Friday Chat: Sculpting Your Body

You can totally have the body you want.  If I can, you can, and here is a peak into the key factors that will allow you to gain muscle, sculpts, and reduce body fat. 

Transcript

(00:01):

Welcome back to your Friday chat. This is our place to talk about all things metabolism. And this is Julia, your host, and also the founder of Jolie, a company that I founded because of my own needs as it relates to food and nutrition that weren't just mine. Many other people had those needs. And we specialize in customized meal programs, resets, cleanses to help you reach optimal health. And today we are talking about optimal body composition because this summer I went on a body composition journey, shall I say. And I have a great book that I want to suggest to you all, which definitely helped me in this. And it's called Figure Secrets. And it's not a new book, it's an old book, but it's the complete playbook for building an amazing female body. So this was my handbook this summer, and what I intended to do was to gain muscle and swap out muscle for fat.
(01:15)
One of the key things that comes up as you're reaching your fifties and beyond is it's harder and harder to build muscle. And I'm going to say that that is true unless you work out and eat for that purpose. So if you are going about your day and you're doing your workouts and you're keeping your diet the way it's been, it is going to be hard for you to gain muscle. And most likely because of the hormonal shifts that happen as we are perimenopausal, go through menopausal, and thereafter, you're going to lose muscle. However, if you are intentional and you treat this like a project, you can do it and it's not as hard as you think. So let's see, where did I start from? I started from a very clean diet. I eat early life, I eat lots of plants, had good body composition, like healthy weight, all that kind of stuff.
(02:23)
So I started from that space, breakfast, lunch, and dinner. I was not an intermittent faster, more or less unless you count between dinner and breakfast, that 12 hour window, that was where I was and it wasn't a bad place, but I wanted a challenge. And I do believe that having challenges as you're taking care of yourself just keeps everything fresh and it keeps it fun. So I found this book figure secret and I'm like, you know what? I want to see how much muscle I can build in three months. And a spoiler alert, I'm going to tell you, I put on five pounds of muscle and I lost three pounds of fat. I ended up with a net two pound scale gain, and I ended up going down one to one and a half sizes clothing wise. Literally, I have taken everything to the tailor and I do mean everything to the tailor over the last few weeks, bringing them in, bringing in the waist, bringing in the arms, bringing in the butt, the thighs, everything.
(03:40)
And it is literally because of the work that I did with Figure Secrets and I want to share that work with you. So I began by first doing an assessment, and I always suggest that you do an assessment. I assess using my scale, I assess using my clothing and how does it fit? I assess with a tape measure. I take my weight, my waist and hip measurements, and I assess with an InBody machine, which shows muscle and fat. And if you are interested in building your figure and losing weight, Jolie weight loss is launching soon. And we will have an InBody for you to use as part of your program, which is a huge, huge giant perk because I think without my assessment tools, I would've gotten discouraged because we are trained to look at scale weight, scale weight, scale weight, scale weight. We do this three, four month project and we see no decrease in scale weight, and we actually see the scale creep up two pounds and we're like, oh, no, this isn't working.
(04:56)
Let me stop. But a body composition test apparatus in body gives you that look under the hood where you're like, okay, I see what's happening here. I see that I'm gaining muscle and I'm losing fat, and that is okay with me. That is a hundred percent okay with you. Your muscle is way heavier than your fat and more muscle makes you feel better, makes your clothes fit better, makes your bones stronger, and it allows you to eat more. Just say. So I began with assessment and then I looked at, okay, how much muscle do I have? How much fat do I have? And there are, I'm going to deal with the workout first. So I wanted to lose. I wanted to gain muscle. And the cool thing that Figure Secrets talks about, and the cool thing about muscle is you get to choose where you're gaining muscle because your body won't compensate all over.
(06:03)
So with weight loss, like fat loss, you don't get to choose where you're going to lose weight. Your body's just going to take, take, take. And sometimes your belly will go down first. Sometimes your breast will go down first. Sometimes you'll lose your butt, but still have your thighs. It's your body's own mechanism. Muscles are different. Muscles respond to the specific muscle that you are using. So if you want a really tight rear end, then you're going to exercise your glutes and you can get the tightest we in imaginable and still have flappy triceps because you haven't exercised them. So that is the cool thing when we look at sculpting the female body. So what did I want? I want wash board abs. I wanted sculpted legs. I loved Tina Turner. Had to pause there for a moment. Those were the main things I wanted.
(07:01)
And so my plan of attack was I was going to go heavy on the leg exercises to build up my thighs and my glutes and heavy, not so so much my glutes honestly, but more my thighs. But your glutes always get involved. But more my thighs. My thighs were like my focus and my abs just getting 'em flat, flat, flat. Ever since having my children flat abs has been the one non-negotiable for me. After spending so many years pregnant and pre-pregnancy and post-pregnancy and all that, it's like, God, the only thing I want are flat apps, please. So my exercise was focused on weight training using squats, lunges, leg press, hamstring curls, all of that and a lot of ab work. That was my focus. And I did that about four times a week. Occasionally it would be three times a week, but generally it was four times a week.
(08:16)
So when we are trying to sculpt our body, it is important that we decide what areas are we focusing on, and it's important that we focus on those areas three to four times a week. Four is much, much better. So I would train three times a week, and I would go to either bar method or solid core one to two times after that on separate days. The thing about the female body, so if you're a man listening to this, it's a little bit different. The thing about the female body is that we recover a lot faster. And so typically men have off days more often scheduled than what a woman needs. As a woman, we could have one off day or two off days, and our body is able to recover and to put on muscle and build muscle without so much rest. The other aspect of a woman's body is that women respond really, really well to time under tension. Time under tension creates muscle build. And so this is why exercises like bar method for instance, or pure bar work. So well Pilates for building muscle when we're intentional is if we take slow movements, slow intentional movements, and we stay in the muscle for a long period of time, our body is going to build muscle. So you can take that as your tactic, time under tension, or you can lift heavier, but it is still, I find it more pleasurable for time under tension.
(10:12)
But for a female body that is transformative, absolutely positively transformative. So you're less concerned about lifting the heaviest thing that you can. You're more concerned about lifting something that's challenging, but doing it slowly with intention, with great form, that's what you want in terms of your workout. So I started my workout with about four times a week, and then I added my cardio behind that. So when we are trying to build muscle, our cardio takes a different space than when we're trying to lose fat. When we're sculpting our body, our cardio takes a different space. Our cardio kind of takes the back seat and our muscle building takes the front seat. And so for that reason, I chose to do walking as my cardio. It was pleasurable. I could do it.
(11:13)
It wasn't hard. I wasn't sweating none of that. But that's the point. You don't want a HIIT class as the compliment to your weightlifting. You don't want a killer soul cycle as the compliment to your weightlifting. You want something slow and steady. Your weightlifting is your sacred cow of building muscle. So that we put in there. The second is our nutrition around it, and I'm going to talk in two and two parts. One is the nutritional sandwich that needs to go around your weightlifting. So you need to have your weightlifting. Most importantly, your post-workout meal, your post-workout meal needs to come as soon as possible after you eat. It needs to be high protein, and the literature tends to say between 30 and 40 grams of protein in that post-workout meal, I would lean more towards 30. I find it really, really difficult beyond toleration to have more than that.
(12:27)
It needs to be protein with a little bit of carbohydrate. So what might that look like? For me, it looks like a kindness smoothie with extra protein. For you, it might look like grilled chicken with half a cup of blueberries or grilled chicken with a few slices of sweet potato, or it might look like you could do. What else could you do? You could do meat, like beef with a little bit of a salad to go with it. You could do a bunch of egg whites with a little egg yolk added in there, and a small piece of bread or toast your protein most important and a little bit of carbohydrate. Why do we want the protein to build the muscle? And that protein is literally going to go right into your muscles. Want the little bit of carbohydrate to keep our women, our woman body in a space of feeling like all is good.
(13:36)
So for women, our bodies are more carbohydrate sensitive, both for the positive and negative for weight gain and weight loss, but for us to feel good after stressing our body in a way where it's going to do a lot of rebuild, we need that little bit of carbohydrate in there so that our body knows there's no famine, that we're good. That stress that we just endured was okay in that we are okay. Your food is oftentimes, and we sometimes don't consider this, it's oftentimes a signal to your brain about how you're doing, about how life is. And the more we can signal to our brain that life is good, I'm doing well, the more our body will work with us instead of against us. So that's your nutrition around there. So for me, I did my workout. I hopped in my car and I had my protein smoothie, which for me is the kindness.
(14:40)
It's nut milk that we make at Jolie. It is a little bit of raw cacao. It's a little bit of banana. That's my carbohydrate. It's protein powder, and then some anti-inflammatory superfoods like amla, maca, cinnamon, things like that. Turmeric, a little black pepper that was mine and every day, and I loved it. I love it, I love it, I love it. I love chocolate. It was so delicious. Oh my gosh, I look forward to that. I try to get myself to do the macho once, but I'm like, no, I need chocolate. So that's my post-workout. It's also suggested that you do a little pre-workout meal, but since I work out so early in the morning, I try that it doesn't work for me. But if you are working out later in the day, then that would make sense where you would have say a quarter of that smoothie, or you would have a few slices of chicken and a quarter of an apple, and then you would go to your workout.
(15:43)
That for later in the day is also a time to signal your body. That all is good, that nutrition is on deck. I can work really, really hard and I know that I'm not in a famine state, and so I can rebuild and I can rebuild even stronger than I was before. So that is where our nutrition sandwich comes in. You have to be intentional about that the rest of the day. You can slip and slide a little bit. So sometimes I would wake up, do my strength workout, have my smoothie, and my day would get busy and I would find myself not eating again into two o'clock. Is that optimal? No. But is it okay? Yes. And did it get in the way of my building muscle? No, it did not because I made sure to prioritize that nutrition sandwich around my workout. Now, for the rest of the day, again, your concentration is on protein, your concentration is on vegetable. That's your carbohydrate and some healthy fats. This is what you want. You want that type of food to A reduce inflammation. Our vegetables and our fruits reduce inflammation. You want it B, to give your body the building blocks to rebuild your muscle. And C, you want that healthy fat because the cells of your body as well as your hormones need that healthy fat.
(17:13)
When you do that very intentionally, you put your body in a muscle building mode. Muscle building mode has some pretty cool side effects, muscle building mode. Side effect is fat burning mode, muscle building mode. Side effect is side effect is better. Sleep and sleep is going to be important to you. You're exhausting your body. Your body is going to need sleep to rebuild. So that's the third factor in our three legged stool of building muscle is you need the sleep. You do those three things. You dial in a heavy weightlifting workout on a regular basis, three to five times a week. You dial in your nutrition, particularly around your workout. You provide yourself with lots of good food. And we're not talking crap food here. You're in midlife. Your body does not do crap food. We're talking fruits, we're talking vegetables, we're talking clean protein.
(18:28)
We're talking good, healthy food, olive oils, avocado. We're talking that type of food. So you give that to yourself. You don't give yourself bars. You don't give yourself pre-made shakes. You don't give yourself crap food. We don't do that in midlife. And then you give yourself sleep. You do those things and three months you are going to see a radical, radical change in your body, a radical change in your body composition, how you feel, how you move, how you look, how you dress, your confidence level, your alertness. You're going to look younger. You are going to be transformed. That is my little story and instruction on building an amazing female body. I look forward to the release of Jo Weight Loss because we will be dealing with these things. So sometimes we think weight loss is just fat loss, but weight loss goes beyond that.
(19:31)
There's definitely fat loss, but it also goes into creating a body that you're really happy with and what's happy for you may not be happy for me and vice versa. And there's no judgment in any of that. It is what is first off, healthy for you. And second off, what would turn you on the most? And I'm super excited about Julie weight loss because we'll have in-person support, but we'll also have the InBody. So you get the under the hood look of knowing what's happening inside your body to keep going. And you'll get clear guidance on nutrition. Nutrition that will help you to shift your body composition into more muscle, less fat, but also nutrition that will help you mitigate the stress and challenges of life that is anti-inflammatory that keeps your joints feeling good, that keeps your belly feeling good, that keeps your brain feeling good. That's important. We cannot have walk around hair looking good and sacrificing what actually is happening inside. That's not an option in midlife. It is a completely different ball game. We're talking Holistic 360 wellness here. So I encourage you to look out for that, to sign up for it, to get really plugged in. And you can contact me at Julie at the Jolie Life. Check out our other podcast, the Jolie Life Podcast, our website, the jolie life.com, and connect with us. Connect, connect, connect. There's so much there for you. Love to hearing from you soon.