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Health & Fitness Redefined
Health and Fitness Redefined with Anthony Amen. Take a dive into the health world as we learn how to overcome adversity, depict fact vs fiction and see health & fitness in a whole new light.Fitness Is Medicine
Health & Fitness Redefined
The Female Body's Warning Sign
What if your relentless pursuit of fitness is actually destroying your health? In this eye-opening conversation with Dani Sheriff, we uncover the hidden dangers of extreme fitness regimens that many health-conscious individuals never see coming.
Dani takes us through her personal journey as an Olympic weightlifter who lost her period for eight years straight—a condition called hypothalamic amenorrhea that she initially viewed as a badge of honor rather than the serious warning sign it was. With disarming honesty, she shares how her obsession with training six days a week while maintaining strict dietary control created a perfect storm for hormonal disruption. "I was so balls deep in fitness that I thought my period was an optional extra I only needed when it was time to get pregnant," she admits.
The revelations in this episode challenge conventional fitness wisdom on both ends of the spectrum. Dani explains how the body, when faced with energy deficits, makes ruthless prioritization decisions—keeping your heart beating and lungs functioning while shutting down "non-essential" systems like reproduction. But the consequences extend far beyond fertility, affecting bone density, cognitive function, and heart health. Perhaps most surprising is the psychological dimension: how rigid food rules and exercise regimens create constant stress that further disrupts hormonal balance.
We also explore the middle ground where true health resides. Neither extreme restriction nor complete abandonment of healthy habits serves our bodies well. Dani shares actionable insights for recognizing warning signs and restoring balance—including why sometimes having that donut might actually be better for your hormones than stressing about avoiding it.
Whether you're actively pursuing fitness goals, struggling with hormonal issues, or simply curious about optimizing your well-being, this conversation offers fresh perspective on what health really means. As Dani puts it: "Everyone, chill out, have the occasional donut, go to the gym semi-regularly, and don't take any one thing too extreme." Your hormones will thank you.
Learn More at: www.Redefine-Fitness.com
Hello and welcome to Health and Fitness Redefined. I'm your host, anthony Amen, and this is way better set up than last week episode when we had our first test here. So super excited to be in the new space, starting to get equipment organized, starting to make things look nice for you guys. So, if you are watching on video, we are currently running on youtube and rumble as well as, obviously, all audio streaming devices. So thank you guys for supporting the show. Really appreciate it. Without further ado, we have a great guest on for all of you today. A nice, fun, different topic. I think this is going to be eye-opening to a lot of the guys that listen to this show about things they never wanted to know but probably should know. So, without further ado, let's welcome to the show, danny.
Speaker 2:Danny, it's a pleasure to have you on today thank you so much and honestly, it's often surprising to women too. It honestly is um and I can. I can assure the men who think they don't want to know about it it will help a lot with something one day, just to have the basics of this issue covered. So I'm excited for everyone.
Speaker 1:Yeah, me too. So just tell us a little bit about like this is an interesting topic. So how did you get into this world? So what made you want to pursue it? Talk about it, run a podcast about it. Talk to me a little bit about how it all started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, yes. So I was an athlete, I was Olympic weightlifter and I had also been doing, you know, some CrossFit and things and, like many people, I think this is me very relatable. There's this thought that crosses your mind of like many people. I think this is me very relatable. There's this thought that crosses your mind of like, okay, I do all this activity, I do this exercise, I want to look like, I work out right, I want to be fit and healthy and I want everyone to see it, because this is something that's important to me and for many people. It's why they get into health and fitness not for everyone, but for some people. And you know, I have a personality that if I'm going to do something, I'm going to do it right and I'm going to do it hard, I'm going to go all in.
Speaker 2:So I was a weightlifter for 15 years and, at the same time, of training very regularly to make it happen. You know, six days a week mostly, and also just living in the world full-time job, actually owned my own business, so it was more like six days a week. I just was really, um, honestly burning the candle at both ends and I had lost my menstrual cycle because I was working out so much and dieting the whole time, either to make weight for my weight class in sport or to just like be lean and try to fit this healthy look, this fitness mold that is very common, especially for women, to. You know, men can sometimes tackle. They're like let's get bigger, let's eat more, let's do our bulk season. But it's not uncommon for women to be like absolutely not, I shall not bulk. That's scary to a lot of women. So they end up in a cut phase. And that was me, in a perpetual cut, feeling that, wow, now I'm not losing any more weight. Let me just cut harder. Let me do more high intensity interval training, let me do more steady state cardio, let me just do chores around the house to get my step count in. Let me do it all because this is important to me.
Speaker 2:And it kind of starts taking over my life and that's what happened to me and I lost my cycle somewhere in that frame and I lost my period for like eight years straight of just living this lifestyle and I felt that it didn't matter. I felt that it was an optional extra on my body that I only need when it's time to get pregnant. So it was something that I just ignored and, in fact, I felt a little bit like and this is common if I've lost my cycle, it means I'm working out hard enough, I'm so fit that I don't have a menstrual cycle anymore, is something that people hear, and I think that that is a story perpetuated from things like gymnasts and ballerinas don't have their periods very often so, and they're you know, the picture of health in our society. This must be a good thing. Is this kind of weird narrative that starts to happen?
Speaker 2:So I lost my cycle and what happened like the reason I started to care about it was I went to my OBGYN and he asked me about my periods and I said I don't have any. Me about my periods, and I said I don't have any and he was like oh well, we worry about that when, when you don't have periods, that's a problem. And I was like, in all my years, the first time I'd ever heard I was like what do you mean? And as someone who value, or at least, wellness, I was like, well, this is a problem I obviously need to solve. And he gave me medication for it, not quite the birth control pill. He gave me something else, um, progesterone. And I was like, well, I'm going to, I'm not doing that, I'm not taking the medical route, because I knew that. I knew that, I knew that this was a self-inflicted problem that I could fix, so I ignored the medication. But I went into like a Google rabbit hole. You know why is my period missing? And this was actually very hard to find information about, because you're either pregnant or menopausal. I was like, well, no, I know that I'm just working out a lot and let me find the magic way to fix this, let me, like, help my way through this or something.
Speaker 2:So I go down this journey of research and I'm coming across information that's like, you know, maybe exercising this much isn't as good for you as you think that it is, and maybe this pursuit of being super lean is not as healthy as you have this belief that it is. And I'm I'm like reading this information and I'm thinking that that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard, whereas, like I don't have an ED disorder. I don't have, like I'm just a regular person. I'm not even that lean. Like I was struggling so much to lose weight, I didn't feel that I had a problem. It didn't make sense. I don't have an ED, I'm not menopausal, like what. What's happening? But this message in my research that I was trying to ignore kept coming up right, you're exercising too much, you're too healthy, basically. And it was so confusing, it was just like not something I'd ever heard before.
Speaker 2:And eventually, you know, I exhausted all paths and I started being more and more curious. Like, okay, maybe I am. Maybe six days a week, three hours a day, is a lot of exercise. And you know, maybe doing a two-hour weightlifting session in the afternoon after having done early morning CrossFit session is like a bit much. And maybe trying to do that while having a full-time job is a lot. And I do notice I am a bit like neurotic about it all and I am a bit of like a stress head. And when my husband wants to go out for dinner spontaneously, I'm not okay with that because I didn't plan my day around it, I didn't plan all my meals around us going out for dinner, so it's a no right, like fun had left my life, spontaneity had left my life, obsession with my body actually taken over. And this is crazy common and we equate as a culture often we equate the pursuit of leanness and maybe even fitness right, like run time, strength etc. To health and they're not actually exactly the same thing. And so I had to really like figure that out and it was a long process.
Speaker 2:It was very anxiety inducing to do less exercise and eat more food, which was important. I couldn't just like. I just mentally and emotionally couldn't just stop doing exercise and start eating tons of food. That was. It was very scary for me and I was learning.
Speaker 2:You know I have this thing called hypothalamic amenorrhea and there's a lot of research around it. You know reds and it's an energy availability issue. Too much energy is going out through exercise. Not enough is coming in through food and the body cannot operate all of its functions without energy. You can't just eat air and celery and cucumbers and expect to menstruate, like the body's gonna say well, pump your heart, you've got to use your lungs, we've got to do all of these other things that matter for your life now. So we're going to shut off your reproductive system. But guess what, the longer you don't menstruate, this affects your bone density, this affects your cognitive function, this affects your heart health and your brain health and this has long-term consequences.
Speaker 2:And I wasn't trying to get pregnant so I didn't have that made up, but as I was learning all of the long-term health outcomes, I started to get really freaked out, like really freaked out that all this pursuit of health was sending me completely in the opposite direction. And like people don't tell you this, but when you have chronically low estrogen, your cholesterol goes high, right, but when you see high cholesterol in your blood, what do you on your blood labs, what do you do? Health harder, like all these things. It was so confusing for me and I had to back out and I had to like be what you know people call a nup, right, like a non. What is it? A non-active, regular person or something like that. Where which was super scary for me um, but with persistence and daily journaling and just like figuring this out through all my own research, my period came. I was eating more, I was exercising significantly less and my period came back. It worked.
Speaker 2:And after a lot of work to get the second one being consistent and that's a whole other rabbit hole but I got that and I was laying in bed one night after all of it and I thought to myself that was hard and exhausting. There was no resources, support out there at all I had to piece this together. I was walking through a society that was saying six-pack abs are the goal, trying to do the opposite my own health and keep my sanity together and I just thought to myself you know, there's no such thing as a unique experience. There are many, many other women out there with my same issue, my same anxieties, going through the same thing, and they cannot find any resources anywhere. So I started a podcast and at the time I didn't know it like that much. I just all my research.
Speaker 2:I wasn't an expert, um, but I started the show and I started inviting and bringing people on to share their story, to help motivate other women and feel supported and like there's community, because it's a very lonely experience. So women all over the world going through this are coming my show and they're listening and they're listening. So then I started a support community. I went back to school now I'm a fertility awareness educator um, sorry, practitioner and a functional nutrition counselor and I started like coaching other women through this process because they were saying I need help and support and like it's enough food and is this too much exercise? And you know what do my, my lab saying Do I have HA. So I created a whole practice around it to help support these women. And here we are five years later and that's the story. So long story, sorry.
Speaker 1:It's all right, it was a long women. And here we are five years later and that's the story. It's a long story, sorry, it's all right, it was a long story, and there's a lot to unpack in that. So I think the best place to start would be I think there's extremes, and I'm going to talk about what I mean by extremes. There's people that hop into the fitness world and you see it more in, like the crossfit, like athletic community, like you're talking about.
Speaker 1:Women take it to the very edge. They get into the bodybuilding, they get into the shows. It's all the prepping super unhealthy, I don't even think it's a good look. Then you have the other extreme won't even step foot into a gym.
Speaker 1:And I've always noticed this with, like society as a whole. People live in polarities, so it's either I'm all in or I'm not in whatsoever, and it's very tough to find people that live in that middle ground. And then you hear people say, kind of what you were saying, well, this is what society is teaching us. Kind of what you were saying, well, this is what society is teaching us. And I do believe that, going back 10 years seven, eight, 10, nine, 10 years that society was pushing for years women should be this big and it was a super unhealthy look. But now I think it's the exact opposite. Talking about polarities, now it's okay to be 50 60 pounds overweight and neither is okay to your, to your point like you could take thing. You could take something too healthy and take it to an extreme and not make it unhealthy.
Speaker 2:So how do you find and live?
Speaker 1:exactly how do you live in a moderation and how do you really truly understand that to embrace all the positive effects of fitness but not take it to the overall extreme level, and that's hard for people. I think it's really hard to understand like you can do fitness and not do the extreme of it and not to the extreme of it.
Speaker 2:That's a hundred percent the problem that we're trying to solve. Because women come to us on that, you know, stick thin or at least uh, cause you don't have to be stick thin to lose your period. It's really about the behavior around it, right? Some people's bodies will be like we ain't dropping that weight, you know, like for survival reasons. It's we're all about weight loss, total amount of weight loss, and just like how much you're eating to how much you're exercising. And they'll come to us and they'll say I really want to help with this.
Speaker 2:I understand it's actually pretty cool, right? Reduce exercise, eat more normal, like have a bowl of pasta, eat a sandwich. You know, I get it, but I'm scared that I will become like that other side of the spectrum that you're talking about, like there there's no middle. There's no middle for people and in fact many people I'm going to say women, but I assume a lot of men feel this way. If I, if I step one foot outside of this very strict, very disciplined way of living, I lose everything that I've worked for and that's a scary place to be for people. But I do. I'm happy to report. It's actually a pretty solid place to be and people just it's a leap of faith for a lot of people to enter into the middle. I went into a donut two days ago.
Speaker 1:So it's about taking a leap of faith as an example, right. Like I don't live in either extreme, I like to think I live in a really perfect bell curve. Maybe my wife thinks I'm strict, but I I eat so much food it's crazy to watch. I love food, I live for food. No one's ever taking it away from me. But on the flip side of that, I work out a lot, but not three hours a day.
Speaker 1:I do 30, 45 minutes at best, maybe four or five days a week. But that's me being a male. I mean on the female side of it. You mentioned not getting your period and that's, like you said, survival instincts right. If your body's saying to yourself like you can't get pregnant, like the baby's not going to make it, the baby's going to be unhealthy. Or maybe you're in an unhealthy situation where, if you get pregnant, you'll be at risk, like if you're too thin and you don't have enough fat in your body, your body's not going to be able to hold on to a pregnancy.
Speaker 1:It's thinking like I don't have enough food for myself, how the hell am I going to support a baby there ain't no way as in more of a moderation standpoint and give your baby the best possible outcome, which kind of pins back to what I talk a lot about with nutrition. It's living in the mindset that we lived in 3000 years ago, which is you eat a lot of food in one or two sittings a day and you're trying to survive. It's mostly meat, right, because it's a lot easier to hunt and make bone broth, soup or eat an animal and just indulge. You're very seldomly eating fruits and veggies, you're only picking what you can gather, but you're trying to grow specific crops just to get some micronutrients involved. So it's eating a lot, but eating a lot of clean food. It's a hard balance for people because it's calories aren't the issue, it's what you're eating.
Speaker 2:Yes, and I think this is interesting. And so when I first went into to recovery myself and into I have, I had that philosophy and and it's a good philosophy, it's very logical, it makes sense and, and is it true, you don't need a metric shit ton of vegetables all the time and you don't need like, you need the, the basic stuff, and you can't live off crap. End of story, right, like just we'll lose your help. Something about hypothalamic amenorrhea that is fascinating, that we've learned over time is solid. Part of it is psychological. So this problem happens in a very like 99% of time. A very specific population who we've talked about high achieving, very disciplined, can set a goal and execute it ad nauseum. And what this, what this appears to have created, is like a almost like a slave driver of famine response.
Speaker 2:So these women and this problem can happen, happen to men. There's a male version of this issue, but y'all don't have menstrual cycles to set an alarm about. Something happens where you tell yourself you will go and do this workout, you will go and do this run, whatever, and you will do it on this amount of food and you will like, like, you put your body, your body in a headlock and you tell it to perform, and to perform on cauliflower, rice and chicken breast, right, and it's like okay, but like, is food coming? And you're like no, right, and you know, do you know? You're not, you're not going to feed yourself. And so the brain senses famine, no matter what it is. So we get many women who are actually very clean eaters, whole food. They're like hey, I don't understand why I'm missing my period, because I eat whole food, I don't eat junk, I, and I eat an abundance, in fact, of whole food, which you know, once we do our reviews, we can see, for many of them, like well, I love the broccoli. Like, have you seen a potato? You know I love the chicken breast, but have you done thigh? Would you eat the skin? The white fish is awesome, but is this so? Like a lot of people and it's so common with women, right, uh, obsessed with whole food, obsessed with ancestral eating. But you know the second, we're like okay, but can you be in a caloric surplus of it or can you eat enough whole fat? You know, they're like the. The obsession is now in question that like, where is the intention? Come in the eating.
Speaker 2:So sometimes people will struggle to recover, even if they get their calories up, because we find that there's still a lot of rules involved. So there's a lot of cortisol pumping, there's a lot of stress happening because of the rules. I'm like I am not allowed to have sugar, I am not allowed to have a high, like a high fat protein. And until we can unpack those rules like you know your example, like you had a donut every now and then, like these people won't touch it with a tenfold pole.
Speaker 2:Right, I know it's not health food, I'm aware that there's actually no nutritional benefit of it for you, but there's something about the psychological rule restriction of so many food groups, because some people are doing there's no sugar, but there's also no like bread, or there's also no dairy or whatever, for many different reasons, and now their brain is like well, like it's not in abundance, we're not. Like there's still rules and fear and structure around it and it's been fascinating to just get women up to calories. But until we remove all of the rules and bring them into more of a, you know, normal way of eating, that their body will, that's when it will respond. I think it's fascinating that like a donut can help sometimes.
Speaker 1:Yeah, because it's less about the food, it's more about I mean lack of a better word the placebo effect, right, which? Understanding where? Yeah, well, that's what I'm saying. It's the placebo effect, for lack of a better word For what I mean by that. Let me explain so I can make more sense out of it. If I'm taking something and I think it's having an effect for lack of a better word For what I mean by that let me explain so I can make more sense out of it. If I'm taking something and I think it's having an effect, I'm going to make myself convince myself it's having an effect. Right, that's what we know, the placebo effect being known as.
Speaker 1:Now, take it in a reverse example. If I'm taking it, getting super stressed about something, and I just sit there and worry about it all the time and it gets so worked up about it, my body will start having an effect for example, not menstruating because I'm spiking my cortisol levels through the roof, because I'm worried about absolutely everything. So you're screwing up your hormones inside your body because you keep having super high levels of cortisol. Now how do you combat super high levels of cortisol? It's one side. It's getting over a fear. So it's a fear. The fear could be food. Right, you could ever be afraid of certain types of foods and be afraid that if I touch something I'm going to absorb the calories and gain 400 pounds. So it's the same way. You would get over your fear of heights. You would slowly expose yourself and get yourself used to it, eventually start getting relaxed, being in that stressful, fearful situation. The thing such as sleep, making sure we're getting high quality sleep in our lives and we're learning to just relax and unwind, like people forget just to take a deep breath all the time, and how much of an effect that just has on our body. Just to let me just I don't need to stress about something so silly like a fricking donut and thinking that I'm going to go insane. So it's cortisol just to wreak havoc on our bodies. I mean, there's even research coming up and I got to look more into it before I really acknowledge that it's truth. But I wouldn't be shocked that it causes certain types of cancer. It's that you're taking just a hormone and noticing what it does to our body. It affects our blood sugar regulation, it affects our sleep, it could affect your mental health.
Speaker 1:There's so many things Just from high levels of stress because we're worried about it. Take another extreme example there's been studies of men who get so convinced they're pregnant that their body starts producing an exorbitant amount of estrogen and progesterone and they start looking pregnant Like physically impossible. But they get so convinced that they're pregnant. You actually, they actually start looking pregnant. So it's you get so worked up about something Like you can start having issues like that. You obsess so much about getting pregnant that you can do the exact opposite because you're stressing so much about it and you're not getting pregnant.
Speaker 1:Know when you get pregnant, when you don't want to get pregnant and I think I'm case in point for that. My wife and I didn't want to. She didn't want to be pregnant again and we found out, oh my god, one time. One little freaking accident and now she's pregnant with having another kid. So, like it's, when you just drop those cortisol levels, your body starts working so much better, because fright and flight has been meant for quick responses. There's danger in the world run, but after you get away and spend three to five seconds getting away from that danger, like it should disappear. You shouldn't be worked up all day about something, because our bodies are not meant to live that way, totally yeah, you're completely right.
Speaker 2:Like people will like, why is a donut spiking your cortisol? And this absolutely happens to people who get all caught up in you know the nutrition, the various nutrition crazes of the world, right, and like you go, I'm gonna be keto. So now, like, the fact that you ate a carb is super stressful to you. And you know, to your point of cortisol. Cortisol is at the very, very top of the hierarchy of reproductive hormones. So if your cortisol and your insulin is not under control, you sorry, not insulin, blood sugar if your cause on your blood sugar and under control, that will. That's dictating what's happening to your reproductive hormones. So all of these women who are stressed out because I didn't get my win and I don't have anything to eat, because we're going to this restaurant and they don't have anything that works for my diet, and you know your brain says yeah, no estrogen. You know it's, it's super important and that's yeah. It's a great way to kind of explain what's happening. And this happens to men too.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I think I want to take it a step further because I think this is an important topic and probably a controversial one. But that makes it more fun is the increases of infertility as far as one as a society as a whole, two people wanting to have kids. There's a lot to unpack inside of that. But why are we having extreme infertility issues? I know that we talked a lot about women obsessing about fitness and, like yourself, like just over worrying about food, but that's only like 5% of the population, right when obesity. On the other end of that, around 70% of the population is overweight and obese, so are those related to infertility. Why do we have so many infertility issues? And then the flip side of that if we understand the infertility issues, how can we help people fix and have kids? Naturally, that's a tough question, but maybe know the answer.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and, to be super honest, I spend very little time thinking about that, very little time thinking about that overweight population.
Speaker 2:I'm like I'm so balls deep in women who are under eating that I've spent very little time really looking at the opposite side of the population. I do think that I could take them through an identical process that I do with my population and come up with pretty solid answers. Right so like, we use something called the fertility awareness method to track women's cycles and we can see, using that method, their estrogen, lh, fsh, progesterone are doing, as well as their thyroid and metabolism. So I would like I I could imagine what their thought was like versus our clients and take them through a similar process, but just reversed. Right, so like with ours, we're trying to introduce things that they're afraid of. Right and like, change up their diet a bit and potentially, with the opposite population, we're looking at like, okay, well, maybe let's chill out on all the caffeine and maybe let's bring in some high quality animal protein, because you're getting all of your protein from pretty rubbish sources, right like I don't know, mcdonald's frozen dinners the cheapest quality animal proteins that you can get and just start like kind of like that bell curve again. Right, like, let's bring you to the middle this way and you guys to the middle that way, and then, you know, everyone's dealing with the stress of life and all of the expectations on them.
Speaker 2:And another thing that I think about a lot, um, another thing that I that I think about a lot, my whole team does is, while the missing menstrual cycle part is like a small population of women, it's a lot of women, but it's not the majority, right, it doesn't mean that just because your cycle hasn't completely disappeared, you're not on the spectrum. So you could have, you could still be menstruating every single month. It could be very poor quality, and it's for the exact same reasons. It's just that your body has decided not to stop bleeding. Right, there are some like genetic factors here as to like, if you're likely to completely lose your cycle versus just have like the bare minimum function of it. But it's the same thing. Um, and I think that you know women who may be considered in the other part of the population like obese, overweight or even, just like you know, naps like regular people.
Speaker 2:I think that there's still just enough malnutrition in our diet, just enough people, you know, maybe fasting when it's not appropriate for them to be fasting like. I'm not a big fan of intermittent fasting for women, example, and I think that a lot of people are doing that the wrong way, taking it too far. I think we have a heavy reliance on medications. That's messing up with things. Um, that is just like a crazy plethora of possible reasons and um it it takes bringing everyone back to the foundations to like all right protein carbohydrates at quality sources from animals and not overdoing it in the junk world, but not being like neurotic about avoiding it. And we can bring everyone to this like harmony about it. But, like again, I'll be honest, I don't spend a lot of time looking at that population. I'm so busy with population.
Speaker 1:I get it and I understand. It's a different population and it's a different understanding and I think as a whole, though, there's still a lot that both populations do experience and that I think can be fixed. I'm going to if anyone ever wants to get into the political side of things about why I believe certain things, about happy to jump into that, but I think I'm going to, for now, just based on our conversation is stick inside the health and fitness realm of this. First and foremost, as a funny side joke. Everything you're taught in health class is completely wrong. So if you go back to seventh grade, eighth grade, whatever the years was when you had two weeks on sex ed, oh my God, I learned so many things like were wrong, and I should have known that, because everything in nutrition we were taught in school is wrong, so why would the stuff in sex ed also be wrong?
Speaker 1:Like it's absolutely mind-boggling, but to your point, you made a couple of really good ones is these crazy diets, these over-extreme eliminating a macronutrient because we think that's correct? It all started all the way back in the eighties when society as a whole said wow, we're starting to get bigger. What the hell is going on? And we mentioned the study all the time. But it just really, really irks me.
Speaker 1:The Coca-Cola company sponsored a study saying that sugar wasn't the problem, it was fats. So all the trends of all the food companies took fats out of food and everything was low fat. This, no fat, this. You know what the primary function of fats are as a macronutrient Hormone regulation. So when did we start seeing a curve up towards period issues or infertility issues? When we started stripping fats out of our diet. That's where it started.
Speaker 1:Now take it to the other extreme. What came next? It wasn't fat, oh my God, it's carbs. Now we're going to cut all carbs out of our diet and, on top of that, we're going to tell women, to your point, to stop eating protein or proteins. Animal fats are bad and don't touch those animals. Blah, blah, blah and you get complete protein sources from animal products. That's it, sorry, plants, just don't cut it.
Speaker 1:So women now go on these extreme diets. They stress their bodies at to your point about cortisol, and then they jump from one to the next, from the Atkins to the starvation, to the keto, to intermittent fasting. So your body's just always in this constant state of extreme stress and you're not regulating it by giving it all three essential macronutrients. So that means carbs, proteins, fats, with the biggest one being protein, and a lot of women just don't eat enough protein, like not even close. You should be eating 0.8 to one gram per pound that you weigh of lean muscle tissue per person. So if you are 160 pound female and you got like 20, 22% body fat, you should be eating around 125 to 130 grams of complete protein. Not what my fitness pal says, which is are you at peanut butter? That's seven grams of protein. No, that counts as zero.
Speaker 1:So just understanding how to start regulating our hormones as a whole. So I think that's problem number one. Problem number two is age. Women are trying to conceive and I think this one has a lot of societal undertones. But to get again to just sticking kind of the health world, we were meant to have kids. When you look at our parents, right. And then our grandparents. When do they have kids? 19, 20, 21, 22. When are women known to start having issues with pregnancy? 33, 34, 35. When do they start hitting perimenopause? 40, 41, 35. When did they start hitting perimenopause? 40, 41, 42. So your body already knows at a certain point that it's not regulating its hormones properly. So having kids at a younger age is really where we're supposed to meant to be, and this isn't all women's fault. This is men's fault.
Speaker 1:You want to talk about quality of like hormone cycles have a quality of sperm, the quality of sperm in men. You know what increases the quality of sperm in men Higher testosterone levels. You know what men are struggling with Low test. Why? Because men don't really do the extreme like women do when it comes to like bodybuilding as much as percentage is way lower. But women are way worse with the obesity side of it, way worse with the alcohol side of it. So we're just killing our sperm quality. So there's just no good swimmers out there.
Speaker 1:So when you add both extremes now you have crazy infertility issues. So it's just. There's a lot of things that we can learn from this and I want to also mention, as a side point, I do love all the different research like IVF and stuff coming out to help people to conceive and have kids. I think it's amazing and it gives people a chance to do have the opportunity to have kids. But, like, there's things we can do first and we should really look internally and get our blood work done check our test test levels, see what's going with our period, see if we're living in extreme, learn how to regular thing drop our cortisol levels because overall, even if we're not trying to have kids, we're going to make ourselves healthier in the long run yeah, I mean, that's a great.
Speaker 2:Uh, we, we want to be the middleman before you just go straight to treatments, because because, yeah, there's a million things you can tackle and, yes, those treatments are wonderful and way too more people than need it are getting it like that. You know, it's totally as simple as that and I think you made a lot of excellent points. Totally.
Speaker 1:Just as a side point and this is going to be purely speculation because there's no research out on it yet Uh, glp ones. So your ozempics and ZEP bounds. Do you think it's going to have an effect on women's menstrual cycles and do you think we'll have an effect on women's menstrual cycles and do you think will have an effect on infertility?
Speaker 2:two clients so far who have been on ozempic and so far, while I I do think I could see some things where I'm like you know, I wonder if that's the ozempic we've been able to fix it. Uh, one of those clients is pregnant. The other has restored her cycle, but something that I that is anecdotally interesting I'm like you know, I've got nothing to back this up as well they are gaining more weight than their non-ozympic taking counterparts in recovery and in pregnancy. But it's hard to know, you know, like, oh well, is that actually just always going to happen for her genetically, or is this a pattern?
Speaker 1:No idea, that there's research on. I could tell you the answer to that.
Speaker 2:For the ozympic.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so GOP1s are known to strip muscle tissue. It's the same issue with gastric bypass. Your body burns the same amount of fat stores as well as muscle tissue, and your metabolic rate is determined about how much muscle is on your body. They have a lot less muscle tissue on the body. Therefore, they're burning a lot less calories per day. Therefore, when they start eating right again, they gain a ton of weight quicker because they're burning at such low rates yeah, yeah, I, I I've seen this in.
Speaker 2:I actually have a personal friend, so she wasn't a client but gained when she went off of the ozempic um, gained significant amounts of weight like surplus as before when she started. So it's not shocking at all, doesn't surprise me, and I'm sure I will be seeing more and more of it in my career over the coming decade. Um, you know, we saw some interesting stuff with the vaccines kind of happened as well and getting people like really, when everyone was first getting it, you know um and and how that was impacting people's menstrual cycles. That was a cool one because people both trying to recover from ha, but then also past clients who then came back to me and were like you know, my cycle is totally out of whack. What's going on?
Speaker 2:And in coming to the determination like, inject yourself with something and it's going to mess with your cycle. The neutral cycle is a a mirror of your life. Every week it looks just like what was going on that week in that month. So yeah, yeah, you're going to see it. Then nothing's happening in a vacuum in the body.
Speaker 1:I that was so interesting with the COVID vaccine and how it actually did kill women's menstrual cycles, and it was something that was talked about a lot because people are like why are women just stop having menstrual cycles after getting the COVID vaccine? I don't know enough to see here and give you the exact reason about why, but I do know there was enough women experiencing it that it was actually a well-known side effect. Now, did that cause permanent reviews? I don't know, you would know better than me, but I'm very interesting about it how it did play a role in that yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, what we can say for sure right is like if a woman has any, honestly, any vaccine, um, or illness, travel, high stress type things come up on the chart. Ovulation is delayed, you may have a short or luteal phase, you may have a light leader, like no tens of really like light spotting versus your regular four-day bleed. Some kind of really annoying, inconvenient symptom comes up, because that's how it works, like it just is so easily impacted by environment around it and what you're putting into it. So the nice part is that more often than not, when any medication is administered for a woman so like, let's say, antibiotics for an infection, a vaccine, even if someone has had to have an abortion or a miscarriage or something like that it's always pretty effed up for like a solid three cycles in a row.
Speaker 2:There's some kind of stuff out of whack, but the body is awesome and it will do everything in its power to get back on, if you allow it. So we do see it more, as it appeared to be more of a blip surface level After two cycles, we could get them looking pretty normal again. But you know, whatever else was impacted egg quality for how long, you know, could their luteal phases be a day or two longer and we don't know that potentially. But the body works pretty hard to sort itself out and we really run those bodies through a lot of shit and it keeps getting back for us as best it can. But you can only fuck with it so much. So I definitely wouldn't say oh, go do whatever you want, your body will figure it out. But it is nice to know that it's to see it trying its best for all of these women. Get back on track.
Speaker 1:I really, I really couldn't agree more. It's. There's so many things we don't know and we just keep giving our body more excuses to not work properly. We start introducing a lot more chemicals and things into it and we're like why doesn't it work? I don't understand without really looking about. Well, what are we doing? Like what everybody meant to do.
Speaker 2:Our bodies are meant to be in motion, so I'm way more concerned about, like the amount of makeup, fragrances, dyes and things that women are expecting themselves daily than I am the occasional donut. You know, it's like every day you get up, you put your deodorant, you wash your body with some shitty soap, you put your deodorant on, you put your hairspray in and your makeup, you go and have your coffee, your weird flavored creamer and you have your pop tart or whatever, and then you get in your car with the air freshener in it and then you to the office. It's like filled with fragrances and chemicals that are used daily and like it's not even 9 am, like I just that's very concerning to me and it's like you know a point to your question earlier like for the issues, um, growing like we're just it's hard to get away from all of the things that we put our bodies through every day and we're wondering why we're having so many issues.
Speaker 1:On top of the extremes of either not exercising at all, exercising too much, it's it all adds together. I always use the example, like everyone that wants to find, and this is why we're science kind of gets hard One thing causes one thing. Right, you're always looking at causation. A is going to cause B. But take obesity, for example. If I have a donut, it ain't going to cause me to be obese. If I have 20 donuts, a cake, a cheesecake, over the course of like a month, then I'm going to gain the weight. It's not just that one like you can't prove that one donut's going to cause me to gain weight, but it's everything that's going to cause issues. Take that into the side of autism.
Speaker 1:By the increasing, rates of autisms have gone to the roof. I don't think one thing causes autism. I think a conglomerate of things cause autism. Bunch of stressors freak the body out to cause it. So I don't think we're ever going to find what actually causes it. But I think we can look at what's changed in our society over the last 20 years and say what the hell are we doing different? And it's going to be these six different stressors that we introduced over the last 20 years about why the rates of autism have increased so much or why the rates of infertility have increased so much. There's everything's multi-factor and if we can just cut a couple of them, maybe we'll disappear forever, because it needs seven factors to affect, as opposed to we cut it down to five. So it's really just understanding just to try to like minimize as much as possible, but not stress to the point like I need absolutely zero, because then that that adds a whole new world of an extreme yeah, it's just sadly.
Speaker 2:It's a bit ironic that if you, if you try too hard to fix it, you will make it worse. You need it. It's that people hate that answer, and I get it because we love a good prizing camp, we loved being like here's the one answer. And the truth is the answer is you just need to kind of like, look at the most relaxed person in the world that you know. They're probably doing a few things, they're probably not caring too much about a few things you know, and it's um, it's a good way to be.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I couldn't agree more, danny, but I do want to wrap the show up a little bit, so I'm going to ask you the two final questions I asked everyone at the end. First one is if you were to summarize this episode, or one or two sentences, what would be your take on message?
Speaker 2:Yeah, everyone, chill out, have the occasional donut, go to the gym semi-regularly and don't take any one thing too extreme and you'll be. You know, you'll land in a pretty good place.
Speaker 1:I love that. And the second one how could people find you, get ahold of you and learn more?
Speaker 2:Yes, so I am Danny Sheriff on Instagram. If you're interested in like our work and our practice, dannysheriff on instagram. If you're interested in like our work and our practice, maybe it's you who has low hormone function issues, or your daughter or your sister or someone. We are thehasocietycom and I have a ton of education resources. Like all day, every day, I'm putting education out on the low hormone topic, so it's a good place to go and just dive in and find out, like if you like podcasts, if you like YouTube videos, if you like articles. You know I got you there. So the H? A societycom is a solid starting point.
Speaker 1:Danny, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, guys, for listening to this week's episode of health, to fitness redefined. Don't forget, hit that subscribe button, share this with a friend and remember fitness is medicine. Until next time I'm out Outro Music.
