If you’re a woman of a certain age who is anywhere near social media these days, the algorithms have probably sniffed you out and served you up heaping helpings of Dr. Stacy Sims.
For health-conscious women on either rim of menopause, Sims is the influencer of the moment. She’s everywhere on YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. At the most recent count I could find, she’s got about 128,000 followers on Facebook.
That hardly compares to the 170 million Facebook fans of Christiano Ronaldo, the Portuguese footballer. Still, Stacy Sims’ reach is building like lean muscle on one of her devotees.
Full confession: she has certainly influenced me. To an extent.
Readers familiar with my writings on this topic may recall that I spent my early years as a pudgy klutz who entered adolescence in the era of Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, when extremely thin was extremely in.
On a steady diet of Diet-Rite cola, Metracal, and Seventeen Magazine, I whittled myself into what I thought were acceptable parameters, defined entirely by an arbitrarily arrived-at number on the scale.
Considerations of body composition were decades in the future. Like my sisters, my mother, and most of my friends, I cycled through diets — grapefruit and cottage cheese, low-fat-high-carb, high-fat-no-carb, low-calorie, zero calorie (yes, really).
With predictable results. Sometimes, rarely, I saw that magical, longed-for number on the scale. I felt exhausted and light-headed, yet I rejoiced.
Of course, that number was wildly unrealistic and unsustainable, so it was never long before I went back to eating like a normal human being.
Eventually I discovered that crap food makes me feel like crap and exercise makes me feel good. So I’ve stuck with that. Mostly.
Still, time has its way with mortal flesh. What with menopause, a meandering metabolism, and general life stress, the squishy inches have begun to accumulate even though my eating habits haven’t changed.
Which, I finally had to admit, is part of the problem. In my 30s, I knew I couldn’t eat like I did when I was fifteen — back when my girlfriends and I would have races to see who could eat the most Tollhouse cookies before the kitchen timer went off, and still slip easily into our miniskirts.
Somehow it hadn’t gotten through to me that, at 70, I also can’t eat like I did when I was 45, or even 55. Not without making fatty deposits in places they aren’t welcome.
If only it all went to my boobs.
Knowing how stupid, profit-driven, and essentially doomed almost all diet advice is, trimming down has become a confusing proposition.
It used to be simple: calories in, calories out. If more go out than come in, boom, you’re golden.
But if you cut your calories too low for too long, your body will decide you’ve been renditioned to a famine-ridden desert. It will respond by reducing your metabolism level to that of an estivating hedgehog.
In other words, the less you eat, the less you can eat without your internal thermostat dictating that more of it goes to storage, AKA fat.
Another consideration, especially crucial for women as we age, is bone health and lean muscle mass. Fail to maintain either, and you’re looking at scary words like osteoporosis and sarcopenia, both leading to frailty.
I’d rather get out of a chair without help and trust my bones not to spontaneously fracture than rock a bikini.
Not that I’m ever again going to appear in public in a bikini. That train has sailed.
On the other hand, creeping overweight isn’t great either. It causes inflammation and puts additional stress on the joints, and if you’re already feeling a few arthritic twinges, you know that’s not good news.
What to do?
Back to Dr. Stacy Sims (who has neither endorsed nor agreed to this article and who has no idea that I exist, but I’m not letting that stop me). To be clear, she is not a medical doctor. She’s a PhD exercise physiologist and nutrition scientist with impressive academic credentials and awards, who has authored Roar and Next Level— two buzz-worthy books on fitness for women in menopause and beyond — and over 100 peer-reviewed papers.
She’s no diet-fad dummy, in other words.
She is selling courses and products, so there’s that. I keep a grain of salt handy in my rear pocket.
But thanks to following her general principles, my rear pocket has a bit more room in it already. And unlike in my dieting days, I neither want to eat my own hand nor steal onion rings from the next table over.
Long story short, ladies: lift heavy, jump high, sprint hard, eat protein.
Lots and lots of protein, probably more than you’re getting now.
And we should all be doing strength training. By that, Sims doesn’t mean wanly waving around 2 lb. weights while watching Netflix. She wants you to lift heavy, two to three times a week.
Safety first, of course. Hire a trainer if you’re new to it.
Then there’s jumping. You read that right: jumping, as in high-impact, hurtling yourself vertically off your feet and landing (with bent knees). Of course, how you do this depends on the state of your joints. Again, get a trainer before suddenly launching into box jumps or burpees.
But according to Sims, that impact — which we’re often cautioned against — is exactly what your bones need to signal them to increase their density.
This explains why I spend ten minutes, three times a week, jumping up and down like an overwrought goldendoodle.
The other component is sprint training, which is a lot like high-intensity interval training, only with shorter intervals — 20 to 30 seconds — followed by longer recoveries of two to four minutes. Rinse and repeat, four to eight times.
Harder than it sounds, trust me. But it doesn’t take long, and if you do this twice a week you’ll benefit far more than if you did steady-state cardio and spent an hour on the treadmill.
Am I doing all this?
Yes. Yes, I am. And I’m finding it not only sustainable, but quite rewarding.
Do I believe that I have cracked the code of aging and will now live into my 100s as a lithe, limber, log-hopping silver fox?
No. No, I do not. Here’s where that grain of salt comes in, and here’s what I, at age 71, know in my powdery bones that perhaps 51-year-old Stacy Sims does not:
Time always wins.
No matter how earnest and consistent I am in my fitness journey, something somewhere along the way will disrupt it. An injury, an illness, a bad fall (which can still happen no matter how often I practice Tree Pose), or a grievous loss — any one of them could toss my wellness train off its tracks.
Hopefully, the derailment will be temporary. But at some point, it’s bound to be permanent, a total wreck.
I accept that, which is smart of me, given that it’s the way things are. Until that happens, though, I intend to enjoy the ride in good (not perfect) health and happiness for as long as I’m able.
Please excuse me while I jump up and down and then eat a chicken.
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