Bitesize Biohacks – Optimise Nutrition & Exercise & Transform Your Body

11:43AM Oct 21, 2022

Speakers:

Angela Foster

Intro

Mike Matthews

Keywords:

muscle

protein

episode

training

angela

eating

body composition

body

gain

foster

fat loss

lose

fat

achieve

listening

bite size

women

leaner

pound

show notes

Welcome to the high performance health podcast with your host Angela Foster. The show where we talk about everything you need to break through limits and achieve a high performance, mind, body and lifestyle.

Hi, friends welcome to another episode of Bite Size bio hacks. It's been super popular recently the episodes that I've done with Dr. Cargill, it's on hormones and also Dr. Stacey Sims on how to design your exercise programme your nutrition, your sleep around your hormonal cycle, and specifically, the considerations for perimenopause and how to achieve longevity and optimal body composition. And so, in today's bite size bio hacks, I thought it'd be helpful to share a clip from my podcast with Mike Matthews at the beginning of the year, all around the concept of flip flopping and how to really achieve your optimal body composition and how you can fuel that with the right nutritional plan and the right exercise and how you can do the ultimate which is really to gain more muscle mass while also losing body fat, which there is a science to so I hope you enjoy this clip. If you want to listen to the full episode, which I highly recommend we went into a huge amount of detail on it, then it is episode 130. And Mike is a real expert in this area. He's written multiple best selling books on it including thinner, leaner, stronger and bigger, leaner, stronger for men, and he really knows his stuff. So if you want to listen to the full episode, that is episode 130. But for now enjoy this clip of me chatting to Mike Matthews.

For people listening, thinking, I want to lose fat and I want to gain some muscle. What are your thoughts on that?

Yes, certainly there's no question this has been shown in a number of studies. And when you are new to resistance training your body is is hyper responsive to it basically is what's happening, right. So your body's muscle building machinery, it it goes into overdrive, for the first it's a range. And this depends primarily on compliance, how well are people not being perfect, but doing the most important things mostly right most of the time. And then there are genetics, some people respond really well to training, some people respond, not so well. But even the people who respond not so well, they still can do great, they just have to be a little bit more patient, it's just a matter of time. It's not, it's not a matter of total muscle gain or strength gain that's only relevant to people who want to be a competitive strength athlete, right. And so when you first start out, this is in the body composition world, it's known as re composition or re comping body recomp. And that is where you simultaneously lose fat and build muscle and how to do it, fortunately, is very, very simple. You set up your diet to lose fat. So that means that you are going to be consistently eating fewer calories than you're burning, you are going to be consistently eating a lot of fruit. Well, I don't want to I want to be specific, you're going to be consistent consistently following a high protein diet, which doesn't it doesn't have to be an obnoxious amount of protein somewhere, let's say between 0.8 and one gramme of protein per pound of body weight, you can convert that into kilogrammes, if that makes more sense to you. And if that is if that is too much, because somebody has a lot of weight to lose. Another way of looking at it is one gramme per centimetre of height. So if somebody against say a woman is 200 pounds, and she's like, really fit 200 grammes of protein per day, that's what I write is that necessary, and for a 200 pound woman that that's, that's a, that's gonna be tough. Most a lot of women when they first start out that in my experience, they're eating 30 to 50 grammes of protein per day. So to ask her to go from that to 100 and even 160 to 200. That's a bit much it is a

lot. Yeah. So what would you do then with somebody who's already if you're quite lean, like say, I want to put on some muscle? And I am 115 pounds and I'm 165 centimetres, where would I go to somewhere in between about 130 grammes of protein a day? Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And there's a range there. Because you're you're fit, you could probably get away with a little bit less protein, like you could probably you could go to 0.8 grammes per pound, especially if you are maintaining or you are trying to gain muscle so you're intentionally over eating a little bit. If you are wanting to lose fat, it would probably be smarter to go a little bit higher because you're fit you have a fair amount of muscle support, make it make sense to go I would say at least 120 or so maybe 130. But not too important, as long as you're in that range of you're around 100 grammes, ideally a little bit higher. What would be a problem though, is if you're eating 50 grammes a day, for example, there's no question that that would not be enough to support muscle building if you are trying to gain muscle or, or muscle retention if you're trying to lose fat. And so so for women wanting to lose muscle, lose fat and build muscle the same time you set up your diet, for losing fat, and then you train in the gym for building muscle. And I think that's a good way actually to look at the primary functions of diet and training. primary function of training is not fat loss, like many people think, yes, it does support fat loss, of course, it burns calories. As you build muscle that supports your it boosts your metabolism, so to speak, training regularly helps your body do other things with the foods you eat, then store them as fat. So training supports fat loss, but most of the fat loss is going to come from nutrition and controlling your calories controlling your protein. And then the primary function of training is to support muscle building, or support muscle retention, maybe you're at a point where you don't really want to gain any more muscle, you're actually pretty happy with how everything looks. And you want to maybe you want to get stronger, or you want to find of course ways to enjoy your training. But in in, in women in men, it rarely happens. Most guys, they always want something to get bigger. But it's more common with women to get to a point where they can't point to anything on their body and say, I want more sighs there and then, and then the game becomes, of course, maintaining what they have. And so in the gym, then what we would do is we'd have this this person this, this is for men and women, but we'd have this person spend most of the time that they have available for exercise on training their muscles. So we want to that's resistance training, progressive overload just the fundamentals of good strength training, good resistance training. And that then drives the muscle growth and setting up the calorie deficit and controlling protein that drives the fat loss. And they can have their cake and eat it too. Most people for six to maybe 12 months. And then after that it gets a bit harder, and you can't effectively recomp anymore. But what's cool about that is if you do a good job in your first six 810 12 months, that's enough time to to really transform your body. And so it's pretty rewarding that first year is a lot of fun. Because you're seeing major changes in the mirror, you're seeing major improvements in your performance in the gym. And then things they get a little bit harder after that. But by then you've you've already you've already gained so much momentum and you've already established the habits and you've already completely changed your lifestyle that you're you're not discouraged by the fact that it's not as easy as it once was.

Thank you so much for listening to today's episode. As always, the show notes will be over on my website, Angela Foster performance.com forward slash podcast and you can download the transcript there together with the show notes and all of the other resources that I have on my website Angela Foster performance.com Thank you so much for listening, and I'll see you in the next episode.

Thanks for listening. Remember to review and subscribe. You can grab the show notes, the resources and highlights of everything Angela mentioned over at Angela Foster performance.com You can also snatch up plenty of other goodies including the highly helpful Angela recommends page which is a list of everything she personally recommend to optimise your mind, body and lifestyle