Beef Up Your Protein: How This 74-Year-Old Woman Built Strength, with Dr. Sandra Scheinbaum

There's a lot of gender differences that are very deep seated messages that were passed on from our mothers, for example, or grandmothers, and how we eat.

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Hello and welcome back to the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. We have an awesome guest today. It's Dr. Sandra Sheinbaum. She has devoted nearly four decades to clinical psychology. And Dr. Sheinbaum is renowned for her expertise in positive psychology, mind body medicine. She's also an author and host of the Health Coach Talk podcast that I was on a long time ago. And in collaboration with the Institute for Functional Medicine, she founded the Functional Functional Medicine coaching academy in 2014. So happy anniversary, Sandra. And it's shaping the future of holistic health care. So, Sandra, welcome. We're so excited to have you here today.

Oh, thank you, Wendy. I'm so excited to be here.

Yes. So I'm not on social a lot, but one day I was kind of flipping through and you pop up in my feed and you're upside down, you're doing a handstand, and then you're lifting 50 pound plates. And if you've ever met Sandra in person, she is petite. Like, just cute and petite. And if you break five feet, I would be surprised. You're very petite and you're extremely powerful. And I think what was so inspiring to me is, you know, you referenced something like at my age, you were talking about yourself. And really our premise is that you be vital, vibrant, healthy, alive, able, and interested in intimacy till you're at least 100. And every decade's meant to get better than the one before. And you really personify this. And then the other thing that's really poignant for me is I think like a week ago I had an hour to get to the gym, get changed, workout, and get back to a meeting. And I was like, am I going to do this? Or should I just stay and do my portals and do my emails? And I was like, no, anything is better than nothing, and everything we do makes a difference and it doesn't have to be perfect. So I went and I worked out and then I was like, oh, cool, I sweated. You know, it doesn't have to be this big thing where you go get strong, you just do it as you can. I work with two trainers at the Y down the street and I'm always fetching at them. Like, these weights are made for men. These weights go in five and ten pound increments and women really should be in like two pound increments. And just based on the amount of testosterone and our strength innately. And he's like, I know, but what can I do? So they actually do have hand weights that are two and a half pound increments. So that's been great. So in the last year, I've been able to double my weights, but it is hard to go from five pounds to ten. For a curl, I can go from five to seven and a half and then seven and a half to ten. So I'm at ten now. But I wasn't there when I started, so there is definitely something about pushing yourself and getting, getting increments going. So when you started versus now, is your body different?

Yes. So I never had glutes, I never had a butt. And I always thought, oh, good, you know, like, you can't be too thin. And yeah, I could wear a size double zero pants. And yeah. And as I started learning more and more, and a lot of it is due to Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, muscle Centric medicine. And as I started getting into my late 60s and now in my 70s, I'm so focused on avoiding sarcopenia because I see it happen in all my, just about all my contemporaries, friends that I have been friends with for a long, long time, and I can see they are losing muscle. Except those who are working out, who are committed to resistance training. And so the, so the idea that I could start building and so I, I now have a butt and I actually, like, those double zero pants don't fit so well. And the old days, like in when I was 30, that would have been a bad thing. Oh, I better go on a diet. You know, I better do something. Because it was all about that appearance. And now I like, I love to feel like, no, I have, like, my thighs are really strong. But I can see a difference physically as well as well as my arms.

So I see your arms, I don't see your tush, but I see your arms. And I'm like, your arms look amazing.

Back in, when I was in my 30s, I remember I was in the gym with a friend of mine at the time and we were just walking around the track, probably waiting for our Jane Fonda, like, aerobics class to start, and she said something to me which wasn't very nice. But she said you have no definition in your arms, which was true at the time. So I was in my 30s at the time. Now fast forward. I'm 74 and I've actually built muscle and I track it through the scales where you can track skeletal muscle mass. And I look at like when I had it tested the first time I started tracking it was like in 2016. And from then to, to now I've put on like seven pounds of muscle.

So awesome. So I wanted to double clip on a couple of things. One, I just want to make sure everybody knows definition of sarcopenia, which you later stated, which is muscle loss and happens very commonly as we get older. So that's. And one of the best predictors of longevity is muscle mass. So that, that just to be clear. And then the other thing that you're really highlighting and I think when you said but I really want to double click on this is it's never too late. Like you're actually, you're, you're better now than you were. And not only that skinny. Fat is just being skinny does not mean you're in good shape. Like if you have no muscle and just all of that is just fat, it's actually worse for you from a health point of view than having extra weight on you but having muscles underneath. So I want to really highlight how important muscle mass is. Thank you.

Yeah, absolutely. That is what I'm committed to. I mean frailty is just so, so dangerous. In fact, there was just a study that came out that showed the number of push ups you can do is better at predicting your chances having a heart attack. That actually your LDL cholesterol, I mean it was.

So I'm going to be videotaping Wendy doing push ups now.

Just so you know, I can't do push ups yet. I've been working on it, but for.

Some reason the muscles are working. Right.

Okay. When you started, did you, could you do a full on push up when you started?

No, when I started, I could not get to the ground. I could not do a full pushup. I was, I can get to the.

Ground, I just can't get back up.

So I started with one and then I was really excited when I can do five. So now every day I incorporate these. I do yoga every morning and I incorporate these. They're chaturanga push ups or yoga where your elbows are against your side. And so I see how many I can get to and it varies because how we feel is different every single day. But I can usually I just go to absolute exhaustion where I can't do one more. And so I can get to 15 once I've got up to 17 and then during the day I will find a another time and I will continue to do push ups and my record is going up to 70. And then I'll rest for like 10 seconds and then I'll try. I, I do 100 every day and, and then I have a TRX at home which is great and I do pull ups on, on the trx. So I do exercise snacks throughout the day and it's just like non negotiable. It's like brushing my teeth. I just find ways to incorporate this throughout the day. One of the things that has been really helpful is using something called a tonal.

That's the thing I wanted to get that I haven't gotten yet. Yeah.

And what I love about tonal is that you can increase the weight in one pound increments because often like I'll go to the gym and these machines, first of all they're not built for women and certainly women my size. So it is very tough because was you have to increase, it has to be like a five pound increase or sometimes even ten pound. And if you can't get there then you can't go up efficiently. So I love the tonal because I can go up in one pound increments and then there are just certain machines. I just decided I was going to see how far I can do. So I leg press. I will do every other day or every third day and see how far I can get. It was interesting. So I have got gotten up to £350 on the leg press. And so I what happened was the fit, the fitness director happened to be walking by and he stopped because I was just resting and doing leg presses and he looked at the weight I had stacked and it was 150 pounds. And he said boy, that's a lot of weight for you. What I didn't tell him was that was my warmup set that was like I was just starting. And full disclosure, there are different ways to do leg presses and so can get to £350 if I have the seat moved a little farther back. If my legs are right up against my body then you know I can, it's, I can't do that strong of a weight. So I, I try different, different ways but I always like to challenge myself. It's like which I never did in my earlier days. So I would do you know, 10, you know sets of 12. Okay, I'm done. But now. Oh I can. I'm going to try with. I'm going to add £5 and see and even if I can barely move it, that's what my understand that it's that to exhaustion like you go where you can't move it anymore. So that's what I've been doing. But just all day long my whole day is movement. So I'm sitting on a bouncy ball right now. I have my hand grippers because grip strength is one of the. It's so important. So often during meetings I'm just working on grip strength. So just try and incorporate throughout the day.

So did you do anything in addition like when you started doing weights, did you also start to do eat more protein or take testosterone or take any type of peptide or is there anything else you've augmented with? Cause from the outside I'm like oh okay, well I'm gonna go do that.

Right.

Is there anything that rounds it out and obviously work with your trainer and work with your doctor and blah blah blah. But do this isn't medical advice. I'm more just like how. What else did you do to give a full picture of everything?

Yeah. So I have been really have followed so many diet trends. If you were in my kitchen and see all the cookbooks, oh, here's the fat free. Here's the, you know, here's the Mac. You know before that I had the macrobiotic. You know that diet and the venue. I read Diet for a New Planet or Die for New America. And no, no more meat, no more chicken and then eventually no more fish. And I was a vegan. I raw vegan. I didn't know how bad I felt. I remember going to a dance class I could barely in dance classes are always upstairs this long stairway could barely make it because what would I would do? I would get up in the morning and I would grab going to class. I was with my daughter, she was homeschooled as an actress. I was accompanying her and I would take the classes as well. We'd grab a bag of carrots or a banana and think oh that's great, great, that's. So I did 180 degree turnaround in the last few years. Really appreciated. I first of all started eating meat a lot and focusing on high quality protein, a lot of protein. And I do supplement. I use essential amino acids during workouts. Creatine is absolutely something that's part of my routine. Urolithin.

Do you do it before your workout? Or during your workout or after your workout. When do you do your creatine?

Yeah, I usually do it in between since I'm like always working out. So the only thing I have to do fasted is my yoga inversions. There's nothing worse than. And I've experienced this sometimes being in a yoga class. Like a hot. You can eat for me at least I can't have anything for like at least three, four hours. And even then. So I like to get up and on an empty stomach. That's where I will do my handstands and, and that yoga practice. And then I will have a power smoothie and I'll put the creatine in there and then do strength training sometime like midday or around noon before lunch and then have a big lunch with lots of protein. And I follow the advice of J.J. virgin and Gabrielle Lyon. And it's like I try and get at least 30 grams with each meal, so I aim for a hundred grams of protein.

That's a lot of protein. I'm always proud when I get like 15, 20. And it's hard.

Sometimes it can be hard. Yeah. Yeah. And I prioritize protein and a lot of things. We teach a lot about nutritional psychology and there's so many gender differences in how people eat. And if I was thinking about this because I was at a, a luncheon a few months ago and what's on the menu, I've never been to a ladies luncheon, fundraising, a bridal shower where they served anything but like a dainty salad with maybe some chicken strips on it, but never, like, it would be unheard of to have like a big steak, you know, but yet guys go out and they're going to order that big steak. So there's a lot of gender differences that are very deep seated that may have messages that were passed on from, you know, our mothers, for example, or grandmothers and how we eat and. But also the sense that protein is bad for you. I have a lot of people who are in my age group who we go out to dinner and again, they're like under a salad with like two shrimp on it. And then that's not enough and where's the beef? Yes, exactly.

So, interestingly, I was sitting next to Tim, JJ's husband, at an event, and he was flat out bullying me. He was like, you need more protein. You need to get more protein. I was like, dude, I'm full. He's like, I don't care. You need to eat more protein. And he sat there while I was like, okay, I'LL get it in. But it was, sometimes it was. He said, you just have to train yourself to eat more protein because I just, I got full. And he said, just a few more bites. A few more bites is like 10 grams of protein. So get that in you. And so I did. So I've been really mindful of that. But it can be challenging.

It can be really challenging. But that is something that I, I found I will eat the protein first and it's. The first thing I will consider is like, how am I going to plan it out throughout the day? And then supplements. So I use whey protein. I'll put that in my smoothie. I'll start out with I usually sheep's milk yogurt as opposed to cow's milk yogurt. And so that'll be the base of my smoothie many days. And I'll then add a good whey protein concentrate and sometimes even more So. A few months ago I broke my fifth metatarsal bone in my foot. So I was out of commission. And so my first thought, talk about negative thinking, like, this is awful, I'm going to waste away, I'm going to lose all my muscle, I'm not going to be able to work out. And so But I was determined to have a good outcome and to not lose strength. So what I did was I immediately like googled what exercises can you do? I had this boot, but I was okay, I'll do push ups like knee with, with bent knees and I got okay, I can do those every day. I can do all the things. The bench was my best friend. You know, I was doing all the upper body exercises on bench core exercises like crazy. But my protein, I figured I need to really increase that to have good bone repair. So I was eating like so much protein and other supplements for that. So luckily when I got right back to it, I hadn't lost muscle mass, which I was really afraid of. And also cardio as well because I wasn't doing my walking or high intensity interval training with this boot on, but doing the best. I was doing rowing that worked with one foot.

You do hormones too or no.

So I was of the generation that was so scared by the Women's Health Initiative. It's going to kill you. You're going to get breast cancer. Stop. I had never considered because I luckily went through menopause with no hot flashes or symptoms. I just. Or if I had them, I just, I. My work at the time was as a psychologist, a health psychologist and I help people through imagery and so whenever I started to feel hot, I would just focus on, it'll feel so good to, like, be in cool water. I would create images of the exact opposite of what was happening, what I wanted. And that really worked very well. So I never felt I needed hormones at the time. And just lately I thought, I wonder. Because we just interviewed Dr. Felice Gersh for the podcast, and I think the thinking has really turned around in terms of bioidentical hormones. So I just started a trial. So you're like, oh, my gosh, I'm 74. Like, the age when you're, you know, you're supposed to. That's out of the range. But the thinking is, well, maybe not. So it's an adventure and it's curiosity, which is the. As you get older, what people lose, that is the most dangerous thing to lose is curiosity. Love of learning. Like I hear people say all the time, I just heard song someone the other day was my contemporary. Well, I have my friends. I don't need to go out and make new friends. I have my set of friends. As opposed to, it'll be great to learn to meet new people and have these new connections or curious about trying new things. What it would be like if I did go to the gym and start weight training. I wonder how I would feel. So we lose that curiosity and turn more inward. And so it's important to fight against that, to maintain that, because all learning starts with curiosity. Like, oh, you know, I wonder what, you know, I want to learn that. And so it's a real important strength to keep.

So where can people find you, Sandra?

Sure. Well, Our website is functionalmedicinecoaching.org Instagram. My personal Instagram is doctorsandy s a n D I and a functional med coach also on Instagram. And those are probably the best ways. We're also on Facebook as well, and.

We'Re gonna post the clip of you upside down and lifting crazy heavy weights. But if they want more, they can go follow you directly. So from both of us and all the listeners who I'm hoping are inspired by you, because I'm inspired by you. Thank you for being here. It's really a pleasure to have you on. And I can't wait to see how many people you inspire. Like, you're really, truly inspirational, Sandy. So thank you.

Well, thank you, thank you for having me.

And to the listeners, thanks for joining us for another episode of the Feel Freaking Amazing podcast. And as always, we look forward to talking to you Next time. Inspire and empower someone else by leaving a five star review so they can.

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