Why & How the Flipping 50 Show Started a Decade Ago

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.

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What are you waiting for? Good night. Hey friends, before we dive into this episode, here's what it's all about. If you're brand new to the Flipping 50 podcast, and even if you're not, if you've been around for a minute but you really haven't heard the where it all started story, this is it. Now, we're not going way, way back, but we are definitely going back to 2013. To a time when there began a lot of tears. And although today we're celebrating successes, celebrating the team that we've got that, that I love working with, you know, it wasn't always this way. There's usually some stories and there's some hiccups and stalls and pivots and U-turns along the way, and that is certainly what you're going to get. I will also tell you this, that If you're tender-hearted, you might want to grab a Kleenex box and maybe it's not you. I'd like to think that I've told many of these stories enough to be healed from them. We have a saying in the speaking industry and that is, you should never heal from the stage. That you need to have dealt with that even though you can get back to that moment and be totally authentic in it. You're not actually needing to heal still before you tell the story. Love to think that all of that is true, and that still I can tap into it and take you to that moment and how it felt for me in starting, and why still I was compelled to keep going. Here we go. I'm Debra Atkinson, and 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 know to ask them. The goal: to help you accelerate results with science and the practical application of proven protocols while living your best life. There is no more powerful health influencer than a midlife woman. It's not just you, but it's the 3 generations you influence who benefit. My unique 40-year career includes being a university senior lecturer in kinesiology, an industry subject matter expert, 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 science of optimal hormone balancing, fitness, and longevity and share answers to our community's questions so that you can have the vitality and the energy that you want, need, and deserve. Tears roll down my face as I take down years Years of memories. Since I could remember, I've always wanted dozens of frames of memories hanging on my walls and lining the bookshelves. My cell phone rings and I see it's my realtor. What perfect timing. It was she who said a house sells better when a buyer can imagine themselves in the space and the seller's personal items are removed. I should have been putting up Christmas decorations. It was a brutally cold December day. There'd be no 19-foot tree, no throwing Mardi Gras beads at it. Dustin was at college and he'd be home over break, but there might not even be a tree this year. He'd have to have that experience at his dad's. That was the first year of what is now Flipping 50 and the companion business that is served by the She Means Fitness business. Business podcast that helps fitness and health coaches start and grow their own fitness businesses serving women over 40. That was 11 months after having quit safety and security of a regular paycheck at a university and at a private health club. My revenue was cushy for the Midwest. I had zero debt. Life was good. And it was after the times that I had confidently said, if I'm not where I need to be when, when it gets to this point, I will just sell my house. Well, not so confidently, I was selling my house. I was leaving a house I loved in a neighborhood I loved in a town I had loved since I was a little girl visiting my sister and hearing stories of my grandmother attending the same college here so many decades ago. During the first 14 months of going 100% in on the mission and the vision to serve midlife women and to uplevel the health and fitness industry instead of complaining about what was wrong with it, I had 8 major life changes. Life was tough. There was a lot more money going out than coming in. But then, you know, I would love to say that right now I just worked harder, got help, and it all got better. Well, folks, that's not how it happened. Life got harder, a lot harder, and I learned a lot of lessons. In the J.Crew factory outlet store, picking up funeral suit coats for my great-nephews whose dad was killed by a drunk and high driver 2 days before, in spite of the red-rimmed puffy eyes The clerk said, "Going to a wedding?" It took everything I had just then, which was not a lot, to say or not to say, "No bitch, you had a 50/50 chance and you blew it. They're burying their dad." But nobody suspects that when you're buying a size 3 and a size 6 and a size 9 suit coat. My niece's husband was killed riding his bike in the last 10 minutes coming home from a about a 2-hour bike ride with a buddy after he'd been gone all week without getting a ride in. The driver had left him for dead and sped off. We were all devastated, not just our families, but a town, an entire small Midwestern town where he'd grown up, his colleagues at Google, his biking community where, like him, they were near pros. Bill wasn't a careless occasional bike rider out on a Saturday ride. He was calculated Eagle Scout kid grown into a turning pro biker who was much loved and envied for his skill and for his humility. Life was hard for me before Bill, but after, my eyes were wide open about what hard actually is. Choose your hard, we say. I choose to work hard because I know this really isn't hard. I choose to put in more time than most are willing to because this really matters. Things that I do, I think, are worth it. I'm not here for the toned arms and the smaller size, and no judgment if that's what drives you to exercise, but I'm here for the adventure and the fun and the feeling it all and experiencing it all. I watched life fall apart close up in minutes. I've also watched it come back together and it's never the same. Of course it's not, but it's beautiful and it is honoring to those who are gone. This was essentially the first 4 years of my start of a new life, of a new business, of a new way being. There are tears much more than laughter and the privilege of watching generosity and love pour out of people. The lessons of understanding that everyone you meet on the street at any moment could be going through a catastrophic event in their lives, but because groceries still have to be bought and work still has to happen and kids still need to go to school, we see these people. And we wonder, why are their faces so long? What could be that bad? A lot of things actually could be that bad. I'm a better human because of hard. It can go either way. You can let it swallow you up, consume you. You can gain limited beliefs and then you can let them run you, or you can choose, no matter what it is, to surround yourself with somebody who will tell you that no, Exercising hours a day and fasting to disguise a terrible habit of eating too little is going to keep you stuck. I established Slipping 50 for the woman who feels like nobody gets her and that trainers seem to think that you must be cheating if you aren't getting results. For those who think they should be tired, sore, or stiff, or it just isn't working. Who think that if you feel miserable doing what you're doing, that you will finally somehow get to a good place and feel better. My job is to point out the science that these things are wrong, to put into practical terms what the missing part is for women in midlife. No one was talking about menopause fitness in 2013 when I began this journey. And what I used to teach in the '80s personally and in the mid-'90s even about osteoporosis, for example, has changed. Yet if it's online, you may read something, some old science. Now you still may be conflicted. It doesn't even have to be two experts talking now in the same year or decade. It's my self-prescribed job description to clean up that mess and to give you clarity about why we thought that then and what we know now. Not just to tell you the rules have changed. It's my job to help you hear from people whose ideas might oppose mine or sway me even to change my limited thinking. It's not about being right. Sometimes it's about delivering information that might be still inconclusive so that you can decide for yourself. Hey, this is Debra Atkinson. I love creating the Flipping 50 podcast for you, and I have for over a decade. I also love helping midlife women shift not only their physical energy but their beliefs about what effective exercise looks like and how much it can positively and powerfully impact your life, not just today or for the weekend, but for decades to come. If you're not exercising right now, or if you're getting tired, not stronger, or think you don't have time or the energy to exercise, do a 5-day flip with me. I will send you one short video a day for 5 days. It's just 15 minutes long, so you can see exactly how I plan a fitness plan for myself and for thousands of clients. You can get this at flipping50.com right now. What are you waiting for? Let's start flipping 50. Today. Other times it's sharing new information and either asking questions about the validity of science or its application specifically to you. When you tune in, you'll hear interviews usually reserved for Tuesdays and most often a solo episode on Fridays answering questions or following up with an idea or science that's new on the scene. When, for instance, our community is confused about zone 2 training or conflicted about fasting and exercise in a fed state. I'll be talking about those things. Mostly I'll be talking about those things with the lens focused on women in midlife and the studies featuring women just like you. You're not a man, a mouse, or a young woman, not even younger you. You'll hear me talk about that in my TEDx talk, and I'm going to link to that in the show notes here, but I also want to share a little bit about that with you right now. As I was shifting in that very first year, spending most of my time barely dressed and mostly in my pajamas at my dining room table, which somehow becomes my office even when I have a dedicated office— anyone? I realize at the end of that year I was in better shape than I had been for the last 30 years. And the last 30 years, you must understand that I was exercising for hours a day, teaching at least one fitness class probably a day on average, sometimes two, and as many as four when we thought that was a good idea and that meant more fit. And in addition to that, as fitness instructors and trainers often do, we do our own workouts. So that was a lot of running, and endurance was my jam. My DNA says so, and my brain does too. And so I have done marathons. I've even done triathlon training, and training for hours a day had been my MO. And it is an active job. It's not a workout, but it's an active job. And yet the year of sitting more and getting away for walks for an old English sheepdog, emphasis on the word old, and maybe getting 20 minutes of yoga or 20 minutes of weight training or intervals here and there put me in better shape than those hours of exercise. And that's when I began to examine really what's going on here. It wasn't just about serving women in midlife because I'd served so many baby boomer women growing through their menopause who kept saying our doctors don't get us. They're just telling me, welcome to menopause. They're telling me to accept it, telling me what do I expect, but yet not wanting to settle for that. It's that then I decided this is my niche. As I work with health and fitness pros on growing their businesses, they have to see that the strategies I'm doing work for me. And what happened? Took me by complete surprise. Rather than first building a business dedicated only to health and fitness pros, the Flipping 50 side of things took off because nobody else was talking to these women and nobody had taken the time. What I call accidental good timing on my part, because when it was that I, after 30 years of extensive exercise regularly, was in better shape than ever, I started to ask why and look at the research. And we're not mice, we're not men, and we're not young women, not even our younger selves. So we can't expect that the exercise prescriptions and the science based on subjects that are most often young athletic males will work for us. When Tabata came out, everybody started doing high-intensity interval training ad nauseam, and injury rates went up. Correspondingly by about 144%. And women often became injured at a much higher rate. And midlife women also became more tired, more exhausted. They would push themselves through the exercise but ended up being sore, being not as fit, but actually having less muscle. So I began to look at all of that and look at the science about combining strength training and high-intensity interval training that was of the cardio nature in one workout and found things like this that I reveal in Flipping 50 podcasts, that when you combine them, both suffer. You don't get the strength, you don't get the lean muscle mass stimulation, and you also don't get as good cardiovascular benefits that boost your VO2. You actually get better results when you split the two up. So only if the only way to get them both is to do them together would you ever want to. The ideal would be that you take 10 or 20 minutes and do that high-intensity cardio intervals, and you take that 20 minutes and do a high-intensity strength training session. Not moving in a frenzy, but moving slowly to muscular fatigue, not just moving all muscles fast and in frenzy so that you're quote unquote tired at the end. Success at the end of a workout is not exhaustion. Success at the end of a workout is that during it you've reached muscular fatigue, multiple sets for multiple muscle groups, so that you have overloaded and will gain and boost your muscle protein synthesis. So we gain lean muscle tissue, we gain lean muscle fibers, boosting our metabolism and decreasing body fat, therefore optimizing body composition. That in the end decreases disease. And yet women slightly, you know, are treated in studies as subjects only very slightly. It's beginning to skew more to our side, to our favor, but we have to be asking every time someone tells you, here's a protocol, here's what I want you to do, you have to ask, was that made for women just like me? And again, I talk about this in my TEDx talk and I talk about myself, the accidental in the best shape of my life doing less. Are you kidding me, right? And I talk about Jennifer, who was in her mid-60s, early 60s when I met her, who is now over 70 and in the best shape of her life, having lost 100 pounds, by doubling her caloric intake and probably cutting her exercise by two-thirds, but making sure that when she does do it, it's of the highest quality. And in between, she's doing a lot of movement, movement, but not exercise that gets her tired. And I also talked about another client who was a nurse, realizing that those 12-hour shifts were actually exercise and counted toward her fitness goals. She did need to strength train. She did need to do some high-intensity interval training and get outside for walks. But on those very days that she did those 12-hour shifts, she did not need to also beat herself up. And learning these lessons helped these women by decreasing the exercise they did increase their fitness level dramatically. So I put the link again to that TEDx talk. So if this is you, you're doing all the work, you're exhausted from doing all of the physical exercise and maybe under eating while you're doing it. I will support you. And once you listen, you have nothing else to lose but following the challenge I give at the end. Try it my way. Cut your exercise in half for a week or two. See how you feel. You can always go back to what's not working now. And there you have it. That is the philosophy of the Flipping 50 show and the programs. So I will ask you to think big while you're listening rather than criticize. If something strikes you as new or different or a little too direct and in your face, try to get curious. Get curious about why I said it that way, how it could have triggered you and why. And believe that when one woman wins, it lifts us all up. It's called collaboration. And if you haven't gotten the memo, we're all lifting each other up now. When I was a year into building this online business of mine, the Flipping 50 show became a part of it. I realized that less exercise had me in better shape than I've ever been in before in my life. Now, if you are somebody out there who loves exercise as much as I do, realize that when we're through the major changes, the major hormonal ups and downs that menopause can bring, we may get back to being able to do endurance exercise and still having the fitness level we want. If you do this one thing for me, I'm going to encourage you to go shopping if you haven't yet. If your home does not yet have a smart scale so that you can measure and track your body composition, the amount of lean muscle mass that you have, and the percent body fat that you have, go get one. Because if you're exercising thinking that you want to lose weight, or you're exercising thinking that you want to gain lean muscle, you need to be able to measure it. These things are really important, not just for today but for your future. And you may falsely celebrate a win that is weight loss that will come back to bite you in the butt. And that is pretty literal and figurative all at the same time. There you have it. I hope you've enjoyed this episode, and I'll see you more in the future. So in this episode, I hope that I gave you a good bird's-eye view of just why I started this and then why I kept going even though it was extremely hard and quitting might have seemed easier. For me, it just wasn't an option. And I hope for you that the feeling is you're glad I didn't quit, that somebody is serving you and giving you the answers that you want. I also hope that you understand now what to expect as you listen to more episodes and to know that you can contribute and build the content that lays out right here about everything related to muscle, bone, and brain health and your longevity, but most of all, the strength that you have along the way. Thank you for listening. To listen to a decade of episodes and get show notes, visit Flipping50.com, where you'll be able to find all the previous episodes. And that's Flipping 50, all spelled out, no spaces. I made it easy to make the most of your listening time with the top 10 episodes in the areas that you really care about most. Those like protein, weight loss, bone density, other areas that women in midlife tend to think absolutely most about, be curious about, and maybe be getting conflicting or incongruent information about. If you know a midlife woman or soon-to-be one who wants to optimize her midlife energy and time with the right exercise and lifestyle changes and a mindset shift about just what is possible, please share the podcast with her. There is no more powerful health influencer in the world than you, midlife woman. So do you have a question, a question that you'd love to ask? And did you know that we have a special group for podcast question roundups and answers? My community coaches and I provide answers daily to questions that you have in a group of women just like you. If you're looking for a community of women who also are interested in optimizing their health, strengthening their mindset so we don't go down that ageist, oh, I'm too old or I'm getting old path. And they want to look forward to every single year. Join the Flipping 50 Insiders group on Facebook. It's open to the public. We'll just ask you a few questions before you join, meaning play nice with others and you'll be off and running. Can't wait to see you in there.