Dr Stephanie Estima walked onto a figure-competition stage at 11% body fat, having lost her period three months earlier, and the room told her she looked incredible. People stopped her to ask what her programme was. By every signal the culture sends women, she had won. She felt like she had failed, because the thing she had optimised for had taken the things that actually keep a body standing: her cycle, her recovery, and the muscle and bone she would need decades later.
That story sits at the centre of her recent conversation on the Diary of a CEO, and it is worth your time. We love this doc. She is well respected, and for good reason. One thing she said stood out to us, and we agree with it completely: the goal should never be to be smaller.
What you have to gain
Estima's line is that she wants women to stop being losers: to stop trying to lose all the time, and to start asking what they have to gain. How much muscle. How much bone density. How much capacity in the tendons and ligaments that hold a joint together. It sounds like motivation and is actually physiology.
Muscle does more than fill out a silhouette. It is the largest site of glucose disposal in the body. When you build and use it, you give incoming glucose somewhere to go other than storage, which is most of what improving insulin sensitivity means in practice. A woman who spends her forties afraid of anything heavier than a 2kg dumbbell ends up metabolically more fragile, with less of the tissue that keeps blood sugar steady and more of the trajectory that ends in frailty. Estima puts the long arc plainly: you can fit into a dress size you are proud of at 40 and have osteoporosis at 65, and that is not winning.
Female bodies were an afterthought
She is also right that female bodies have been neglected in all of this. Most of what women have been handed - eat less, do more cardio, earn your recovery, read the scale as a verdict - was built on research done largely on men and then shrunk down, as though a woman is a smaller man with the same hormonal weather. She is not. The menstrual cycle, the shifts of perimenopause, the way cortisol and oestrogen move together: these change how a body responds to training and to food, and they have been misunderstood or waved away for decades. We see the cost of that in our members all the time.
Metabolic autonomy, not a dress size
What changes when someone stops chasing the smaller number is rarely dramatic on day one. They eat enough to actually recover. They pick up something heavier than they thought they were allowed to. They start watching how their body responds rather than how much of it there is. Estima calls the woman who gets there dialled-in Diana. We would call it metabolic autonomy: knowing your own signals well enough that you stop outsourcing your worth to a dress size.
The hard part is that the culture still rewards the opposite. Estima was never more complimented than in the weeks she was starving, sleepless, and without a period. Until that stops being the version of health we applaud, the strongest thing many women can do is refuse to compete for it.
Watch the full conversation: Dr Stephanie Estima on The Diary of a CEO.