'm gonna be fine. And no, I was not. So just saying. But these two biggest reasons. Number one, we have too little anabolic hormone influence. We'll define that. Anabolic hormones are those that inspire muscle, that help us gain or preserve the muscle we have, holding on to it. Nobody's going anywhere. And/or help us if we're truly lifting weights, doing the right habits, eating adequate protein, getting adequate sleep, not stressing quite so much, we're going to have more anabolic hormonal influence. So it's easier to gain lean muscle. Number 2 is too much catabolic hormonal influence. Catabolic hormones are the opposite. So sounds a little bit like cannibalism, is a little bit like that. So it's wasting away of muscle, breakdown of muscle. So all of those things, we influence those anabolic or catabolic hormones by our exercise, our nutrition, and our lifestyle habits to various degrees depending on which one or ones we're talking about. That is what we're going to dive into by the end of this episode. Here's what I hope that you know. What are the biggest obstacles to fat loss after 40? Why do we hear this and struggle to implement the right things? How do you know which of these you might be doing wrong? How do you deal with prior injury and fear of reinjury? Because that's a real thing. And what makes you more prone to struggle with fat loss after 40? We're diving into all of that today, and I hope you will join me.

I'm Debra Atkinson. You're listening to Flipping 50. I started this podcast over a decade ago to answer questions about fitness in menopause and beyond before you knew to ask them. The goal: to help accelerate your results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There's no more powerful health influencer in the world than a midlife woman. And it's not just about you, but the 3 generations that you influence. My unique 40-year career, including being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, and an international Speaker to founder of the first and the only exclusively made for menopause and beyond fitness membership in the world. Every week I interview experts behind the scenes and the science of optimal hormone balancing fitness and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve.

I'm gonna suggest to you though, that these two issues, these two obstacles, not enough anabolic and too much catabolic, that alone is not the problem. But I want you to think about this. Imagine you're in your car or you're in a better car than you have right now. You're in a Porsche and you are getting this driving experience. By the way, if you've never done that, it's very cool. Picture your feet in cute shoes, of course, driving the car. Put your foot on the accelerator and what happens? You expect to go fast. Put your foot on the brake. You expect to slow or to stop. Altogether depending on the pressure and the force you put on it. Now put your left foot on the brake all the way down and put your right foot on the accelerator also all the way down. Now I'm guessing somebody who taught you to drive a car said to you, never ever ever do this. Maybe that was only me, but I know that happened. Now, now if you're at a Porsche drive experience, They will tell you to do that, and then they will tell you, let your foot off the brake, and you will shoot like a rocket down a little runway. And those of us that are a little nervous will itch to put our foot on the brake, but the little voice in your earphones is saying, don't do it, don't do it, just ride it out, keep pushing the accelerator all the way down. And it's like, oh my Oh my God, I'm so out of control. But it's such a great experience to realize, yeah, and you're out here on a straightaway. Nobody's in your way. This is the exact time to do it. And what a thrill, right? I don't love roller coasters personally, but that was the best, best ride I have ever, ever had. And I was responsible. I wasn't along for the ride. I was in the driver's seat. How good is that? You can be back in the driver's seat with this issue that we have going on here. But now, if you're driving a Porsche and you want to launch that baby, you can do it and get great results. But that's a story for another day. And the challenge is, if you are sitting in your garage and you've got your foot on the brake all the way down and your foot on the gas, you are burning out your engine. And the challenge is when we're in midlife, we're a lot of times doing that. Imagine that the foot on the accelerator is anabolic hormones. We wanna release them. We wanna go, let's have more muscle, let's build more muscle. But your foot on the brake is the catabolic hormones. You're breaking them down. You're not letting them out. You're causing more harm than good. Motor's burning out. You're getting tired. Your adrenals are spinning out. You reach for sugar, you reach for caffeine, you're doing the workout, but you can't sleep. And it's all backfiring on you. That says, okay, park this. Let's talk about anabolic hormones. They include estrogen, testosterone, growth hormone, and to a small extent, insulin. And by the way, insulin plays on both sides, a swinger if you will. Sometimes insulin can contribute to muscle growth, so it, it's kind of a depending on where and what the situation is. Catabolic hormones include cortisol and insulin. Again, I know it's showing up. I said, said it swings. So let's talk a little bit about physiology of menopause. Estrogen was the first one on that list that we need for muscle. For women, estrogen plays a bigger role in our ability to hold on to lean muscle and gain it than testosterone does. Now, testosterone is important and it's the most abundant hormone in the female body. Little trivia, right? So 3 years ago, I'm not sure I knew that, but now we do. So we have to look at if estrogen comes down dramatically, and that was kind of glue holding our muscle there and helping us to build more muscle if we were making any effort in doing that and gain more strength. Estrogen comes down dramatically, so we don't have that anymore. Huh? What are we going to do instead? Because when you say what I used to do doesn't work anymore, I would have to say exactly. That's right. It won't because you don't have the estrogen you have. So with that gone, you need to fill in that spot on your team with probably a different kind of exercise. You've either got to add strength training if you weren't doing it, you've got to make the strength training you are doing a little more serious than those pink dumbbells and those 15 to 20 repetitions until the cows come home. Yes, you have to start there, but you can't finish there. Okay, testosterone and then growth hormone were the next two on that list of anabolic hormones. They also come down more related to age and lifestyle habits than just menopause alone. So, you know, when you were 30, you had so much testosterone and growth hormone. When you were 40, you had a little less of it. When you're 50, yeah, less, less, you know, and so on and so on. The older we get, the more that's going to be true, and especially if we ignore our lifestyle habits like drinking alcohol. If you got a glass of wine habit every night, or a bottle of wine, definitely that's probably problematic. Your growth hormone is not being helped, neither is your testosterone, and that's disrupting your sleep. So we could say that, that also is a problem. We could say that melatonin, the sleep hormone, is also problematic because it does come down. Production decreases with age, and so women in menopause are being hit with that as well. Now we can't sleep, and during deep cycles of sleep we release testosterone and growth hormone. So here's how sleep works, by the way. So quick nugget, we sleep in cycles of about 90 minutes. Kind of like during the day, our attention span goes really well for about 90 minutes. And if you notice, you start to wane, you start to like picking up the phone more frequently, or you're switching tabs a little more frequently. There's nothing wrong with you and you don't have ADD, by the way. It is just Simply, that's how we work. We'll do better throughout the day being more productive if we lean into that. So that's your cue. Get up, go move, because you need that anyway for blood sugar control, insulin reduction, visceral belly fat support. So get up, go move, get outside, get some sunlight, get some fresh air, exercise a little bit, just a tiny little snack. It's all you need. Exercise snack, by the way, not other kind. And now you're better off and you'll be able to come back and focus. We sleep like that too. So there's 4 cycles of sleep, that lightest one where you're just drifting off, and then the next one, and then deep cycles of sleep where you release testosterone and growth hormone. So if you are not sleeping really well, you're getting frequently woken up by someone who snores, by a dog who snores or has issues because they're old seems to be a big common denominator among midlife women, and/or you're waiting on teenagers to come home or adults who've come back to the nest, you know, to come home and you hear everything coming in and out of your house. That's really a problem. We want to— I would love to take you and be able to say, okay, let's get you into a room where we can have some white noise. We can make it really cool. We can stick an eye mask on you and you are just isolated. And nobody needs you, nobody can have you from the time you get tired, go to sleep, to the time you naturally wake up, you would have much better restful sleep, better testosterone, growth hormone, and potentially because of it, better muscle mass. So realize that would be a huge help right there. If you're not taking it seriously, start there. Then let's look at insulin. You know, at the right levels, the right time, it's viewed in literature as both an or anabolic and catabolic. I said it swings, but the biggest challenge with insulin is your body is in fat storage when it senses there's too much insulin in your body. For women in midlife, we deal with that quite a bit. We're more insulin resistant, meaning blood sugar levels go up because of stress or because of something we've eaten, and that's naturally a response. But insulin's job is to bring that blood sugar back down. We want to remove it because that's inflammatory. So your body says, all right, let's get it out of there. We're either going to deposit it in the bank of the liver or the bank of the muscle. And if your liver is already overloaded, a little clogged up, a little sluggish, because maybe you've had too much processed food or wine or alcohol, kind of overeating and making it work so much with toxins, It's got to filter everything and process so much that it may not be working really well. No place to store it there. Okay, muscle. But what if you haven't built muscle? What if you're not using muscle, creating more muscle? What if you're not moving it so that it's okay, let's pull that blood sugar out because that's what it's using for fuel? If those two banks are full, is it going to storage? It's going to say, well, I got to get this out of here, I'm going to put this in store. And the hips, the arms, the upper body, the belly fat, all those places, that's where it will go. So that's going to work against us. So little things you can do already: sleep. Prioritize it. If you're not— if you are prioritizing but you're still not sleeping, realize that there are probably a dozen things right away that I would suggest to you. Here's what we want to do. Are you doing these? These are things you would do on your own. And then let's test these next things and see if you doing that doesn't improve your sleep. So almost naturally, maybe taking a supplement— but we're not talking medication or over-the-counter drugs, we're talking a micronutrient— that sometimes sleep deficiency or insufficiency, insomnia, is a sign of a micronutrient insufficiency. So we can find out if we can plug that whole. So there you have it. If your storage systems are full, it's going to fat because your body is very adept, unfortunately, at making more fat cells, taking little fat cells to big fat cells, relocating fat cells to the belly. Oh, so many things it can do magically that we don't love about it. Cortisol and the other catabolic hormone insulin plays a part in that. Cortisol will break down your muscle. So now cortisol is a little complicated because it's also a good, bad— it's the stress hormone, it's the energy hormone. We've got to account for both, right? We can't just poke fun at it and say, ah, stress hormone, cortisol bad. It's not. You will die without cortisol. We need it. We need it for energy. We need it for those surges of I've got to have this and be Superwoman. And we don't have a lot of those in everyday living, but we do have that I've got to rise to the occasion here. I've got to get through this. And with those surges, ideally then come back down and we get to relax and rest and restore again. That's where we're missing the gap here. We need it to survive. We need it high when it's supposed to be, which really is in the morning when it would naturally wake us, and we did it low when it's supposed to be, and we also use it for exercise. So that's kind of a newsflash. So when your cortisol level is naturally high at about 8:00 AM and in the morning, it will stay relatively high. It's probably why you focus a little bit better. You problem solve a little bit better in the morning. If you're gonna do something tough or challenging, it's probably better to do it then than to wait till the afternoon when it, your attention span wanes a little bit. You don't quite have as much focus. That's in part because cortisol starts to come down because by dinnertime and afterward, we're supposed to be chilling out, relaxing, getting ready for a really great night's sleep. And at 2:00 AM, your cortisol is supposed to be the lowest possible because we don't want you full of energy at that point. So that's how it works in an ideal world. And you want to be exercising when you already have cortisol high because yes, you will, Elevated even more because those surges of lifting a heavy weight for a minute and/or doing high-intensity interval training for 20 or 30 seconds or up to a minute and a half, that will elevate your cortisol level. But it's calculated. We're thinking about it. We know we're going to do it and we're going to recover in between. In both counts, resistance training and HIIT, you see the difference. Doing moderate exercise, you don't do that. And after you break 45 minutes, we see cortisol continue to rise. And afterward, it doesn't actually come down. You're higher the rest of the day. And if cortisol is higher, blood sugar's higher. If blood sugar's higher, insulin is higher. You're in fat storage. We don't want that. So many of you will find and have the hard way because we are stubborn. Is that just me? We're stubborn thinking, no, no, I can push through. I can work hard, even We like to work hard, some of us. We really like exercise, but the exercise we like is not liking us back temporarily. So I wanna say to everybody out there who really struggles with this, this is not a forever. You will find your sweet spot again. You can come back to endurance exercise, but you've gotta ride this roller coaster out and you can't get through it by pushing because that will push back on you. And eventually you're probably gonna be told to rest far more than you would have to if you listened early and really in earnest did what you needed to, and you'd feel so much better while you were getting to the place you wanted to be. So we see this kind of pattern mimicked with cortisol levels go really high when you're doing workouts, and then they drop back down. We see that mimicked with continuous blood glucose monitors. What we're looking at is blood sugar. But blood sugar and cortisol are very closely related. We see that during exercise or shortly after high-intensity exercise, your blood sugar will have spiked. That is normal and natural. What your body did is release the blood sugar so that the muscle could use it. All good. That's, that should be happening. That's normal. So if you were trying to work really hard and you weren't having those spikes, that would be a little abnormal actually. We wouldn't quite know what to think of that, but you're probably lifting more weight or going faster if it's a speed-related kind of high-intensity work. We also see this in heart rate monitors. So when you're doing really quick sprints, 20 seconds, 15 seconds, 30 seconds even, we are not like trying to hit a heart rate and doing that, what we're seeing is generally you're going to get breathless, have to stop, and then see your heart rate and where it got to. But you're seeing historically. So if you keep pushing and you're actually already breathless and kind of waiting for the point of exhaustion, that's not going to work out very well. You have to just stop when you have to stop. So breathlessness always wins. You're seeing when you look at a heart rate monitor what happened in the past, but the same is true with your cortisol levels. Yeah, we're going to elevate it significantly while we're strength training, but then it's going to come down, and that is as it should be. So as long as you're not overdoing it— long endurance bouts of strength training, long endurance bouts of high-intensity training— are not the idea. The total high-intensity work that you'll do during a week would be 45 minutes, meaning maybe it's 10 minutes 4 times a week, maybe it's 15, 3 times a week, plus your warm-up and your cool-down. And that high-intensity interval time is the workout time, the high-intensity workout time that might be 15 seconds And it's the recovery time that might be a minute and a half, 2 minutes, or 3 minutes if you need it. No harm, no foul taking more work, more rest so that you can work harder and be fresher. That's good. So to summarize, you could be exercising and actually causing so much cortisol if you're working in that mid-range, or you've taken a good thing and made it an endurance thing as well. You've created intensity. That is not favorable. So you could be causing so much cortisol that you're breaking down muscle and increasing your fat storage. So if you're always working, you're a always hard all the time kind of gal, slowing down, learning to train, not strain, or to drain— train, not drain— could be the way to open the door for better results. If you've steered away from lifting weights in favor of Pilates 5 days a week or walking and yoga Your muscle and your bone may need more stimulus than that. I ran into a really lovely couple from Florida while I was on the trail in the Grand Canyon, and one more or less, we shared the same challenge of this last mile and a half up the hill. I didn't talk to him for very long. I did. It was like an hour and a half. Because it's steep, so, and hard. And so there we were, you know, and I would pass them and say, see you in a few minutes, because I knew in a few minutes I would probably sit down and they would pass me. That's just the cat and mouse you play in those last few miles. And there is a little bit of competitiveness, probably for anybody maybe who has that gene at the beginning, but not at the end of the day. You're just fine. To sit down. It's cool, right? So here I was, but I got to know them. You know, I learned that she was the hare of the two, as they described it. She would go ahead faster and then seemingly pretty effortlessly. And she did Pilates 5 days a week. He was the self-proclaimed tortoise of the two of them, slow and steady. And he would just keep going and eventually catch up to her where she would have kind of sprinted and then waiting, and then she'd go again and wait. And they were very comfortable with this, you know, each going their own pace, which was exactly, you know, the way that we recommend anybody does marathons after they've done a training program and hikes when they've done the training program, you start a hike and finish a hike. On your own. You've got to know your own limits. You've got to go your own speed. So there's a big difference between we're going to take every step together and this is a guided tour and no, no, you've done the training, you've done your homework. If you follow the instructions, you now know yourself and you're fueling. Now you're going and this is you. But here's the deal. She was moving great. She was agile. She was mobile, you know, meaning she moved very very well, light on her feet, pretty quickly. So her VO2 may have been fairly good, at least at that speed and for that purpose. But she was so slight that I couldn't help wonder— as much emphasis as society puts on being slim or thin, and we tend to equate it with being fit, which is a misdemeanor in my opinion. I mean, we're committing a crime by thinking and assuming that is the case. So when we talk about longevity, what will fitness really be? It will be those of us who have more muscle, more strength, and that strength pulling on the bone equating to more bone density. So I wondered, what would her next 20 or 30 years look like? And fast forwarding to a, you know, an 85-year-old self, you know, what would that look like? She had her mobility nailed. She seemed very agile, you know, check and check, but two very important things in longevity. And yet we don't wanna stop there. So if she was a bestie of mine, I would be suggesting let's slip in twice weekly strength training at the very least for those major muscle groups around your spine, your hip, and your wrist, those osteozones most likely to fall on and fracture and measure your bone density and your muscle mass right now, because if you've never done it before, we at least want to benchmark that so that we can measure going forward. Quick tip for all of you, many of you know if you've been here for a moment, this is the year that I become mother-in-law. Yeah, and we're gonna keep that mother-in-law, not monster-in-law. And one of the things that I've never had a girl So my stepson, a boy, you know, and my own, a boy. And so it's so fun to have a girl and she's 30. And the one thing I want to give her, there's something about her being 30 and me being 60, but I can't wait. Yes, I can. I mean, I don't want to rush it, but I really would love to give her a bone density test and she's up for it. As long as there's no pain, she said she's in, not a problem, you know, and to watch that bone density and do it again at 40 and do it again at 50 so she knows the benchmark. Because so many of us haven't had one, you know, until we were maybe mid-50s or 60. You know, I had a fairly proactive doctor who had me have one 2 years ago, I was 58, and then again at 60, and it improved. But it wouldn't have most likely had I not known— where did I test? I was insulted by that. By the way, I was like, what? So we're going to do something about that. One of the things that I did, I couldn't lift any heavier, I couldn't do any more impact, but I started using a power plate. So there's a little argument for, yep, you can do all the right things, have all the right habits for a lifetime even, and yet still need a little nudge. So you will see me again forcefully trying. So there was one place where it was still a little bit low. It had improved., but my left forearm, I'm right dominant, was still a little bit low. We're going to fix that. So mark my words. But if you have younger yous that you influence, or younger women at work that are in your life that you influence, one of the things that they could do for themselves and start getting curious now about where am I, bone density is one. The second one would be what are your hormone levels? When you right now are in your peak of productivity, what are your hormone levels? So if you have women who are, you know, thinking about it and hopefully not going through any fertility issues, but thinking about getting pregnant or between pregnancies, finding out where they are would be really worthwhile because again, then you'll know, you know, postmenopausal, What am I now compared to then? And keeping those levels regularly high, we may find that in the future that's what we're doing in order to even boost longevity further as we go on. I hope that was helpful. If you need help on how do I find the right mix of exercise so that I am getting the strength I need without getting the fatigue that I don't How am I getting the boost for the estrogen no longer there without getting the boost in cortisol that's going to take me in the opposite direction? Our 12 Weeks Stronger program is open. I'd love to see you there. We're doing something a little crazy this time. If you're listening in real time for the October 1st launch, once we hit October 1st, by the way, that doors will be closed. You have to be in before that. But we're doing something a little crazy, so we're doing an hour weekly coaching call with me. So you can join me through those hours every week live, and if that's because you're in Australia or somewhere else, you can listen to the replay but still be able to drop your questions in by way of the private Facebook group and get live coaching in numerous ways. We want you to go through— we know We're using the science based on women in perimenopause to postmenopause, and yet we're not at all exactly alike. We're slightly different, and you have a different moment in time. You're going through a different set of stressors, and we sometimes just need to help navigate through that so you're using things correctly, not pushing yourself too hard, but pushing yourself just enough. At the right time. And we'd love to be the ones to help you do that. Get started right now. Let's start 2025 stronger.

Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and to get the show notes, visit flipping50.com where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes and I made it super easy to make the most of your listening time and get exactly what you want to listen to as top priority by getting the top 10 episodes in the areas you most care about, like how much protein do you need, weight loss, and other 3 ultra-important topics we've identified as our community's top 5. There's no No more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So go and listen right now. Do you have a question for a podcast, a question you'd love to ask, or maybe a story you want to tell? Did you know we have a special group? Just for podcast question roundups and the answers. My community coaches and I provide answers daily inside of this group, but it's also where I go when I occasionally say, okay, open call for podcast questions, or tell your story. Would you like to be a guest? So if you're looking for a community of women who are also interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset, and looking forward to every new year, join the Flipping 50 Insiders group. That's Flipping 50 Insiders on Facebook.