The Betty Body, a Geeky Goddess’ Guide to Balanced Hormones, Intuitive Eating & Transformative Sex [Podcast with Dr. Stephanie Estima]

“Too often your voice has been drowned out by the hostile cross-examining lawyer that exists in your mind, constantly telling you that you are not good enough, pretty enough, capable enough or worthy enough.” – Dr. Stephanie Estima

Dr. Stephanie Estima has a positive, straightforward, and holistic approach to healing PCOS that will resonate with you as a PCOS Diva. She is a Doctor of Chiropractic with a special interest in metabolism, body composition, functional neurology, and female physiology. She is also the host of a high-energy podcast called “Better With Dr. Stephanie” and author of a brand new book called “The Betty Body.” What’s a Betty? You’re going to love her answer. Tune in or read the transcript as we discuss that as well as:

• Small habits with big impact for healing hormones
• Tips on managing your inner critic
• New habits and shifts to make around bedtime
• Why you need to play Tetris & have regular orgasms
• The best type of movement for PCOS, high testosterone, inulin resistance, and mood dysregulation

All PCOS Diva podcasts are available on:

Mentioned in this podcast:

• Dr. Stephanie’s podcast, “Better with Dr. Stephanie”
• Dr. Stephanie’s book: The Betty Body, a Geeky Goddess’ Guide to Balanced Hormones, Intuitive Eating and Transformative Sex

Complete Transcript:

Amy Medling:

On today’s PCOS Diva podcast, we are very fortunate to have Dr. Stephanie Estima. She’s a Doctor of Chiropractic with a special interest in metabolism, body composition, functional neurology, and female physiology. And she is the host of a wonderful podcast called Better with Dr. Stephanie and the author of a brand new book called The Betty Body. So I’m so happy to have you here, Dr. Stephanie to talk with us.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

I’m thrilled to be here. Thank you for having me.

Amy Medling:

So you have a great new book. I read it from cover to cover last night, and there’s a lot of parallels with my PCOS Diva philosophy, especially. And I want you to get into your story and tell us what a Betty is. And I think listeners can both see the parallels.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah, sure. So, like your Divas, a Betty is someone who is really just a lifelong learner. So this name came about… People often ask, “Your name is Stephanie, why do you have a book called The Betty Body?”

So, it comes from the podcast. As you mentioned, the podcast name is Better With Dr. Stephanie. And we started calling our fans of Better our Betties and it was just sort of this organic, cute little nickname that I had for my Betties. And then, I had said it a couple of times on the podcast, like, “For my Betties that are listening,” what have you, and then it just kind of stuck. People started leaving reviews on the pod, on iTunes or what have you, saying, “I’m a Betty. I love being a Betty. I love being in this world of being a Betty with you.”

And I said, “Huh, there’s something there.” And I looked it up… Well, I actually can’t take credit for it. My partner looked up the word Betty, and he came across a definition in Urban Dictionary. So if you actually go to urbandictionary.com, you’ll see the definition of a Betty, which reads something like, “A Betty is a modern day queen. She is a triple threat. She’s intelligent, she’s loving, she’s beautiful on the inside and outside. She knows who she is and she’s on this quest for learning.” And when I read that definition, I said, “Wow, that’s so funny.”

It’s completely unintended, but that’s exactly the type of woman that I want to be serving, someone who is… We’re not trying to all be size twos. That’s not the goal. The goal is to love the skin that you’re in. And then, if you have other health goals for yourself, to work together, to bring those about. So that’s where the name Betty comes from.

And when I was writing the book, it was all for my Betties. It’s like I was sharing personal stories, my own story with my own hormonal and menstrual… I’ll call it a gong show, because it was a gong show for many, many, many years. And I wanted to name the book almost like the promise, right? The promise is that at the end of the book, you are going to have a Betty body. So you’re going to be able to heal your hormones. You’ll be able to intuitively eat and respond to yourself in an appropriate way, right? So with you attending to your internal environment, your external environment, and you’re going to use things like we talk about transformative sex and other proxies to self-actualize, to be the healthiest, most joyful versions of ourselves that we can.

Amy Medling:

I love that. And you really did a beautiful job writing this. I just have to read a few lines when you’re describing the Betty, you describe her as, “She intuitively knows how to eat in a way that is not punitive, but a celebration for all that she is. A Betty leans into her desires. What is pleasurable and what marinates her soul and joy.” I love that line.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. Thank you.

Amy Medling:

And then you talk about… I think this is true for a lot of listeners, “Her voice has been drowned out by the hostile cross-examining lawyer that exists in your mind constantly telling you that you are not good enough, pretty enough, capable enough or worthy enough.”

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. Yeah. I think that that’s… I mean, who hasn’t felt like that? We all have this, I call her like, my hostile cross-examining lawyer, as you just read. Where you want to move towards your self-actualized self and you’re afraid. There’s this voice that’s like, “But what if? What if you fall on your face? What if you look like a fool? What if you don’t have all the skills yet? What if you don’t have the capabilities yet? What if you’re not good enough yet?”

And then you scare yourself out of moving forward. There’s kind of like a secret goal in the book. And the secret goal is to make friends with this voice, right? It’s not to listen only to what this particular voice is saying. Honor what that voice is telling you. That inner critic or that inner troll or that hostile cross-examining lawyer, but also figure out what it is that you really want to do.

And that voice is there to protect you, right? It’s there to keep you safe, but it’s also there to keep you small. Because we know that staying safe and not doing anything new is one way to keep us safe or no harm to ever come about. But if you want to make a courageous leap, whether that’s healing your hormones or changing your metabolic landscape or changing your body composition, it requires changing a lot of behaviors in your everyday life. It actually requires hundreds of behaviors to be checked.

You have to change sometimes where you grocery shop and what the things you’re buying and how you’re preparing foods. And maybe that you’re preparing foods at all. That you’re not just ordering it from Uber Eats or whatever. So I think recognizing that you are there for the long haul with this particular voice, to love up on her and to thank her for keeping you safe, but to also recognize… to do the things that you still want to do anyway, in spite of this voice telling you that you’re not pretty enough, not talented enough, not smart enough.

That was kind of my story for years. I didn’t even start a podcast. I had wanted to start a podcast like, easily five to seven years ago. And I was like, “Well, I’m in clinical practice. Don’t have time for it. And who wants to hear my voice anyway?” Right?

And it’s sort of this shape-shifting critic. That’s like, “Well, why do we need another podcast on health? There’s a lot of them out there. You’re not doing anything revolutionary.”

And then when I started the podcast, I have an interview set. One of the shows that we have on the podcast is an interview where like this, you and I are having a conversation. And then I have a smaller segment where it’s just me talking about, I call it geeky magic, where we just talk about some musing that I’ve had. Hot therapy, cold therapy, zone two training, whatever. And I was like, “Well, people don’t really want to hear your voice. You have a pretty good network but they only want to hear the interviews you had.”

I still deal, and I think we all will forever deal, with this hostile cross-examining lawyer. It’s just a matter of recognizing when she’s running the show and deciding to be the driver’s seat and be in the driver’s seat and not listen to the backseat drivers, so to speak.

Amy Medling:

Yeah, exactly. And I kind of think of it as sort of partnering with that inner critic as well. I think in order to write a book like you’ve written, you have to have your own struggles and journey, which you’ve overcome. And so, I’d love for you to share that journey with us.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Sure. I outline this in chapter one of the book, A Heroine Lost in a Modern World, is the title of the first chapter. And I talk about how I was doing all the things right. I was getting all the grades, in university and through chiropractic schooling, very rigorous and it’s very academically heavy. So getting all of those things, but completely ignoring my body.

So, my body… I would sit for hours on end studying, eating the most nutrient-devoid, toxic garbage. I talk about this coffee that I used to get. It was like double cream, double sugar. And I knew exactly… in between my classes, I could go pop out to this little coffee shop, get this double cream, double sugar insulin bomb, glucose bomb, and have it in my hands, warm before the next class started.

And I did that for years. And of course my menstrual cycle, as you may have guessed, was not great. I never really viewed my menstrual cycle as anything to pay attention to. I’d always felt like I was being punished for being a woman every month. That’s sort of how I viewed it as like, “Oh, this thing again.”

And I would have to take medication to silence the pain, so I was on these little blue pills, they’re called Anaprox. And I would take that, copious amounts of Midol and whatever to be able to get through it. It seemed like every month, like nothing changed. And I always thought that the solution was to just duct tape the screaming from my body. And it wasn’t really until I… and I was still fully in practice, teaching people about the science, the health and wellness around having flexibility and mobility. And we were running nutrition programs, in-house in the clinic.

Several years ago, I’d gone through a very difficult divorce with young children. So any of my Betties or my Divas that are listening, who’ve gone through divorce, know how difficult that, divorce in and of itself is difficult. With children, it’s like orders of magnitude worse. And then I also had… At the same time that that happened, because when it rains, it pours, my clinic burned down. So I had to rebuild up the clinic. I had to find a temporary location and then build out this like big rehab center at the same time. Menstrual cycle was continuing to be just this punitive… I was at war with my body.

And it wasn’t until I went on a family vacation with my kids and my partner to Italy, and I was sleeping more. I was spending time in nature. I was walking. I’d walk every morning to go get a cup of coffee. And then we would walk after lunch, we’d walk after dinner. I was outside getting that beautiful, salty Mediterranean air. And towards the end of that vacation, I got my period. And normally, that would have been the thing that ruined the vacation. I would be holed up in the hotel room, mask on, drugged up. But it was beautiful. It sort of came, did its thing. I didn’t bleed through like multiple pairs of pants, which was like a thing for me forever. Whenever I was going to clinic and I knew I was getting my period, I’d always bring two pairs of pants because I would inevitably bleed through at least one, sometimes two.

So it came and it went and I was like, “Oh my gosh, I feel like a goddess. I feel like this is what it’s like to have beautiful menstruation.” And I was determined to have that experience again, right? So when we came back from Italy, part of me was like, “Well, how am I really going to do this? Because it’s on my vacation. Everything’s better in Italy. Like the coffee, everything is better there.”

But what I did was I really deconstructed what were some of the things that I was doing. What were some of the lifestyle mods that I was doing that really had this profound effect on my hormonal milieu. And it was the things that I talked to you about, getting out in sunshine, getting out in the morning and honoring my circadian biology, sleeping longer.

And I talk about this in the book. Women have longer sleep cycles than men, so we should be sleeping. We should be honoring our sleep. Walking after dinner. And so of course, again, talking about this in the book, you oxygenate, you increase the oxygen saturation of your blood so you’re going to have a better night’s sleep.

So, all of these different things, I brought back to my home. I live in Toronto on the East Coast in Canada, and I started experimenting with my female patients as well. So I was running a nutrition program in-house. And I started taking some of the girls, some of the women aside and saying, “Hey, can we play around with some of these parameters and see if we can augment and improve some of the results that you’re trying to bring about on this nutrition program?”

And that was sort of the birthplace of The Betty Body in terms of the protocols that we talk about, in terms of nutrition and macronutrients, and then how we can cycle them according to our menstrual cycle. And that’s where that all came from.

Amy Medling:

I think what I’m hearing and with your lifestyle shifts, getting out in sunshine, sleeping more, going for a nice walk in nature, those are all really enjoyable, pleasurable things that shifted your health. And I think that a lot of women with PCOS, they’re told by the doctor, “Go on a low carb diet, go to the gym more, exercise more, you can’t have gluten, you can’t have dairy.”

It all seems really restrictive and kind of like living a life of denial. And that’s very different from the life that healed you, which I would love for you to talk more about some of your routines and your little habits, but I just love the way that you’re framing healing with these positive habits that you make to really make an impact on your health.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Absolutely. I talk about PCOS quite a bit in the book as you know, when we talk about androgen dominance, and we talk about the inability to move testosterone down the pathway to estrogens and what some of those techniques for healing might be, but you’re right. There’s a lot of joyful practices and baked in pleasure into things like sleeping a little bit longer. When we talk about sleep and I hope we’ll get a chance to talk about it today, this is free, right? You don’t need to buy an expensive program. This is available to everybody. And for women, we have a longer sleep cycle than men, usually somewhere between 15 and 45 minutes longer, which is almost an entire full cycle of going through your non-REM to REM sleep and back up again.

And so, it’s important to honor that, and getting out. Every morning, what I do now is I have a little… I love my little cup of espresso. That’s my little treats for the day. I have that first thing in the morning and I sit outside. So I have a tank top on. I live in Toronto, so all seasons, we get winter, spring, summer, fall, and it doesn’t matter the season. I have my cup of espresso and I listen to the birds chirp. I watch the sun as it kind of changes the colors in the morning sky.

And it’s so simple. And it almost seems so simple that you would disregard it as being ineffective, but it’s the aggregate, it’s the smaller little habits that really do add up over time. You know, I’m often asked, “If I want to lose weight, what’s the biggest…?” And I’ll say something like, “Put your fork down in between bites and just chew your food,” and people like, “Come on, what’s the real thing? Like, okay, fine, I know we should chew, whatever, but what’s the real thing?”

And it’s like, “No, that’s the real thing.”

So many of us are eating unconsciously, right? We’re just kind of… At least I did this for years and I’ve had a lot of women relay this to me, that we’re just shoveling the food in our mouths without actually properly chewing, properly allowing for the salivary amylase to break it down, getting that bolus fully broken down and ready for absorption in the small intestine. So I think some of these small little habits, like sleeping a little longer, getting out and getting some sun in your eyes first thing in the morning, can be enormously powerful in terms of helping to heal your hormones. And the second chapter in the book is actually all about chronic stress and low grade inflammation.

And when we are not practicing these little, tiny little moments of joy through the love through our day, all we’re doing is a to-do list, right? All we are is like, “Okay, got to get the kids to school, got to cook, got to get myself together for work. I got to get on the Zoom call. I got to…” Versus, “Okay. I’m just going to take a moment for me right now, to ground myself, to connect to Mother Earth.” And I live in an urban center, right? I live in a really big city, and I think what tends to, and even if you don’t live in a city, I think we tend to, what I’ve noticed anyways, we tend to… we become more divorced from the land, right? We just think we’re on planet earth, not that we’re of or from planet earth. I think that as we can just connect to Mother Nature and all of her brilliance, I think that that’s one of the ways that we can very powerfully, simply and available to everybody, begin that road to healing and self-actualization.

Amy Medling:

Yeah. I love that you brought up exposing your eyes to sunlight, because I think that really helps to regulate that circadian cycle that you talk about in the book and the importance of that. Maybe you could touch a little bit more on it.

But one thing that I love… I’ve recently moved out to the country, and I have a long walk to my mailbox and that’s my sort of opportunity in mid-day to get my sunshine. And then, in the evening I try to go for a walk as well to expose my eyes to those sunshine at various parts of the day. And I really think that’s helped my quality of sleep.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. Yeah. I love that. And I think that that’s… It’s like these little small little things that we can perfume the day with, right?

What you’re talking about when we’re talking about circadian rhythms is typically what we see. And I’m sure that you can comment on this as well, is we are very much a dark deprived society. Most of us spend most of the day indoors under artificial light. And of course, we know that lights that we have in our indoor homes, like our homes or our office spaces, they’re not as bright as the bright light that we would naturally see from the sun. So we sort of spend the day when we should be exposing ourselves to bright light under this kind of darker light.

And then as we get home or we shut off Zoom for the day, or what have you, then we maybe watch TV, a Netflix special. We browse social media on our devices and then you have this really bright light, right? We have this really bright blue light that is starting to stimulate areas in the brain that are actually involved in shutting in… In the evening, what should be happening is we should be shutting down or getting ready for sleep. We spend the days in a darker kind of environment and then we spend the evenings in a lighter environment, which of course is completely contrarian to how we are wired to work. What happens normally is, as you said, we should be exposed to bright light in the morning.

And that’s going to tell our brain like, “Hey, it’s morning time, time to rev up, time to produce lots and lots of energy. Time to suppress melatonin,” which is a hormone that’s involved in starting the sleep cycle. It’s the sort of forewoman, I call her the forewoman in the book, in terms of initiating sleep. And when we are moving through the day, I will often counsel people, and I talk about this in the book, to actually make the inside of your house look like the outside of your house. For me, in the summertime spring, it’s very bright towards seven, eight, nine o’clock even, still very bright outside. And so we still have lights on in the summertime in the house. But as we move into fall and you know, the daylight savings time or the time switches again, and things are darker earlier, and especially through the winter, where I am, it can be dark at like 4:30 or five o’clock.

And so in through the winter, we have dinner by candlelight. All the lights in the house are off. We have those little nightlights that we put in the plugs that are along the baseboards of the home so that we don’t fall down the stairs or anything, but everything is dark. So we’re trying as much as we can to mimic Mother Nature’s rhythm so that we can internalize that and help with our kids’ sleep and our sleep as well.

So yeah, that would be my best piece of advice, is just try to make the inside of your house look like the outside. What is nature telling you? Because there’s been billions of years of this rhythm. And for us to think that social media and Netflix and TV, if these things are not having an impact on our sleep, you’re sadly mistaken.

Of course, it does. And you can… Even just in the middle of the night, if you wake up and just check your phone, a lot of people have their phones in their bedroom, which I don’t advise, but if you do have it and you check the time, just that blast of light from the phone opening and you seeing the time can also affect your ability to fall back asleep again.

That would be like my little spiel or my little call to action or call to, invitation. If someone feels so called to try and help with decreasing the amount of light that we see in the evening. Because we need to be in a dark environment in the evening. And that’s why I say dark deprived, because in the evening is when everything lights up, the TVs light up, the phones light up, the iPads, we need to really get off of our devices and really just begin to settle in for the evening.

Amy Medling:

Yeah. And I think it’s really common too, for a lot of women with PCOS, with mood related disorders, anxiety, stress, it’s hard to quiet your mind in the evening and to have so much stimulation, I think with the screens and the blue light, it just makes it harder to unwind for sure.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. And it’s a way of self-soothing too, right? We go online to sort of be like, “Okay, what’s going on? What makes me happy?” But there are other gentler ways that we can begin to feel our feelings and begin to honor our physiology, whether we have PCOS or not, to help with that unwinding and getting ready for bed.

Amy Medling:

And you have some good new habits and shifts that we can make around bedtime. I was wondering if you could share those with us.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. Yeah. So one of them I’ve already shared, kind of making the outside look like the inside. That’s one of my favorite things. There’s a couple of hacks that I talk about. So in the evening in particular, I love to talk about… I just spent like five or 10 minutes talking about blue light, but I will break that rule for Tetris. When we’re thinking about settling in for the evening, before it gets dark out, I love, I talked about this in the book, it’s called the Tetris effect, playing a little bit of Tetris. What this has shown to do in the brain when you’ve been playing it consistently, is that it actually makes the parts of the brain, we call it the gray matter, which is basically where the nerve cells are born. It makes that area thicker.

When we think about healthy aging over the span of our lives, one of the things we want to be considering with PCOS is to keep our brains big and thick and juicy. That’s what we really want to preserve, is our brain volume. So this is one fun way to do it. There are many others, exercising is one. There’s fasting, that’s another. There’s carbohydrate restriction, that’s another way, but a fun, easy way to do it is to play some Tetris.

Another thing that I talk about is regular orgasms. So this is something you can do with, or without a partner. I always say like, “You can do it with a partner or you can just find a toy that you like, call it your partner and just kind of get after it.” Because this is one of the best ways. Regular orgasms is one of the best ways that you can bring about parasympathetic activity.

And that’s just a fancy word for relaxing. It’s like the part of our nervous system that we call rest and digest, stay and play. If you’ve ever experienced an orgasm, that post orgasmic release and relaxation, and this is another longevity tool. Because one of the things we know specifically about women with PCOS is that they tend to have… a lot of times the PCOS has its roots in insulin dysregulation, which is correlated with cardiovascular issues like cardiovascular disease over the long term. And when we are regularly climaxing, one of the things that we know is that it impacts our vital signs, specifically some of our cardiovascular parameters. So our heart rate will lower, our blood pressure will lower, our respiratory rate, maybe leading up to the climax, it quickens. But after you orgasm, your respiratory rate will decrease your oxygen saturation.

So, the amount of oxygen that’s in your blood is going to improve. It’s like nature’s Ambien, right? It’s like one of the most beautiful ways that you can drift off into a beautiful sleep. So I talk about the places you will go with the big-O, like my little Dr. Seuss and hat tip there, but I’m definitely thinking about regular orgasms and journaling as well. This can be a handwritten, or you can just make mental notes. I like to close off the day by thinking about what went right. And if things didn’t go right, where is my opportunity for learning? So if there was something really great that happened with your child or your partner or something in your job, taking a moment to honor and celebrate that. Looking for the… Even if nothing big happened, even if it was just like, “Yeah, I had a great hair day today,” just taking a moment to be appreciative, even if it’s like the simplest thing that you can imagine.

And then when negative things do happen and they always will, right? How we can reframe it? Rather than ruminating on the event and what he said or what she said and what I should have said and how come I didn’t think of this, instead of that, maybe reframing it as an opportunity to learn more about yourself and potentially some of your own unresolved traumas or triggers or activators so that you can show up better next time.

That’s kind of the big… It’s like win or learn. It’s not win or lose, I like to think about it as you either had a win or you had an opportunity for learning. So where’s your opportunity for that. And so that can be like a five minute little journaling exercise. I go through questions in the book that you can ask yourself to sort of prompt you. Or you can just make mental notes like, “Hey, my makeup turned out really good,” or, “I felt really good when I presented at this meeting,” or, “I really felt like I kept my cool when I was having a very emotionally charged conversation with my whoever family member.” So yeah, those are some of my best kind of tips for your evening routine.

Amy Medling:

Oh, those are great. I think that the more you focus on good in your life, all of the good things, the more you’ll attract the good in your life, it’s such a powerful tool.

Amy Medling:

So the last thing that I wanted you to chat with us about is movement. And there’s a lot women with PCOS who do a lot of single exertion type exercise, like running and even like spinning. They’re not doing a lot of strength building and interval training. And I would love for you to talk about what you think is the best type of movement for PCOS and that kind of high testosterone situation.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah. This is a great question. I think that I am a big, big fan of resistance training. And before we kind of dive into the waters of it, I just want to pinky promise you, I promise you will not get bulky. I still hear that, in 2021 people like, “Well, am I going to get bulky?”

No, you’re not. You do not have enough… Even if you have poor aromatization from testosterone to estrogen, I promise you do not. You will need to supplement with exogenous testosterone to get bulky. And I will say that as a woman who was a… I used to be a figure competitor. It’s like a step above bikini and a step below bodybuilding, and I wanted bulk. I wanted the bulk and I had the nine plates doing the leg press, and it didn’t happen for me.

That’s just not like an N of one, that’s just generally women having very, very hard time bulking. So resistance training is wonderful for women with PCOS, because as I mentioned briefly before, one of the common underpinnings, one of the physiological derangements that we see with PCOS is that it has its roots in insulin dysregulation and all that means, and I’m sure you’ve talked about this a lot on the podcast, is that the cells are typically insulin insensitive. So when insulin is working, trying to get the glucose or the amino acids or whatever into the cell, in order to create energy, we find that women with PCOS, there’s a downregulation of sensitization to insulin. So one of the ways that you can improve that is by increasing your lean muscle mass, and just by volume, your muscles are going to be the biggest glucose reservoir or glucose sink, if you will, just by volume.

So, we know that the brain is a big gobbler of glucose. Of course, the liver will also store glucose as glycogen and the muscles will store glucose in as glycogen as well. But we have our muscles in aggregate are much bigger by total volume and weight than our liver is, right? So as we improve our lean muscle mass, as we are training, lifting weights, you are going to initiate a process called muscle protein synthesis, which is going to create that muscle. And then when you do eat something, maybe it’s immediately following a meal, or just generally through your day, you are much more likely to dispose of the carbohydrate, which breaks down into glucose or the amino acids, which break down from protein in the muscle. So this is one of the ways that is a really great strategy for healing your metabolism.

So, we’re sensitizing your cells to insulin and also changing your body composition as well. And of course, resistance training also has a lot of impact on the brain. So we know that resistance training is going to improve your mood. There’s studies from me to you, it will fill up my entire house with the mood ameliorating effects that exercise has. So we know that a lot of women with PCOS often will suffer from mood dysregulation. They’ll feel depressed, they’ll feel sad, they feel stressed, especially if they’re the type of woman who has lots of anovulatory months where they have no idea whether or not they’ve ovulated or they have not. So exercise will also help with your mood. It also up-regulates brain volume.

Again, we were talking about the Tetris effect before, but exercise also has the same effect. It will up-regulate a gene and an enzyme called a brain derived neurotrophic factor or BDNF for short. And that is kind of like MiracleGro for your brain. It’s going to help protect the nerve cells that you have. And it’s also going to help be involved in the birthing of new neuronal cells. So very, very important from a physiological and body composition perspective.

Now, of course, I’m not going to poopoo on the spin classes and the cardio classes, because of course we know that that has great cardiovascular benefits. We see mitochondria biogenesis with that. But if that’s the only thing that you’re doing, you really are missing out on the opportunity to help regulate your insulin insensitivity or sensitivity as it were.

So that’s my spiel or my elevator pitch on weight training. And there’s a lot… We’d go through the book like programming, whether you have never lifted weights before, or you’re a seasoned expert as I am, there’s programming in the book there for you. So you can, and I sort of direct you in the book where you can kind of go and get these free resources that I’ve created for you as well.

Amy Medling:

Yeah. We really only scratched the surface on today’s podcast because there is so much in the book. We didn’t even touch upon diet. So I really encourage PCOS Divas to certainly check out Dr. Stephanie’s podcast. And maybe Dr. Stephanie, you can tell us where we can find you, but also to pick up a copy of your new book, The Betty Body.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Yeah, absolutely. So you can find me… The podcast is called Better with Dr. Stephanie. So anywhere that you listen to PCOS Diva, you can find me there as well. So we’re on iTunes and Spotify and Google and all the places.

You can buy the book, it’s called The Betty Body: a Geeky Goddess’ Guide to Balanced Hormones, Intuitive Eating and Transformative Sex. And you can buy that on Amazon, on Barnes and Noble. These are online retailers that have it, and once you buy the book, head on over to bettybodybook.com. And that’s where I have created lots of bonuses and treats for my Betties, for my PCOS Divas who want to get some of the… we have nutrition programming in there. We have fitness programming. We have rehab. All of the juicy stuff is there as well.

Amy Medling:

Well, that sounds great, I love it. The little treats for everybody.

Amy Medling:

Well, I hope that you have enjoyed listening to today’s episode. Thank you, Dr. Stephanie for joining us. And I look forward to being with you again very soon.

Dr. Stephanie Estima:

Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.