What your 50-year-old self wishes you’d done for your health in your 20s & 30s with Dr Faye Bate | Future Self Series Ep.4

Working Hard with Grace Beverley

In this episode of the Future Self series, Grace Beverley hosts Dr. Faye Bate to discuss foundational health habits for women in their 20s a

Key takeaways

• Dr. Faye Bate highlights that women's health research has historically been biased toward men, often overlooking gender-specific biological needs in clinical trials.
• Consistent weight training is crucial for maintaining bone density and preventing fractures as estrogen levels decline during menopause.

Main topics

• Women's health research gaps
• Sleep optimization and biology

Notable quotes

A Ferrari can't run without fuel and neither can you.

Conclusion

The episode emphasizes that long-term success requires a sustainable f

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:11) What is up? I'm Grace Beverly and welcome back to Working Hard, the podcast-shaped guidebook on how to improve your own life and achieve what you actually dreamed of doing. Because life's too short for boring Speaker 1 (0:19) podcasts and bad advice. Speaker 2 (0:24) What is up guys and welcome back to Working Hard. If you are new here, hello. We are nearly a third of the way through the Future Self series, which I am putting live throughout my maternity leave, all built based on one idea. That you can build the life you want by reverse engineering it very specifically. So to zoom out for a second, we've come to the end of part one now, which was all about getting really, really clear on what your plan is going to look like going forwards. Because it's very hard to steer the ship if you don't actually know the destination. And I think that's some of the groundwork that like almost ends up with you treading water because you know you're moving somewhere, you know you want a certain type of life, you probably have like an amorphous kind of representation of it flying around your head, but it's not that specific and getting clear on that plan is so important. So that's what we've done for the past three episodes and I'd highly recommend going and listening to those if you haven't already. But now it's time for us to hone in on how you're actually going to go and execute it because I am a very firm believer that you can have the most detailed, beautiful... colour-coded five-year plan in the world. And trust me, I love... a good colour coding session. But unfortunately, it will mean absolutely nothing if you're running on four hours sleep, your hormones are all over the place, you've forgotten to eat a proper meal, you're on the verge of burnout. Essentially, your day-to-day life is not maintainable in line with the long-term plan you have for yourself. Like, yes, you're going to have to put in grind to be able to get to where you want to get to. Extraordinary outcomes require extraordinary input, and I will be the first person to say that. But in order to be able to graft, you have to be putting yourself in the right situations. have to be looking after yourself in the right way. You have to be very, very clear about the type of person you are week in, week out, and the type of things that person does in order to be able to actually get to where you want to get to. So I'd say this is something which my past self very much knows all too well. And honestly, I think we've all come way too far to not be looking after ourselves in 2026. So that brings me nicely onto the topic of today's episode. And this one is all about how we can be looking after our future selves in a health sense. And I want to make it very clear that this isn't about looking a certain and way or fad diets or whatever if you've been around these parts for a while you'll know that it's about feeling good in our bodies and looking after yourself in a way that respects your future self like I think so many of us have all of these goals around health and fitness and all of that realistically the number one goal should be respecting your future self enough to be able to make certain decisions to set yourself up for success in that way and that means setting yourself up for success in terms of energy focus hormones stress levels so that you can carry out the plan that you have set for yourself self. We obviously cannot control every element in our health. I think that's very worth saying, but we can do certain things to make sure that our bodies are set up as far as possible to carry the life we're building rather than working against it. And to help us answer that, I have got the perfect person. I really had a very clear brief for this episode because I think that you might hear something like the future self and the way all of this is about reverse engineering your life. And you might hear that and be like, okay, this is all about goal setting. And I really, really wanted to have a health specific episode in here because that I think has been one of the biggest things that's actually come in the way of me reaching my goals in the past, particularly around hormones. Like if you've listened to the podcast before, you will know that I had a two-year journey, very, very in-depth trying to sort out my PCOS, get my ovulation back, all of these different things. And prior to that, I've struggled with PCOS for what, like 15 years? And so I really found it incredibly important to make sure we're getting ourselves on the right track in order to be able to actually carry out anything we're putting in place because that was me from a point of view of like, well, I guess I'll just sleep later and just do all of this work. And as much as that's important, actually, we're building a life we love. We're building a life we're very proud of. And that cannot happen without laying the groundwork in terms of looking after yourself. So Dr. Faye Bate is a medical doctor and creator. And she began building her platform while she was still at medical school. And she quickly grew into one of the UK's most trusted voices in the health space. She's also completing her master's in women's health this year on top of her medical degree. And Faye has this brilliant way of demystifying more complicated women's health topics, which I really wanted to get her on here for. She is here to answer all of the questions that you've been confused about for years, but maybe have never had the answer to. And I've asked her to bring the science back to evidence too, because you know that is what we like over here. So one of the reasons I really wanted Dr. Faye Bate on specifically is because I wanted to create a health episode that was specifically designed for high achieving women. So all around the issues that we might face because I don't know if you know, you probably will know if you've been here for a little bit, but the amount of medical research that historically has just been done on men will never fail to shock me. Only 40 years ago, women made up just 20 to 30 % of clinical trial participants. In fact, women were banned from some clinical trials, which means that so much of the data we have on the human body is based only on men. We are not even at 50 % participation in clinical trials by women now. And I guess all of this is so important when we think of the knockoff effect that this has on the healthcare women receive, the treatment options we're given, the misunderstanding that so many professionals have around specific women's health conditions. And this is why it's so important when the podcast world is massive and there is so much out there on hell that we talk about this through specifically the lens of women's health. Anyway, Speaker 1 (5:35) before I go down too much of a rabbit hole, Faye is part of changing that. She's even built a Speaker 2 (5:39) whole community around it and talks a lot of the time about women being dismissed or misunderstood. And as with all of these episodes, Faye has put together a follow-up exercise and personally reading recommendations in the Working Hard newsletter this week so that you can actually take away what you hear today and do something with it. All of these episodes are designed to be as actionable as possible so that you're not just going to listen and then never think about it again and in fact you are going to use this information to change your life. So that's going to be sent out tomorrow if you're listening to this episode on the day it goes live. So I'm going to link the newsletter in the description box where you can find that. But for now I will be leaving you in her very capable hands. Speaker 1 (6:13) Women spend 25 % of their life in poor health. Combine that with women's bodies being under researched and too often ignored, it has never been more important to understand your body. As you probably already know, this series is all about reverse engineering the best life for your future self. So when Grace asked if I would like to be a teacher on this series, I knew I had to do an episode on how to make sure your health in your 20s doesn't ruin your 30s, 40s and 50s. Because the habits you're building right now will have a direct impact on the quality of your life as we age. Why should you listen to me? My name is Faye and I'm a doctor who's obsessed with the female body, who is sick of women being lied to. And today we'll begin module two, which is all about how to execute your future plan. And that's exactly why we'll be breaking down the seven science-backed habits you can start building today as an ambitious woman who has been putting her health on the back burner for too long. This episode is such an important foundation for everything else in this module. I truly believe it all starts with getting your health in check because we'll never fully enjoy the big life goals we've been planning for ourselves if our bodies are working against us or we're simply just not feeling good enough. So without further ado, let's get into it. Now, if you spend all day tired, only to get into bed feeling more awake than ever before, staring at the ceiling, counting how many hours of sleep are left, then here is everything you need to know about sleep as a