Make it Attractive to Age: Transition with Style & Confidence with Stacy London

Dr. Mindy Pelz Stacy on this episode of The resetter podcast, I am bringing you Stacy London. Where are all my What Not to Wear? Fans, this is the real Stacey London, and we're gonna talk about fashion, aging and menopause. It's a really fun conversation, and if you aren't familiar with Stacy, just to fill you all in, she is a prominent American stylist, she is a fashion consultant. She's an author, she's a television personality. She was best known for CO hosting TLCS, what not to wear, and she is bringing the conversation of midlife to a whole new level. So I love this conversation for so many reasons. For starters, Stacey and I in the front half of the conversation really talk about how menopause is this incredible transformation. She has a some real, incredible statements that she makes about how menopause is a reckoning, and you are actually letting go of what no longer serves you, and you are stepping stepping into the best version of you, yet, where you are living life on your terms, a concept that I could not agree more. Then we, of course, she's a stylist. I had to go into asking her about how do we dress for the changes that are happening to our body? So everything from hot flashes to menopausal belly weight to Oh my gosh. Now I'm a size eight and not a size six, or I'm a size 12 and I used to be a size 10. How do we navigate those moments, and how do we dress for those moments? She had some incredible tips that I think you all were really love. And then, of course, I had to ask her, like, what do you do about hot flashes. And we talked about, what do you do when you're in a situation where all of a sudden you are forgetting words? And we dove into, how do you navigate wrinkles on your face and all of the different beauty options out there in an hour's time, we went to a lot of different places in this conversation. So enjoy. It's it's fun. She is spicy. She has some great opinions about menopause that I think are really necessary in the zeitgeist right now. And I think you're gonna get a lot out of this conversation. So Stacey London, enjoy. Welcome to the resetter podcast. This podcast is all about empowering you to believe in yourself again, if you have a passion for learning, if you're looking to be in control of your health and take your power back, this is the podcast for you. You okay, Stacy, well, let me start off by just welcoming you to my community and to the resetter Podcast. I'm so excited to have this conversation. Stacy London Thank you so much for having me. I'm a big fan, and I'm so happy to be talking with all of your listeners and you today. Dr. Mindy Pelz Thank you. Thank you. Here's where I'm going to start, because I think this is a simple question that is answered in many different ways. What would you say based off your personal experience? Your definition of menopause? My Stacy London definition of menopause is that it is a reckoning to a renaissance. Oh, only way that I can describe it. It's the only way I continue to describe it. It is, it is a real reckoning. It is a reckoning with physiological, emotional, psychological, even spiritual, ideas that we had about ourselves. I think we go through a reckoning, because we are really faced with the question of our own identity and our use value in society, and what we want for ourselves and what we've been taught and what we've internalized culturally, as opposed to what we want for ourselves, which is something very different from those things. So it is hard. That's why there is a reckoning. And it may feel like your life is falling apart before it feels like you've gotten to this renaissance. But being postmenopausal and being sort of on the other side of this decade, 45 to 55 I'm now about to turn 56 I feel like this was the decade of reckoning, and I am coming out of it more powerful, more with more insight into the way I want to be happy, and the way I hope to give other people permission to be happy with their own lives, which is so much less about people pleasing and so much more about serving community, but in a way that has meaning for. You, and I don't know how to explain it, other than to say I've never been more myself than I am today. Dr. Mindy Pelz So you just jumped right out of my next book. We're calling it, we're, I mean, because this is a really big part that I don't think we are talking about enough, yeah, and the book is called age like a girl. And what I did is write little, little juxtaposition of words, but what I did is really look at the neuro chemical system that's happening when we go through menopause, and we don't just lose two two hormones, we lose up to 10 neuro chemicals, and one of those is oxytocin. And oxytocin is that people pleasing hormone that makes us so it makes it neuro, neuro, chemically sticky, to please everybody around us. But then it changes, and all of a sudden we don't want to please people. So Stacy London I couldn't my oxytocin went right out the window. Let me tell you Yes. And you know, after years of what I call my acquisitive phase, when I was concerned with what other people thought, when I was concerned with external validation, when it was about having the right clothes and the right apartment and the right tchotchkes and all of the things that, you know, I thought were somehow markers of success. It has really been this decade of undoing that thinking that has made me more myself, and now I consider myself to be in my inquisitive phase. So as opposed to wanting things or needing things as external validation, or thinking that I'm the smartest person in the room, I now only want to be in rooms where I'm the dumbest. I want to be in rooms where I am only with people who can teach me and how I can learn the things that when I remember being so self conscious of when I was young was this idea of I didn't want to make a fool of myself. I didn't want to be bad at something, so if I wasn't good, I didn't play. If I wasn't going to win, I didn't play, and that whole sense of self consciousness has been completely eroded by this need and desire of curiosity to learn all the things that I didn't allow myself to do when I was younger, when I was so much more concerned about other people and not myself. And now, you know, everybody used to say, or at the beginning of this menopause conversation I used to hear all the time. Well, the reason we haven't talked about menopause is because, you know, most women died by the time they got to menopause. Historically, bullshit. We have been having menopause for hundreds of 1000s of years, as far as I can tell. And I'll tell you what I think that menopause isn't about necessarily, whether we become good grandparents or whether we become sort of the elders in our society. I think the reason that you know female physiology has menopause kind of instilled into it is because it is the first time we don't have to be anything for anybody but ourselves. That's and it is remarkable feeling it is such an unbelievable sense of freedom. Dr. Mindy Pelz It's liberating, for sure, the transition from the people pleasing, the caring what the culture thinks of you, to the place that you just described, that transition for a lot of women is not fun, no, Stacy London because turbulent, yes. Dr. Mindy Pelz So speak a little bit about that, because I believe this transition from I'm gonna do, be the good girl and do everything the world wants me to to you all, can fuck off now, and I'm gonna be on my do my own thing that that transition is, is scary, it's disorienting, and the people around you stop recognizing you Stacy London absolutely and I think even worse, you don't recognize yourself. And I think that that's how it starts, right? It is this, I don't look like myself, I don't feel like myself. I can't put my finger on what's wrong, but something isn't right. All of these things that sort of creep up on us, and especially with no education, my anxiety got worse, my depression got worse, my rage got worse. The big, big feelings definitely started to kind of overtake my everyday, as long, you know, as well as insomnia and night sweats and hot flashes and joint pain and food allergies, you name it, I had some crazy symptom, heart palpitations, all of it, but you think you're going to get stuck there. I remember it is a there is a sense of feeling hopeless. Now, again, I say this knowing very well that feelings aren't facts, and even when you feel hopeless, and even when it seems like everything is hopeless, that may be just in that moment you are going to come out of it, but I do think it's almost like the way an addict has to hit rock bottom, we have to experience something so turbulent that we change the way we live our lives, that we are able and that we have the tools, and we learn the tools to be able to properly grieve and say goodbye to the person that we were, in order to accept where we're at. Yeah, and accept what's coming, right, and be able to receive change well. And I think, you know, it's really interesting. I'm reading Pima Cho John's we live how we die. I love her. I love her too, and but what I love about her is that the whole book isn't about getting used to dying, right, which is also something I do think we need to talk about, especially in midlife, our relationship to mortality changes. But more importantly, she is saying you have to be comfortable with change. You have to be comfortable with the things you don't know, or you have to be comfortable with the fact that your expectation may not be the outcome. And once you can get your sea legs around this idea that change is going to come out of nowhere. It's going to knock you down when you don't expect it. If you have tools in which to manage change, you are going to be infinitely happier during your lifetime, and because you will understand that death really highlights the value of life, it's going to be even more precious to you, and that's the way I feel about menopause. Just because it's so hard doesn't mean that there aren't benefits. And the biggest benefit for me was this lens perspective shift. Right is all of a sudden, I'm not going to the gym to lose weight, I'm going to stay strong. All of a sudden. I don't care if you think I'm invisible, I know what I'm doing for myself. Not only makes me feel visible and powerful, it makes me feel relevant and that I'm contributing to the society in which I live, into my community. And so I do think there is a very different perspective. The first half of our life is much more about this kind of hero's journey, and the second half is really about The Artist's Way. It's like, what do we do with all of this wisdom, which I think is very different from knowledge that we have from our life experience. How do we how do we pay it that forward, and how do we move on in a way that is going to leave a legacy? And I really do believe the legacy of Gen X is about this education, this lifetime education around female physiology, our desperate need for more research into female physiology, and also the idea that shame and fear should not play a part in this transition, that we need to embolden and empower people. Dr. Mindy Pelz Yeah. So what do you when I look at the history of the menopause conversation, we really had a cultural hush as little as like three or four years ago. And what I've been saying is I feel like now we have cultural chaos where women are realizing that their moods, their lack of sleep, their weight gain, could be this hormonal transition. And one of the things that I have really deeply contemplated lately is we are a culture of comfort. So I could not agree more with you that this transition is for your liberation and for your moment, but the discomfort of the transition is the rhetoric around that is, take a pill, throw some patches on, put some creams on, and you will not suffer. Do you think you can get to the Artist's Way? Can you get to that side without suffering? No, Stacy London I don't. I think suffering, and I think when we are uncomfortable, when we are in dis ease or discomfort, is the invitation to become more self aware, and it is, without fail, the thing when we have to do something hard. It is where we learn the most about ourselves. And I will tell you my my perimenopausal reckoning was a fucking nightmare, like everything that could go wrong during that period. 45 to 55 highest rate of decreased in earning potential, divorce, depression. All of those things were true for me. All of those things were true is that I don't know if they were perimenopausal caused or they're just correlated, but the idea that you are dealing with real world pressure at the same time that you are sort of least physiologically able to handle pressure is not lost on me, and that was uncomfortable. It was really uncomfortable. But I don't think that change happens while we're feeling comfortable. What do we have to change? What do we want to change when we feel comfortable? We change out of necessity. When you know, what's that? Anais nd quote, you know, she finally bloomed when it took too much not to and I think that there's something very true about that when it comes to menopause, and particularly, I think the female experience of menopause. And that's not to say that. And I am talking about all females, trans females, female at birth. It does not matter to me however you identify. If we're talking about female physiology and we're talking about sort of sociobiology, cultural beliefs around women, then you know, and being able to be a baby machine or give birth and that your use value is solely tied to that, that's when I get really irritated and annoyed, because this was yes, okay, I never wanted children, so I'm not. One of those people who was like, Oh, my God, I can't have children now. But it did occur to me that my body could no longer do something that it had done most of my natural life, right? That those are endings. That Are Natural endings don't mean the end of everything. These are natural endings. And the idea that we were supposed to have kids like into our 80s, seems insane to me, because when would we ever have any time for ourselves if it wasn't biologically built into doing it? You know what I mean? I really, I don't. I believe that God was like, actually on our side and she's looking out for us. Yeah, you know? Yeah. So we do. We do have this. We have this essential moment which starts in this very turbulent way which makes us question everything, our surroundings, our family, our relationships, our identity, our work life, everything in order to decide, Hey, what is going to make me the happiest on the back end of my life, we've got a lot more days behind us than we do in front of us. And I don't say that to be morbid. I say that because to value the time that you have means that you don't have any excuses left to not change. You don't have any excuses to live in this kind of comfortable, very privileged way, instead of actually doing the work at looking at who you are and making your life better for as long as possible, which I really happens at this stage, yeah. Dr. Mindy Pelz And what do you what kind of advice would you give to women as they're listening to this that are like, I feel myself changing, yeah, but the relationships in my life are like, what's wrong with you? You're not the same person you talked about 45 to 55 being a career wise really tough, like it is really a burning down of everything that you built and renegotiating every single thing in your life to create this new for a lot of us, that is the process. Yeah, and I Stacy London think, I think the first thing I would say is find community, right, be very careful about any kind of retreat that is, you know, I've noticed now, really, having seen how the menopause landscape is is shaping up, is that, not only are there now, it's not just that we're talking about it. Of course, there are dissenting opinions doctors are going to rival for, you know, who's right and who's wrong? And things that that, to me, are not advantageous for an audience or a consumer, because you really don't know when you're being sold a false bill of goods or not. Be kid, you know, be careful where you're getting your information from and who is selling you what. I think you must be discerning, but at the same time, you need to seek out community. I don't care if that's online community. Perry is an incredible Hey, Perry is an incredible app. 1000s of women. These are not doctors, these are people where you can just feel like you aren't crazy, because people will back you up and say, Me too. I felt that too. This is exactly what happened to me. Don't worry, the hot flashes didn't last more than a year for me, you know, keep a record of them. Blah, blah, blah. Here are the two big things you can go to talk to your doctors about. I You need to feel like you can you can a suffer, not silently, but in community when you have questions or when you feel exasperated that there are people who know what you've been going through, and there are menopause mentors everywhere now, right? I mean, you know, nine books are coming out now about menopause, and it's all about feeling like you are not the only person going through this that is, to me, the most important that you don't menopause in isolation. To me, that's the hardest way to go through it, and I really did a lot of that because I was so ashamed about what was happening to me and that I didn't understand how to really vocalize it in any way that made sense to me. I had to do all my own research. It took me a long time to find like minded doctors and people who wanted to discuss this. When I first said I wanted to start talking about menopause, people told me that I was committing career suicide, and yet at that point, nobody was hiring me for anything anyway. I was like, I might as well talk about something that has the potential benefit of, you know, making other people feel seen and understood, rather than just sitting here on my ass being like, well, I don't want to talk about clothes. And, strangely enough, getting me back into menopause, getting me to talk about midlife, brought me back to clothes, because I started to recognize our identity changes so much so does the way that we look at, how we look at ourselves, or the way that we want to dress, or the way that we want to feel. And I didn't think I'd have any interest in coming back to style. Honestly, I wanted no, but we need you. No, no, I'm not going anywhere. Yeah, Dr. Mindy Pelz I mean, I think, I think, you know, it's funny when I was in perimenopause, I'll never forget not quite understanding my hot flashes, and I was getting up in front of an audience of hundreds of people to give a presentation, and I literally looked down at my shirt and I was it was just wet, completely on my armpit, like you could just see that I was sweating. I. Couldn't make it stop. I didn't have a change of clothes, and I had to go on stage, and the only thing I had left to do was to call myself out and just be like, I'm a man. I'm a perimenopausal woman having a hot flash. And what I learned from that was, when you go on stage, be careful what fabric you wear. Make sure things aren't too tight, like I started to learn how to dress for my menopausal symptoms, which Stacy London is extremely important. And there are amazing technological fabrics coming out all the time that are about whisking away sweat or about keeping you cool. And I think those are only going to get better over time. The other thing is that there's an acknowledgement there that I think really is so relatable right now, not everybody gets to go on stage and talk to hundreds of people, but even if you're getting up to make, I don't know, a speech at a wedding, right? You never want to feel like so insecure and afraid again, this fear thing, this shame thing, calling this out and being like, you know, my friend Carla Hall, when I experienced this a lot too, as well as she did, is that it's in public speaking, I would be worried that I would forget my train of thought. I forget what I was saying, and that, to me, felt very embarrassing. Like, how can I be smart enough to give a speech and yet I can't remember my place or what I was just saying five seconds ago, but Carla, she stops and she says, I got applause for the meadow. I lost my train of thought. What was I talking about? And the first of all, that's an invitation to people to feel like they can discuss this with you, and especially when said with, like, a little bit of humor and really self acknowledgement, which I find it very humbling people relate to that. You know, we all go through that. It's sort of like having the hot flash on stage. Is like getting your period when you're wearing white pants. I mean, it's one other thing that we live with, right, you know, right? And this idea that if we share that information with other people, like we're not perfect either, it gives everybody permission to kind of let their hair down a little bit. And this idea that women have never been taught to feel safe in their bodies is something that Latham Thomas once said to me. She is a birth doula and works in maternal health. And this is something I really I talk about almost every time I speak. If you have not been taught culturally or societally to feel safe in your body. Of course, you're not going to know very much about it, and, of course, you're going to be very frightened by it. So it's everything from, you know, now we have in place to teach young girls about their period and about pregnancy, but then we just stop and even those things, we make you feel embarrassed because you blood yucky, gross, yeah. Then we, you know, are like, if you're not carrying perfectly, if you have you know preeclampsia, or if you you know your it's your performance is not up to par. Same with IVF. We you use words like performance and failure, and we talk about the biological end of being able to give birth, right? And this idea that it is somehow your past your expiration date, your your past due, as opposed to you are freed from the chains that that expiration date gave you. That expiration date expires. You don't. Yes, your use value only grows. But I think that because we are taught to think this way, we are so embarrassed to talk about what is natural, because, you know, we're looking at things through a patriarchal lens. I think women's physiology is or female physiology is so much more complicated that if we had just studied us instead of men, we'd be a lot better off. We'd know a lot more about physiology in general. Dr. Mindy Pelz Well, I can tell you, I am, I'm obsessed with understanding the female body and all that it comes with. I mean, we like, I mean, it's little things like the egg sends a signal out to the millions of sperm that are coming at her, and she this chemical signal decides which sperm comes in. She makes that choice. I just had Stephen Gundry on here a couple weeks ago, and he told me that the intelligence of a of a baby is determined by the microbiome in the mothers, in the placenta, inside the mother, like when you start to break down everything that happens in the female body. No offense to men, but we, we are so well designed, no wonder there is fear around what we're capable of. It's Stacy London also, it's not just fear, right? It's this idea that if men have been sort of at the head of medical practices, you know, or medical practice for a very long time, it took a long time for women to be able to come doctors. This idea that we have always focused on men and male physiology. I think you know, when we use words like emotional, hysterical, and we're always applying them to women, it's because we understand so little about, you know, female physiological engineering, and that we're much more complex and subtle, and that if you were studying. Us instead of men for those trials, instead of waiting till 1993 or 91 whenever women were invited into these tests, that we would have so much more information about both Texas, right? That this idea is that men are actually quite simple compared to women, and so I hate the fact that we are still playing catch up in terms of health equity. Dr. Mindy Pelz Yeah, amazing. I couldn't agree more. Talk to me a little bit about the anti aging movement, because as I've aged more, I'm 55 I've like, why would I be against aging? It seems to me, like Stacy London to be against anything that you can't stop that. That's the first thing. So this idea of the beauty industry very much like the fashion industry. These are, these are industries that are truly built on insecurity, right? If you don't have this blush, or if you don't have this shirt, then somehow you're not relevant, or you're not enough, or that you'll look somehow like the pretty people we see in these advertisements. I mean, this is still using, you know, prehistoric software here our brains. There's a reason we respond to this, right? There's a reason. There's a great book called survival of the prettiest by Nancy at cough, which is really about tracing why some of the things that we think are beautiful are beautiful. So the idea of a crooked nose, let's say, was not considered culturally beautiful, really, because it meant that genetically, that if you were to mate with that person, they may have trouble breathing. If you were, you know, bigger or heavier when it was the, you know, time of the saber tooth tiger, you'd have less chance of getting away than somebody who could run faster, right? So, yeah, all of these things are sort of rooted in the way that we think about fight or flight, the way we think about something in front of us, and we're like, friend or foe, you know, safety or frightening. But now it's really much more. Are you part of my tribe? Do I get you? Like, look at us. We're both wearing stripes today, like we're, you know, Doctor worthy. You and I, we're the same people. I'm right. I'm 55 you know, you're 55 like all these things, you know, we're both brunettes, like all of these things that we use as signifiers in order to find ground, common ground with people, is how we use fashion and beauty today. Oh, you have, I see you've got that Bergen bag. Oh, all right, she's showing up. You know, whatever, whatever it is, they've turned into judgments about people rather than, like, are you dangerous or not? And and I think that that is true as we as we age, we start to look for the give no fucks attitude in people. I'm very discerning in my friend group now me too, right? I don't have time. I do not have time. I do not waste my energy on people that I are literally taking me nowhere. Are either taking me out of my zone of magic, or are just, you know, really want to this idea of picking my brain. I'm like, No, my brain is expensive. No more picking at it, no little free taste test for you, right? I don't believe in that stuff anymore, because I very much believe that who we become as we age, really is about this kind of self fortification in the best possible way. I mean that in terms of strength training, in terms of, you know, psychological fortitude, we are dealt a lot at this stage of life, whether it's like taking care of your kids or empty nest syndrome elder parents or, you know, dying parents, there are things that are happening at this age. I mean, certainly look at the economy. This is the moment if you are a single woman in your 50s who's like, you know, dependent on her own income, that you're going to start to panic, like, Will I have enough when I'm 80? So all of these things to keep us going, keep us in the workforce, staying healthier, walking the 10,000 steps, stopping the alcohol, don't smoke, all of the things that we know are going to contribute to our longevity, we start to look at through a very different lens, same, same. For like, I want all of my social relationships. I don't want transactional relationships. I want relationships that I can depend on whether I'm in a good mood or a bad mood. I don't want conditional love for my friends. I'm like, You take me or leave me, you know. And that's that's Dr. Mindy Pelz your oxytocin. That's the oxytocin system. Yes, exactly it changes. And here's another wonderful thing about the female body is that we have more oxytocin receptor sites in our brains, and we have oxytocin receptor sites in our bones, which, when we say we feel it in our ability, we are absolutely making a fact. And what's interesting is, as estrogen goes down, so does oxytocin, and all of a sudden, the superficiality no longer is good for us. We need not just emotionally more deep connections for oxytocin, but there's studies that show it actually helps prevent things like osteoporosis. Fact. Exactly Stacy London I've already I've found two vertebra that have osteoporosis, the rest have osteopenia. But for me, you know, that was like, I have been on a real health kick this year. I promised myself like as much preventative care as possible. Well done. So I did the two shingles vaccines. I got a full body MRI. I went and had my Dex assistant. And, I mean, I was like clearing every, you know, great shape, great shape, great cholesterol looks good. Blood pressure is great. Heart is great. Brain is good. No amyloid plaques, things like that. And then we got to my bones, and I was just so bummed out. So bummed out. Dr. Mindy Pelz Yeah, yeah. Vibration plates, one of the best things for increasing strength in the bone is a vibration plate, because it really causes, yeah, you just get one for your house. You can it doesn't have to be expensive, but the the micro vibration causes your bones to hold on to calcium and phosphorus much quicker. Super easy hack Stacy London Oh my God, what an amazing easy hack. I mean, now I'm, you know, I was already taking magnesium and calcium nd and things like that, so yeah, and I it's also genetic. My mom had it, my grandmother had it. So it's, yeah, not, not the biggest surprise. But I've never heard about vibration, and that's what I was trying to get my head around. Everybody says that for bone health, impact is important, whether you're jumping rope or something. So I was like, how am I going to do that without hurting myself? Yeah, and this is so exciting, yeah, Dr. Mindy Pelz wrecking vests are another one that are. I have more. I have a weighted vest. Yeah, that really helps. But it's all about putting a little bit of stress. It's like, why fasting works so well? You put a little bit of stress on the system, and the system adapts. So like for post menopausal women, when you fast, you create some ketones, and now those ketones go up, and they can supercharge your brain. So it's just a little bit of stress creates the body stronger. So there, there's, there's my advice for you on that actuall Stacy London very helpful, because it is the thing that I was like, huh, now I have to go back and make sure that there's no bone breakage in my urine that will require medicine, if you know. And I really, I was like, I've been doing strength training now, God, a long time. I mean, I started in perimenopause, so six or seven years ago, and that has proved very, very helpful. But right, sometimes that's just not enough. Yeah, yeah, Dr. Mindy Pelz vibration plates, I'll send you some some information on it. You can geek out on it. So back to the anti aging thing, because it's funny. I ran into one of my closest friends from high school about a year ago, and she had had a bunch of work done. And we got talking about menopause, and we were talking about all the work she had had done on her eyes and her face. And I stopped, and I asked her, and I was like, Can you, can you tell me why you're doing all of that? And she said to me, Well, you know, when you run into people, they ask you, they'll often say to you, you look so good. And I was like, Well, what does that do for you? And she's like, Well, what do you mean? I'm like, what does that emotionally give you when people say you look so good? And she couldn't answer the question. And then I said, Well, does it make you feel worthy? And she goes, Yeah, actually, I think it does. But when we look at the the toxins that are in things like Botox and fillers, it's you're now playing with hormonal Russian Roulette to be putting those chemicals in your body. Plus, I believe that you're robbing yourself of a an opportunity to embrace your aging. So talk a little bit about that. I Stacy London mean, it's not that I disagree with that, but I also think make your own choices how you want to age, whether you're putting filler in your face or Botox in your face, or having a facelift or getting a lower third or having your brows lifted, good for you, if you can afford it. If that makes you feel like you are tackling aging in a way that works for you, good for you. But what, what I feel is that is when women to feel feel pressured, that this idea of they must have the surgery, or they must have the filler in order to feel worthy, in order to feel respected exactly because that's the only way through is, to me, devastating. It's one of the reasons that Justine Batemans book about face, oh my was so important, right? I mean, just this idea that she has chosen to age naturally, she gets shit for that, and yet we get Madonna shit for too much filler, like you can't win for losing as a woman if you're in this about, you know, being attractive, like, what are we saying now glps are making everybody skinny, so we don't have to make plus sizes anymore. What this is ridiculous like for me, if you want to do that, if you want to take a GLP, one or three, whatever they're called, you, you do you. It's. Your body, right? This idea, I mean, and to me, the reason this is so important is because it does fall under bodily autonomy. We should be able to do whatever we want. It is our right as humans. And I don't care about being a woman or not being a woman. You should have control over your body. But what I what, what pains me is this idea that that's the only way to go, or that you have to bankrupt yourself in order to look a certain way, or that you feel like those things are the only way that you can feel better about aging. Because I think we need a much healthier view of acceptance around age, and that doesn't mean you don't stay healthy. That doesn't mean you don't exercise or you don't get the right amount of sleep or nutrients, but how far do you want to take that, right? I mean, when I found out that you could have plastic surgery on your vagina, I was like, Oh, my God. Why does anybody want to do that? Right? You know, I but I didn't know that was a thing. I didn't know it was a thing either. But then I'm like, if this is, if this is something that doesn't hurt you, that you can afford, that makes you feel a certain way about yourself. You're living your life. I'm not living it for you. So any judgment that I pass is actually none of your business, right? You need to do what's best for you. Yeah, and yes. I wish there were more people, particularly people who are celebrities, who would embrace the idea of aging more solely because I feel like it is so important for us to have role models. I mean, you know, Meryl Streep is a great example, but I want people to see in the public eye that you can still be beautiful with wrinkles, that you're still powerful and capable, and, you know, as admirable as if you didn't have them. We prize youth because youth is equated with fertility. It is a pre historic software thought. This is all we know. So we haven't made it attractive for people to h we haven't given them incentive to be lauded for the same kinds of things that were lauded for in our youth. That's where I think we need to start developing more confidence around accomplishment, confidence around being just who you are, instead of worrying that you have to have all these things, or all these needles, or, you know, whatever it is, dye your hair, to feel those things, to feel worthy. Worthy should be. That's the price of entry. You are alive on this planet, you are worthy. And your looks really shouldn't be an indication of worthiness. To me, those things shouldn't just Dr. Mindy Pelz taught us the cultures taught us you're worthy as a woman if you look beautiful. Because No, that's good. Stacy London And that's patriarch, Patriarch, yeah, right. And that's nd you know, particularly, I find that so difficult because it's not women even helping women, or women doing something that's solely for their own benefit. They're doing it based on this idea that this is what we've been taught. This is an invisible, systemic structure, and there's nobody else breaking out of it. That's Dr. Mindy Pelz right, that's so well said. Okay, well, we have to talk about style, since that is your thing. Stacy London Yeah, I still care about style. I Dr. Mindy Pelz know and I and I think I can tell you that I dress for different reasons now, right? I mean, my number reason, number thing I dress for is comfort, and then the second thing that I dress for is, how do I feel in this? Do I like this? Is this working for me, as opposed to, are people going to like this? And I think that shift and what we need to know there. Stacy London I think that shift is essential. I think that it happens during this reckoning, when you're like nothing fits me. I hate my clothes. I wouldn't wear what I wore at 25 at 55 I'm not the same person. It's like saying that I you know, I love Brussels sprouts, but I hated them as a kid like you. Change every seven years. Every cell in your body has changed. It has been regrown and rebuilt to think that your style is going to stay the same, or that you're going to get the same benefits by keeping the same style, would be silly, right? Everything in life changes. So first we have to adapt to the idea that you're not going to stay static, and that your style evolution is something to embrace and accept and be curious about and excited about every step of the way. And one of the most difficult times, I think, that we really struggle with identity, is in perimenopause, and this is where I think style becomes such an incredibly important tool. Now, again, this is not about well, I look great, and therefore people are going to tell me, I look great, and therefore that's the only way I can create my own confidence. I think this is about the opportunity to create your own confidence by controlling the narrative of who you are. You have complete domain over that all the agency is yours. You want people to think that you are, I don't know, some crazy kind of like, you know, hippie vibe chip set, you know, great. You know how to dress for that role. You want people to think that you're confident, clever. You can, you can intimate all of these things. Things by the way that you carry yourself, in the way that you dress now, I agree with you, comfort was definitely not a top priority for me. When I was younger, I wore five inch heels every day for 15 years, right? Couldn't cry them off my feet. I don't believe in that now, because I have arthritis and it hurts, and I would only wear a high heel for a special occasion or a photograph, right? That's like who I am now. But that doesn't mean that my interest in shoes has changed. It hasn't. I look for a different kind of shoe now. I believe in comfort, but I don't disbelieve in elegance. I think you can have both. And part of that is what I wanted to do in terms of making clothes, in terms of just saying, Hey, I know how to style this for you, or, Hey, let's shop in your closet first. I also want it to be like you can be stylish and relevant and whatever that means for you in terms of your age, if I give you clothes that make you feel that way. So that's sort of, you know what my my new style contribution is. Isn't just about how you style yourself, but about clothes that feel good, if you're having a hot flash, about clothes that feel good, even if you've gained weight in your mid section, because all my pants are elastic and they're pulling Yes, you know things that that still look tailored and fashionable, but that have the use value that we need as we age. That, to me, is very important. It's also why I do see quote, unquote, age appropriate clothing as being more comfortable and yet still elegant. We don't need to put in the same amount of effort to get the same amount of return in how we feel about ourselves as we age, if we're making our clothing simpler, and I don't mean that just to say, like I only wear black or I have a capsule collection? No, I think we still need, we want to define what that style looks for us today. And look, I'm looking at your sweater, right? This idea that something can be colorful and bold and really like stand out is wonderful, right? Because, like, you're giving yourself permission to also be bold and stand out. And that's very exciting to me, when I think about a lot of women our age, just in terms of economics and the way, you know, you shop in Europe, you buy maybe seven or eight new pieces a season, and that's all you wear, right? So this idea of a uniform, I think, is something that appeals to women as they age, but I still want their uniform to be individual to them. That uniform could be 10 to 12 outfits that you hang up together, that you wear like you know, this is a great cocktail party outfit. This is great for brunch with the girls, just so you have your go tos, and then you continue to experiment from there. But everything that you put on really has to, it really now, I think has to. I wanted two criteria, but really both criteria, which is that it should have use value in your closet and in your life, and it should be something that brings you joy. And I sometimes you're going to do a splurge and it's a bag and it's amazing, and it's the most impractical thing ever, but it brings you so much joy that you love it so much that it's worth the price, right? Doesn't matter how many times you wear it. It's worth it because you love it. And then there are the things that I consider to be workhorses in your closet, the best pair of black trousers. You don't need 50 pairs of black trousers. You need three, you know? And that's how you start to discern the kinds of things you that look best on you, and the outfits that you know become sort of the backbone of your right. Dr. Mindy Pelz What? What are some of your fashion tips for the menopausal belly I can tell you, I've done a lot of videos on YouTube about menopausal belly weight. It seems to be the thing that women are the most concerned about what is it? Can you give us some advice on how like are we embracing it? Are we? Are we hiding it? Are we? I can tell you, I I could tell you my strategy was low rise jeans, just let it kind of hang over there, you know? But, and Stacy London that's one way to do it. And then there are other people who will say high rise jeans, because they feel like they will contain their midsection. But the thing is, I don't believe in the word hiding. I will never use the word hiding. I know when somebody is hiding, because when somebody is hiding, they're usually wearing black, an oversized sweater that covers their ass and like baggy jeans or baggy sweats. And the whole point is that they don't want me to see them, except for the fact that when it looks like you're trying to hide everything, I can tell that you don't like your body. So how do you accept what you don't like about your body and dress for that? In other words, I say you're either finding ways to compliment the things you do like about your body and also finding ways to consciously camouflage the things you don't love. And I know that sounds a little Gwyneth to be like, consciously camouflaged, but it's that you are aware that you don't like something about your body. But that doesn't mean you're discounting it and pretending that it's not there, because the easiest way to have a problem get bigger is to ignore it. So the easiest way for you to dress in a way. Not flattering is to ignore that there's a part of your body you don't love. You cannot love a part of your body and still dress it well, Dr. Mindy Pelz oh, okay, give me an example. What's a part of body that you see women not love? Stacy London So I know a lot of people who don't love their tush, they don't love their hips. They think their hips are bigger, right? So I would advise look, you know that you like your top half better wear things that are sleeveless, wear, things with a deep V wear, things that are going to really create attention up top do darker colors and universally flattering shapes that define a waist, like an a line skirt or a mid rise Jean, go directly over the mid section and cut that body in half, right? Or if you know that you want to do something, you're just it's creating geometric shapes and symmetry. So where you want to camouflage things, you can do that with volume or wearing something tighter, depending on how you are styling the other half of your body. So it's like putting a puzzle together. You don't have to love your hips in order to wear something that's going to flatter your top half and really elongate your body and get people to look where you want them to look like. We're both doing vertical stripes that forces your eye up and down. If these were horizontal, this would make my chest look wider. If I don't want my chest to look wider, then I would wear something vertical, right? Or if I wanted to add volume or or distraction up here, so that you're not paying any attention, maybe I would create more with on top, a small waist, and then with on the bottom, so that you've got that hourglass balance. So it's never about hiding. It is really I tell I say this in my book, which I wrote over a decade ago, called The Truth About style. But one of the first things I say in the book is you have got to stand naked in front of the mirror until the emotional connection that you have in terms of liking or disliking anything about your body just becomes objective. You can say, I like my boobs. I don't like my tush the minute. You can say that you're actually dealing in reality. And it's only in reality that you can dress yourself best. You actually are fitting what you have the raw material you have to work with. If you think that you're going to dress for the body, you wish you had good luck. You're never going to look right in the close. So, radical self acceptance is another part of the change. Right? Radical self acceptance, once you go through this kind of tumult and this reckoning, what you come out of this as is, I cannot change what is the same way I cannot change aging, all these billionaires who are trying to live forever. What idiots? I mean, you know, when you could solve world hunger instead, to me, that is a waste of time. I am much happier to think that there is a time limit on my life than to think about the fact that I would be wasting all the money that I could be helping the world with on myself. So for me, it's about taking as good care of this vessel to take me as long as I'm going to be able to go for as long as possible. But this idea that we won't age really is such a disservice to who we are. This is a natural occurrence. It is a natural just like the biological end of fertility is a natural ending. So is dying. So this idea that we, everybody thinks it's cute to be old, but nobody wants to age, is really something that we have to get out of, right? I don't want to talk about my cute little 99 year old grandmother. You know, she lived to be 99 and she was like, five feet tall, and totally Sicilian. And, you know, there was, I love the fact that she used to do her hair in this big bouffant, and she was amazing. But it's not just that. My grandmother was cute when she was old. I remember now when she when I was born, she had to have been post menopausal, or still kind of crazy menopausal, and she would do all these weird things. I remember her like eating the hunks of cheese or jars of soybeans. She took tons of vitamins, probably why she lived to be 99 but I don't really remember her getting from where I was as a baby to where I was when she died. I just remember her, you know, as this old lady, not all the other things she did to become an old lady, and we don't talk about this progression, this stage, this radical transformation enough, and how much it requires a certain amount of faith and acceptance that what's happening is meant to happen. You know, just because societally, we put these, you know, ridiculous standards on how we're supposed to look and how we're supposed to age as people, I can't think of anything more torturous than you know, essentially saying to somebody you no longer matter which is what our society does with people who are aging and the elderly. I hope that it is us and our generation that is going to change the way we. Think about H Dr. Mindy Pelz Yeah, you know, for the longest time I was obsessed with the Aboriginal women that come through my Instagram news feed. And when you see see a woman who's really wrinkled, what I see is wisdom. I'm like, wow, if those lines could talk, what would they tell me? What kind of life did she live? And then it got me thinking, well, if everybody you know tries to slow down aging, how are we going to find the wisdom keepers? How? What does wisdom look like? You know, if I was living in LA until the until the fires happened, and I would Yeah, I would walk Yeah, thank you. I lived in the Pelz side, right at the epicenter, and all my clothes were there too. So I got an opportunity to buy new clothes, but, but here's what the interesting thing that I think we don't discuss enough is, if everybody's trying to stay young, how are we going to find wisdom? What does wisdom look Stacy London like? Because I think it's conflating two things, sadly, what you know, what we look like, it doesn't necessarily speak to, let's say everybody's like, Oh, you look great for your age. You look great for 55 right? But you're still 55 and so wisdom, to me, is not the same as knowledge. Wisdom is, really, is based in life experience and knowledge are things that we can we discover, we can pick up, we can learn all of that. So when I think about wisdom, I think about what it is that I'm saying to people that comes directly from my heart or directly from late life experience, as opposed to like, when I feel like I'm teaching something you know, which is like giving people knowledge. I don't know that I need deep, heavy wrinkles for you to be able to relate to the fact that I have wisdom, because if something that I say resonates with you, then I think that that that will stay with you, connects. Yeah, and I don't think that we are going back to the the, you know, certainly not in the like sort of media or, you know, film, television, realms like what we're when we see glamor, that is still going to be hard, even though, you know, I am seeing progress, but, but even even character actresses like we still put such pressure on people to look a certain way. Yeah, celebrities, yes, and that's the thing. I think the more celebrities buy into it, the harder it is for the average person not to, yeah, even, you know, when people can't afford it, even when these are things they should not be spending their money on, because they they have bills to pay. You know, it does that kind of pressure is really hard. I did Botox for a long time, and I stopped recently, and I don't know how I feel about it. I'm not sure whether I'll go back to it or not go back to it. I don't know that I want to be putting any more Botox in my body. But also, you know, eventually those muscles will be so slack that my brow will just fall down and I'm like, I I think I'm probably better off just aging without it, you know, but it's to each their own, and everybody sort of needs to to figure that out. I just don't think that by play acting with all of the things that we have at our disposal, like, you know, plastic surgery or cosmetic dermatology or different hairstyles or dying your hair, whatever it is, is really going to be the thing by which we measure wisdom. It's never going to be the thing that we have to we're never going to have to look to a wrinkle or, you know, an unblem, you know, worked on face to know if somebody has wisdom like, unfortunately, I think those things are get conflated. You know, we want these kind of we want the wisdom of the Crone. Although I, you know, I keep saying that there, I worked with this executive producer, and we decided that, you know, young had the three archetypes of women, right? The Maiden, the mother and the Crone. There's really a fourth one in between mother and Crone, which is Enchantress. And that's that's where we are right now. We're here to make our own magic, and if that magic is in the way that you present, it's the same thing as wanting to wear yellow on a cloudy day. If getting Botox is going to lift you, elevate you, make you more confident create better interactions between you and other people, then I'm all for it. And if that's not where you get your self worth, if that's not the well you know from which you're drinking, even better, fantastic. We need to have room for everybody to be the version of themselves that they think is best. And if they're living this happy life, who are we to judge anyway? Dr. Mindy Pelz Well, said, Yeah, well, I, you know, I used to say that on weight all the time when the body positivity world was really out there, yeah, I would say if, if you're overweight, you look in the mirror, you love everything you see your blood work is great, then I don't, you don't need to be a size two, be whatever's. Size you want to be exactly, Stacy London and I'm also we're as women. We're tied to numbers, sizes, weight, age, yeah, what the fuck you know? I'm sorry. I keep cursing. I have such a body. I apologize podcast, but it makes me, it makes me fucking crazy, because it's like your size 12. So so is the rest of the country, 1214, is our, is our average national size, five, four is the average national height. You don't want to be a 12. Cross out the one, boom. You're a two. This is all magic. This, I mean, like, these sizes are so random. Who gives a shit? You know, there was a great company years ago that didn't use sizes, like, small was, I don't know, pretty, and medium was beautiful. Large was like, sexy, and they did all these different things that I was like, This is how we should be sizing clothes. They should just be descriptions of that that creates self confidence, not a number. Because I remember walking into a store in LA, I was, I was with a friend, and we were shopping for her, and I said, Okay, can we try this dress in a size eight? And this woman looked me directly in the eye and said, We don't carry larger sizes here. Dr. Mindy Pelz Oh, my God, size eight. I Stacy London was like, yeah, right out of your mind. What world are we living in that like a double zero or a zero is is somehow something we aspire to? Yes, Dr. Mindy Pelz right, right. Talk about your new clothing line on QVC, and I want, I want you to say you made it just for menopausal women, but I don't know if you did that. Is it with Stacy London men? I made it for women in midlife. And I did make it with some menopausal things in mind, but bigger than just midlife. So a lot of the lining in some of our like mixed media shirts, all takes away sweat, wicks away sweat, things like that. But, you know, in my new clothes, if there's a zipper, I'm making it a bright neon color, so you don't need your reading glasses to see it. That's amazing, yes. But also to do things that are basics, that are cut well, so that you look like you're wearing a suit when you literally wearing stretch Jacquard, which is like a knit and kind of amazing. I've done that with three piece suits. I've done that with I did a brocade suit that's all flowers. I did some amazing brocade coats, leather jackets, leather trenches, things like that that I feel are staples that you should be able to get for prices that are not crazy expensive yet are made with quality. And, you know, an eye on really good fabrics. And, yeah, you know, the other thing is that we do tend to limit our spending as we age, and I want you to have pieces that still kind of give you pep in your step when you get up in the morning. That still make you feel you're participating in relevant style and feel good about it where you are not that you're trying to impersonate a younger version of you or anything like that. So there's a lot of who are animals for grown ups. Ideally, this idea, you can mix and match almost everything from each of the collections will always have something that goes with it. And to, you know, make it a little bit easier to get dressed and not and not wear herd pants, because who needs her pants anymore, right? Dr. Mindy Pelz You know, it's interesting. I Leanne rimes is a good friend of mine, and when, when I evacuated from the fire, I had this moment because the fires were all around our Palisades house, and I only had a couple of minutes to get out. And so you walk into your closet, and you look around and you're like, all of this is replaceable, and all of a sudden I realized in a second how much time and effort I put into, like actually buying these clothes and being attached to them, but in the moment of a crisis, I didn't care about them. So the fire left my neighborhood and was heading towards Leanne. And so I told Leanne, you better start packing up your clothes. And then we got in this really interesting discussion over the next couple days of what she packed up, and she told me that, like, she packed up her onesies and her hats, those were as important as her Grammys. I was like, what? And it's just, it's really interesting in a crisis moment, how you decide what's important and what you put effort into and which clothes matter to you and which ones don't. It's a fascinating test. And Leanne went on to tell me she's like from now on, when I shop, I'm going to ask myself, would I take this in a fire? Yes. Stacy London I mean, look, clothes are clothes, right? And in a life precarious emergency, i i hope that everybody will be like you and say, you know, I can walk away from this. What I do hear a lot of people saying is they don't know why they chose what they chose when they left, and there were a lot of things that they regretted not taking and it really made me think of the things that you know, like, what could you put in your state for? What could you put in something that is. You know, detachable that you can pick up and take out all your important papers. It really, it really made me think about the way in which we prepare versus the things that we have attachments to, right? That are artificial attachments, not real ones. A lot of people said to me they were upset they forgot something like their grandmother's brooch or something much deeper meaning. Yeah. But there is something about the fact that, you know, disaster puts life into perspective, and it's just what this is a perfect way to kind of come full circle. When we talked about the fact that, you know, the beginning of the menopause experience is turbulent. It is a reckoning, it is hard, and you really sometimes have to break something, lose something, grieve something, in order book, in order to see that there is so much more ahead of you and and I hope that's what the conversation around menopause right now is doing. Agreed, Dr. Mindy Pelz appreciate this. This was fabulous. Appreciate you, and we will appreciate you another time. Okay, I would love that. Thank you so much for joining me in today's episode. I love bringing thoughtful discussions about all things health to you. If you enjoyed it, we'd love to know about it, so please leave us a review. Share it with your friends and let me know what your biggest takeaway is.