Fett CA (2018) Experience and Professional Difficulties. JSM Women’s Health 3(1): 1009.

I will split my experience and professional difficulties into four parts: 1) intellectual and sports training; 2) professional space and paradigm shift; 3) scientific production, politics in Brazil and experience in internationalization; 4) focus on female work, considering health, performance and aesthetics.

1) I was a student at the Federal University of Mato Grosso (UFMT, 1983-1987), an institution that today I teach and research, coordinates the Master’s program in Physical Education, holds a PhD in Medicine and a Master’s degree in Technological Innovation. In this period my main focus was on Judo competitions up to international level including the United States Open, Tae Kwon Do and Boxe on Brazil’s national level. We had many barriers to begin with training that was empirical to the resources to participate in sporting events in major centers, since I was located in Cuiabá-MT, inland. In this way I did Physical Education and focused my studies mainly in Sports Physiology, Sports Nutrition and Sports Training in order to self-guide me. These studies made it possible to apply for the position of teacher of Biomechanics and Sports Physiology at the Federal University of Mato Grosso.

2) Before beginning my career as a university professor and researcher, in 1990 I was a high school teacher and health club owner. In the first I taught physical education classes and in the second classes of Judo, Kick Boxing and bodybuilding where I was one of the first in the region to encourage training with weights and muscular hypertrophy for women, considered at the time as masculinizing. I made progress in this area, advising women of different ages to lose weight, improve muscle, mood, sensuality and sexuality. One of the barriers was that there were few studies with female athletes and training for muscle hypertrophy at this time, and the paradigm shift was performed by the quality of the work and constancy of the guidelines. In addition, another evolution of my thinking in this era occurred in relation to the manipulation of the diet for specific results associated with sports training and the use of dietary supplements to improve diet precision. This change was due to the contact with area researchers and events that we were pioneers to promote in our city. These works were applied to me as an athlete and to students of the gym, including women who wanted a more ambitious aesthetics and who were training more advanced. There was a lot of resistance regarding the use of supplements that were and still are treated by the public and the media with analogs to sports drugs. In 1996 we did preliminary work with background athletes and the prevalence of dysbiosis as a completion work for a specialization in Orthomolecular Medicine, published in a national journal. Later in 2016 I was invited to talk about the use of amino acids in athletes at event ofInternational Life Sciences Institute of Brasil and a few dozens of lectures at other events and postgraduate classes on supplementation.

3) In 1998 I went to do my master’s degree and had contact with the scientific production of fact and with the reality of the Brazilian science of the time. The Faculty of Medicine of UNESP in Botucatu-SP was an important research center in Brazil and South America. I had no grants to perform my research, like several others in the group and therefore we used laboratory resources that were already available in the routine. An important difficulty was in the recruitment and maintenance of volunteers, since the work consisted of a period of two months of intense resistance training, preceded and followed by a maximum exhaustion test and by Brazilian law it is not allowed to pay volunteers to participate in studies. In this period, I returned to compete and became regional judo champion in São Paulo, and Brazilian in Jiu Jitsu and Kick Boxing. Following my doctorate at the Medical School of RibeirãoPreto-SP and worked with the health of obese women. We did an intervention with nutritional orientation and comparison between training in circuit with weights and walking. The maintenance of the volunteers to the end was a challenge, with loss of almost 50% of the sample between the beginning and end of the study. Again the lack of funding that were challenges overcome with the creativity and dedication of the team composed by master degree colleagues, supported by the laboratory technician PhD João Gilberto Padovan and the advised guidance of Dr. PhD Júlio Sergio Marchini. The career as a researcher needs guidance and opportunity support, and mine was due to Dr. Marchini, who, in addition to his Ph.D., nominated me as a Fellow for the International Atomic Energy Agency, where I had the opportunity to stay for seven months in the United States. One month for English language improvement in Chicago-IL and six months at the University of Washington Medical School in Saint Louis-MO. In this opportunity, I was able to experience the difference between how to produce science from a Brazilian university and an American university. The focus on product innovation that goes into the market and that can be financed in the US was completely different from Brazilian management. Being able to pay a volunteer and administer the lab dynamically with hiring and fired of employees proved to be much more productive than the format I worked with in Brazil. In this way, I was positively influenced with this direct form of production and searched for ways that could approach this on my return to Brazil, in particular by supporting me in the law of technological innovation of 2004.

4) When I finished my training in 2005, I returned to my post as a teacher at UFMT and found a reality very distant from those in which I did my training, even in Brazil. The lab had no equipment or computer, which made me have to work with my personal notebook and start writing projects. With the initial group of students of scientific initiation, we use the creativity to develop projects of lower cost, using questionnaires and physical tests. This was an important work where I emphasized the training of women who are now in the labor market and several returned to do postgraduate studies and are being trained researchers. This is an important field that we did not have in our region prior to my return, and in particular there were very few researchoriented women and also few surveys with women, which is a worldwide trend, but more pronounced here in our region. Then in 2007 I wrote a project in partnership with the Ministry of Science and Technology of MT, where we got resources to set up a multiuser laboratory. At the same time, I was accredited in the Master’s Degree in Nutrition at UFMT, having the condition to develop more elaborate research. In 2012 we created the Master in Physical Education and in 2015 I was accredited in the Doctorate in Medicine and in 2017 in the Masters in Innovation of UFMT. In order to do so, several works were developed, and we got some important financing, but most of them we did with resources that we had previously obtained in terms of equipment, using more creativity than the purchase of permanent materials or consumption. To overcome many of these difficulties, I have partnered with other collaborators, emphasizing statistical analysis and epidemiological data collection, with several field works. The work with the elderly population and data collection at home was one of them, as a focus on women’s health and the projection of a global physical performance index, work of my wife Waleria Fett that being published. Some partnerships allowed us to make biochemical analyzes and could work with nutritional assessment of elderly women and the risk to health of men who use sports drugs, articles published in 2014 and 2018, respectively. We are currently working on the elderly population related to the risk thatwomen with polycystic ovarian syndrome, metabolic syndrome and obese women with creatine, arginine, or caffeine supplementation and innovation projects with a protocol of evaluation in health clubs, evaluation of the quality of service in gym in partnership with Eddie TC Lam (Cleveland State University), sports equipment, evaluation of neurophysiological readiness in fighters, effects of martial arts on the emotional balance of practitioners, supplementation of probiotic in constipated women and development of stent for aneurysm treatment, with Brazilian neurosurgeon Douglas Gonsales, residing at FloridaUSA and with American universities how partners (University of Iowa Carver College of Medicine, Iowa City, IA, Baptist Health, Little Rock, AR, University of South Carolina School of Medicine Greenville, Greenville Health System, Greenville, Medical Murray, North Barrington, IL USA, Medical Merge, Brentwood, TN USA). Studies with supplementation have been developed with the support of the VITAFOR a Brazilian supplement company, but maintaining the criteria of being independent researchers. Based on my studies on evolutionary aspects of sexuality, where the relationships of female forms with male preference and health outcomes are tested, we have fine-tuned a project that evaluates self-image, self-esteem, and body measurements in order to develop an aesthetic note designed by the preference of a male and female jury with different sexual orientations. This line of work has already resulted in 02 undergraduate and 4 master’s degree conclusions and we are seeking a standard to establish a quantitative assessment of aesthetic grade, which has social and economic value. We will now include, after achieving an electroencephalogram in partnership, the neurological analysis of physical attractiveness and the impact of the interaction of diet and exercise in these modulations. I would add that this approach aims to achieve women’s health in emotional aspects and in acceptable physiological and homeostatic changes. In short, we achieved a lot of things in terms of equipment over the years, but the main production condition was related to creativity rather than resources that were few.