Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond by Stacy T. Sims, Selene Yeager
Published by Rodale Books
Publication date: May 17, 2022
Genres: Non-fiction, Health, Lifestyle
Bookshop
In 2025 more than 1 BILLION women worldwide will be experiencing menopause.
How’s that for a book review opening? That means all of its stages whether it’s peri, menopause, or post. For author Stacy Sims this is something that’s been ignored for far too long and that she’s been researching for decades. She’s got her PhD in physiology as well as in nutrition and she’s published over 170 peer-reviewed articles about the impact of women’s hormones on our bodies. Her book is Next Level: Your Guide to Kicking Ass, Feeling Great, and Crushing Goals Through Menopause and Beyond. Big promises, but this book delivers with an abundance of useful information.
Sims’ mantra is Women are not small men. Sounds like common sense, but it hasn’t ever really been applied to the research and development areas of any industry, including sports. It won’t come as a complete surprise but even now, the fitness and nutrition goals and programs we’re bombarded with were created around men, with little to no thought given to how women’s hormones impact our metabolism, how we use energy, lose weight, and stay fit.
The book is divided into two parts: Menopause Explained and Menopause Performance. Part 1 is pretty self-explanatory, but still eye-opening. Part 2 is divided into chapters on HRT, exercise that works, counteracting the many symptoms of menopause, how to have a healthy gut, sleep, hydration, and more.
Sims wants to empower women through science-based methods that work with our bodies rather than against them. Next Level is a comprehensive guide to what the female body experiences during menopause and why that means we can go through the same training and diet regimen that men do and they’ll get toned while our belly fat laughs at us. By using research specifically done on women, much of which she has been involved with, and translating that into everyday language Sims sheds light on why traditional male-centric methods of nutrition and fitness don’t work on women.
Next Level is geared towards women who do some kind of physical activity most days, but even for someone like me, who is more sedentary (I work out, but sit at a desk most days) the book is a fantastic reference guide, filled with science-based options to help any woman get through perimenopause and beyond. It’s not a quick-fix book filled with products and programs for sale to help you feel better.
I’ve already started implementing some of the ideas in Next Level and have found it so useful I bought my own copy (HUGE praise from a librarian). Whether you exercise or not, the information Sims shares about the effect of hormones (and their loss) on the female body is likely nothing you’ve heard before and it feels good to finally be seen. I highly recommend Next Level to any woman trying to navigate her way through any stage of menopause.
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I will check it out!
It’s just a great resource for menopausal women. Much of what she says flies in the face of what we’ve been taught, but most of that was based on male physiology. Ludicrous! It’s not a quick fix book, but I’ve gotten great information from it and appreciate that it’s science-based and female.
Thank you for highlighting this book! I usually do not buy books, but this seems like something I absolutely need to own so I can slowly absorb it and reference it in the future! I’m glad the medical community is finally acknowledging menopause! It’s something that many physicians received little to no training on historically which is just wrong!!
It’s definitely a good reference. I’ve adopted several of her suggestions and have found they’re helping me get stronger!