In this podcast, I talk about why “clean” eating isn’t the key to building muscle and losing fat, and what to expect in terms of the overall experience of “getting ripped” (and why 75% of the time you’re wondering if you’ll ever get there or not).
ARTICLES RELATED TO THIS PODCAST
Why “Clean Eating” Isn’t the Key to Weight Loss or Muscle Growth
The Definitive Guide to Effective Meal Planning
How to Speed Up Your Metabolism for Easier Weight Loss
The Best Way to Gain Muscle Without Getting Fat
What did you think of this episode? Have anything else to share? Let me know in the comments below!
Transcript:
[00:00:00] Hey, it’s Mike. And this podcast is brought to you by my books. Seriously though, it actually is. I make my living as a writer. So as long as I keep selling books, I can keep writing articles over at muscle for life and Legion and recording podcasts and videos like this and all that fun stuff. Now, I have several books, but the place to start is bigger leaner, stronger if you’re a guy and thinner leaner, stronger if you’re a girl.
Now, these books, they basically teach you everything you need to know about dieting, training and supplementation to build muscle, lose fat and look and feel great without having to give up all the foods you love or grind away in the gym every day, doing workouts that you hate. Now, you can find my books everywhere you can buy books online, like Amazon, Audible, iBooks, Google Play, Barnes Noble, Kobo, and so forth.
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And I’ve always had trouble finding products that I actually thought were worth buying and recommending. And basically I had been complaining about this for years and I decided to finally do something about it and start making my own products. And not just any products, but really the exact products that I myself have always wanted.
So a few of the things that make my supplements unique are one, they’re 100 percent naturally sweetened and flavored. Two, all ingredients are backed by peer reviewed scientific research that you can verify for yourself because on our website, we explain why we’ve chosen each ingredient. And we also cite all supporting studies.
So you can go dive in and Check it out for yourself. Three, all ingredients are also included at [00:02:00] clinically effective dosages, which are the exact dosages used in the studies proving their effectiveness. This is important, of course, because while something like creatine is proven to help improve strength and help you build muscle faster, if you don’t take enough, then you’re not going to see the benefits that are seen in scientific research.
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All right. Thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let’s get to the show.[00:03:00]
Hey, this is Mike Matthews from musclefullife. com. And in this podcast, I want to talk to you about clean eating and why it’s not as important as many people think it is when it comes to building muscle and losing fat. And I want to talk to you a little bit about the patience that it takes to build the type of body that you probably want to build.
And how it plays out in terms of overall time and why a lot of the time spent, it feels like everything is moving too slowly. And then it all starts to come together in the end. So let’s just start with clean eating. Clean eating it’s a very popular, just, subject these days. A lot of people Think that just by eating nutritious foods, clean foods that should be enough to build muscle and lose fat.
A lot of people think that it’s necessary that you can’t build muscle or lose fat unless you’re eating, 100 percent nutritious food that all your foods are certified clean, whatever that even means. And the truth is that, yeah, nutritious [00:04:00] foods are important. Your body needs a lot of different vitamins and minerals.
Different micronutrients to not just perform well in the gym, but also to just maintain optimal health and, maintain a kind of an overall sense of well being. So that’s the real value of clean foods. What a lot of people are missing though is that when it comes to building muscle, let’s say you have the training side of things, which means that you have to be properly overloading your muscles.
Your training intensity and frequency have to be correct. You have to be focusing on the right types of exercises and so forth. And then on the diet side the amount of protein that you eat does, play a very important role. You don’t have to eat obscene amounts of protein, but if you’re around a gram of protein per pound of body weight, you’re going to, that’s enough.
And then your body needs, there’s, it’s called energy balance. So what that means is your body’s expending a certain amount of energy every day. And then you’re feeding it a certain amount of energy every day through food. The difference between expenditure and consumption would be the [00:05:00] balance.
So if you’re eating a bit less than your body’s expending, then that would be in a negative balance. If you’re eating a bit more, it’s a positive balance. And what happens in negative balance is your body loses fat, but also your, metabolism slows down to match that because your body wants to maintain that state of homeostasis, wherein expenditure is matching consumption.
So to build muscle, you need to be eating enough protein. These are the most important points, beating enough protein and be in a slight positive energy balance, meaning that you do not want your body to be slowing its metabolism. I don’t want it to be. You want it to your metabolism to be running basically as quickly as possible, Or in another sense, as inefficiently as possible, meaning you want it to be burning as much energy as possible.
And you do that by eating a bit more energy or giving your body a bit more energy than it needs. And when it’s in that state, its ability to synthesize proteins, which of course includes muscle proteins, is at its highest, I guess you could say. That’s [00:06:00] muscle building relating to nutrition.
The types of foods that you eat are not so important. As long as the proteins are in a good enough state to be absorbed by the body which is pretty much everything. The only exception to that, would be that there are certain plant sources of proteins that just aren’t very well absorbed by the body.
Hemp, for instance, is pretty crappy. Whereas protein found in peas and brown rice, for instance, is actually pretty good. The highest quality proteins generally are going to be from animals. meat, dairy products and things like that. Eggs are great. So that’s muscle building when it comes to fat loss.
What matters more than it doesn’t. This is, and this is even more so you could just eat nothing but junk food every day and continue to lose fat. If you’re in that negative energy balance, if you’re feeding your body less energy than it’s burning, what you eat does not matter. It matters for your health.
But it does not matter for results. So what happens is, when a lot of [00:07:00] people, cause you flip through Instagram or Twitter, or you read random blogs or whatever, and everyone’s always babbling about, eat clean, train hard, oh gotta eat clean, gonna get lean, eat clean, all this crap.
And, again, it’s good. Eating nutritious food is good. But, if they don’t also tell you that, oh, I’m not just eating clean, I’m eating healthy. 2300 calories of clean food every day, and here’s why, and here’s how you can figure out how many calories of clean food you should be eating. That advice doesn’t help you.
Just to say, oh you should just eat clean, that’s how you’re going to get lean. No, not necessarily. It’s possible. And it would, let’s say that if your diet right now consists of drinking soda all day and eating fast food five times a week and eating ice cream every night. Yes. Eating clean is probably gonna help you lose weight because you’re gonna cut out, you can easily cut out 1500 calories a day minimum of just junk food.
And if you were trying to replace junk food, Those calories with clean foods, you wouldn’t even be able to [00:08:00] eat that much. Think of it as you can eat a Snickers bar, a couple hundred calories it’s not going to fill you up much, it’s just a little bar. But if you take that couple hundred calories and were to put that into, let’s say, vegetables and some protein, you’re going to be full for four or five hours just because clean foods generally are more filling, for instance there’s vegetables, of course, different, fibrous fruits like apples and stuff are pretty filling sweet potatoes, pretty filling potatoes are very filling white potatoes beans can be pretty filling.
So all of these are like clean foods, nutritious foods that are just going to keep you full. But in the end, what matters is how much you’re eating. That’s really the key. Another thing that kind of goes with the clean food movement or the clean eating movement is low carb and high fat. It’s very trendy right now.
Paleo is very important and is, a lower carb, higher fat way of eating. I’m not a fan of this way of this style of eating at all, especially if you’re training, if you’re weightlifting regularly. Carbs are your [00:09:00] friend. Carbs are what’s going to help you. They’re gonna help you maintain your training intensity.
Carbohydrates also play an important role in building muscle, not only because they help you push yourself harder in the gym but they also relate to insulin secretion and over time, elevated insulin levels help. They help you build muscle not because insulin isn’t is a directly anabolic hormone.
It’s not like testosterone, but it’s an anti catabolic hormone. So what that means is it helps prevent muscle breakdown. And when you look at muscle net muscle gain over time is simply the difference between your body’s ability to synthesize new proteins versus the degradation level of existing proteins.
So if you are only synthesizing, this many proteins, let’s say this many proteins per day, silly example, we get the idea, but you are losing, you’re breaking down this many that’s net muscle loss. And when you flip that’s net muscle gain. So You can increase muscle gain by increasing the [00:10:00] amount of protein synthesis that occurs.
We do that through exercise and through proper diet. And you can reduce the amount of protein breakdown that occurs. And we do that through proper diet and also through proper exercise as well. If you are consistently over training, you are causing too much muscle breakdown, which is going to be, waiting, weighing that negative side of that equation.
Carbs and I talk about this I’ll make a I’ll make a note of a, of an article where I go into the science of this with carbohydrates in their relation to building muscles. Not just me saying this. I want you to be able, if you want to go check it out, you can go see the science behind it, how it actually plays out.
And this has been studied directly, there’s no question. So yeah, this clean eating kind of, also being synonymous with low carb, high fat, not necessary. Low carb can help you lose weight faster in the short term mainly because you lose water faster. So you know, if you needed to, for whatever reason, be as lean as possible, look as good as possible in two weeks, sure.
Go low carb and you will shed, you’ll lose fat, but you’ll also shed a bit of water. [00:11:00] You’re going to look a little bit leaner. But if you are not in some kind of rush, I really don’t recommend going low carb because you’re not going to feel good. Your training is going to suck. Your energy levels are going to suck.
You’re going to be, some people get pretty miserable on low carb. I wouldn’t say I get miserable, but I don’t like how I feel. And especially because my work is, I’m constantly having to write and think carbohydrates help that a lot. So if I’m on low carb, I just feel mentally foggy. And.
Yeah, so it’s just not for me and I’ve never needed to go low carb even when I’m cutting like I started cutting this week and my carbs right now are right around 250 grams a day and I’ll be staying here for as long as possible. I hope to be able to stay here for Eh, I don’t know, two weeks.
And then I’m, I’ll probably have to drop just to continue just ’cause I have to cut my calories. ’cause when you reduce your, when you stricter calories, your metabolism slows down a little bit. It’s just, there’s nothing you can do about it. So to keep the weight loss going, you either have to move more or eat less.
And I’m starting my cut fairly high. [00:12:00] I’m starting at around 2,700 calories because my maintenance previously I was up to about 3,200 calories. per day on my training days and about 2, 100 calories on my off days. So now I’m just dropping that to about 2, 700 calories on my training days and I’ll keep the 2, 200 number on my off days and see how far that will get me.
I’m starting at about one 95 8 percent body fat or so. I want to get down to six. So we’ll see what I have to do. I know I’ll have to cut my calories a bit to, to get there, but. I don’t expect to have to go lower than 2300. So also just on this point of low carb, because usually the, you’re sacrificing carbs to add fats and this is very trendy right now.
A lot of it’s all about. Testosterone production is really the big kind of button that is pushed that if you eat a high fat diet, you’re, you’re gonna have these super high tea levels and you’re gonna build tons of muscle and lose all kinds of fat and stuff. And it is just not true when you look at the research of people going [00:13:00] from a low fat to a high fat diet or low to a moderate fat I think of one study right now, it’s commonly cited that showed a 13%, I believe it was right around their increase in free tea levels.
And that might sound cool, okay, wow, 13 percent higher, but what does that really mean? You’re not going to see any difference of that. You might feel it a little bit. You might feel a little bit more energetic. You might feel maybe a little bit more sex drive from that. If your T levels are at, 700 NGDL 600 NGDL, which is right down the middle and that jumped up by, 13, even 15%.
You might feel that a little bit, but it’s not going to make any difference in your training. You’re not going to be stronger. You’re not going to build more muscle that’s been proven to do that. You would have to bump your, you have to push your T levels up to basically the top of what’s physiologically normally, what’s naturally even possible.
And then beyond that’s when you really start seeing differences in the gym. So what you’re gaining by going high fat is a [00:14:00] basically insignificant increase in, in testosterone levels. What you’re losing is the carbs, which means you’re losing training intensity and you’re losing that insulin related benefit where it creates, I guess you could say it creates a more anabolic environment in the body.
So that’s the overall view of clean eating. I’m not a fan of the, if it fits your macros, eat junk and get shredded and, eat pop tarts every day and all that crap. Health does matter and, my diet is actually very clean, but that’s just simply because I like healthy foods.
However, I do every week my cheat meal, I’m probably going to tone this down now that I’m cutting just because as you get leaner, you, a cheat meal becomes counterproductive if it’s too high fat because dietary fats are basically just stored directly as body fat. The, it doesn’t cost the end of the body much energy to store dietary fat as body fat and your body can’t even do it without the presence of, you don’t need a [00:15:00] huge insulin spike.
You could just. Drink some olive oil and your body’s able to store that as fat. It doesn’t need a big insulin response to do that. So like the best type of cheat meal really, it would be a high protein, high carb meal because the cost of a protein to, the energy cost to store protein as fat is very high and your body has a lot of other uses for protein than body fat.
And the energy cost of storing carbohydrates as body fat is actually fairly high as well. Research has shown to be about 25 percent of the energy in a carbohydrate, in a gram of carbohydrate goes into just processing it to turn it into fat. And your body also has other uses for carbs as well.
Whereas dietary fat is basically just stored as body fat. Of course it does have, your body does use fat to, to produce hormones and it uses it to repair cells and such. Okay. But it doesn’t need very much for that. So you know, you could go to a restaurant and you can easily eat 400 grams, not 400, you could easily eat 200 grams of fat, easy in a restaurant.
If you’re going to go there, you’re going to eat an appetizer or two, you’re going to have an [00:16:00] entree, you’re going to have a side and a dessert easy. And if you really go for it, you’d be surprised how much butter and cream and things are in certain types of dishes where you can eat three, 400 grams of fat.
And it’s not nearly as filling, it’s very calorie dense. Carbohydrates are more filling, so that depends on, what you’re ordering. But you’re much better off going high carb, high protein because your body is going to store less of that as body fat. And so you’ll do other things with it.
So what I’m going to be doing on my cut is I’m not going to be, that’s normally as a part of my maintenance. What I would do is save up a bunch of my calories every Friday. I would basically just eat protein and my pre and post workout carbs. And and save the bulk of my daily carbs and fats for dinner.
And then my wife and I go to a restaurant and, I don’t go crazy, but I don’t watch what I’m eating. I just order whatever. And I try to eat about I’m fairly, pretty familiar with what to expect in certain types of foods, so I’d shoot for about 1500 calories in the meal and maybe 2000 and be done with it and end the day maybe 500 calories higher [00:17:00] than I normally would.
Not a big deal. However, for my cut, I’m going to be doing what’s called a refeed, which is where you drop, you do it. I’m gonna be doing it probably every second. Sunday and we’ll see on what day I want to do it. But what you’re doing is you drop your fats to as low as you can get them really, and double your carbs.
And the reason why you do that mainly there’s two, two main reasons. One is it replenishes glycogen stores in the muscles which helps your training. You’ve probably experienced when you’re cutting that as time goes on, your training, You shouldn’t lose a ton of strength, but it just gets harder and your strength does go down a little bit and your workouts just get harder and they’re more exhausting.
When you carve up like that, it gives you some renewed vigor. I guess you could say you’re going to have some, you’re going to gain some of that strength back. You’re going to gain some of that muscle endurance back. Your training is going to feel a bit better. So you use that where it’s needed.
You’re going over the week and you carve up and you come in and then you just ride that. And so there’s that benefit. And then there’s also a benefit [00:18:00] related to a hormone called leptin, which is produced by body fat. And when leptin levels are high, it basically tells the body it’s in a positive energy state.
It has food, it can lose body fat is a simple way of putting it. Whereas when if leptin levels are low and they become chronically low as you diet over time, it becomes harder to lose weight. You feel hungrier because then the counter hormone, which is ghrelin is higher, which stimulates hunger.
It just low leptin levels makes dieting suck. Carbohydrates, however, spike leptin production. Fat doesn’t really affect it at all. Protein does to some degree, but carbs are particularly effective at increasing leptin. So when you are giving your body a large, amount of carbs in a day, you are dramatically raising leptin levels, which keeps everything going, keeps you feeling good.
So that’s what I’m going to be doing for for my cheat meals with my dieting. But in terms of My, my dietary fat overall, it’s, your body doesn’t need as much dietary fat [00:19:00] as many people think. I’ll make, I will link an article in the description below. And so you can go check out the kind of the science behind that and why I, my diets are, I wouldn’t say they’re low fat, but they’re right on the edge between moderate and low fat high fat diets.
I just don’t really see the point of doing it. Yeah that’s pretty much the whole story with clean eating. What I want you to understand is that you have to make sure that if you want your weight loss or weight gain in endeavors to go as smooth as possible, you have to make sure that you know your numbers and you’re hitting those numbers.
It’s not hard to do and I’ll link an article below that we’ll just lay it out for you. It’s very simple, but you have to stick to it. And the only case where it doesn’t work, where you can’t just run through some simple calculations, find your numbers, create a meal plan, eat that food, eat those foods every day and achieve the goals you want is if you’re dealing with metabolic damage, which I’ve talked about in previous [00:20:00] videos and podcasts and I’ll link an article below again on it so you can check that out.
But if that’s the case, then the first order of business is to fix your metabolism, speed it back up. And then you can just go do the normal thing of find your numbers, stick to it and eat foods that you like also. And that includes We’ll see when I, right now I have a little dessert worked in every day.
I might, that’ll probably one of the things that I drop when I need to just because it’s unnecessary. I don’t really care. But I like chocolate a lot, so I’m into these days. Unfortunately it has a bit of fat. I prefer just a pure carb because I would rather get my fats from elsewhere, but whatever.
I have about a hundred calories of chocolate a day with dinner tastes good. And some people, they like to push the, when they understand dieting and that it’s just numbers, they will try to jam more junk calories into their meal plans just for, because they want it. I don’t like to do that because one, I don’t really care.
[00:21:00] I’m not a junk food person. I’m not even really a sugar person. Sure. I like sugar. I’ll eat desserts, but I don’t feel any compulsion to do it. I could eat one dessert a week or one a month and it would be the same thing to me, really. But a more practical reason why I think that’s a bad idea is because in many cases the junky kind of indulgent foods are so calorie dense that it just, you have to sacrifice satiety normally, meaning that you’re going to be hungry when you’re trying to save 400 calories for your dessert and you start working that out in a meal plan.
That means that, you’re probably going to be feeling pretty bad through the day just to get that 400 calories because you’re just going to have to be, low calorie, and then this dinner and then a 400 calorie dessert. It’s much smarter to rely on foods that are going to keep you full, fibrous foods, obviously high protein.
And. So rely on those foods and then, if you want to work in 10 percent of your calories for me, I even do less, it’s really 5 percent [00:22:00] is like a random treat, but I could do 10%, like if I wanted to save 200 calories for dessert, sure, I could do that. I could have, whatever that would be.
I think it’d be like 10 spoons of Talenti gelato. Talenti is the best. But I just don’t care. It doesn’t matter to me. I do a little bit of chocolate and I’m happy with that. So that’s basically everything I want to say about clean eating. Just know that it’s not it’s good. Yes, eat nutritious foods, but that’s not all it takes to lose weight.
So let’s move on to the next thing I want to talk about, which is patience and what it takes to really build a great physique. Of course, You’re going to expect me to say that it takes time, and it does, but a lot of cases it takes a lot more time, depending on what you want to do, than you might realize.
And in this regard, guys have it worse than girls, really. Because, if a guy starts out, he’s never done anything, he’s never built any muscle, he’s just a normal dude, and he looks at Let’s say he doesn’t have an unrealistic goal. He’s not trying to look like a fitness model or a cover [00:23:00] model.
He’s not, let’s say I’m six two. So if my goal was to be like two 20 at 6 percent impossible unless I was going to, get on drugs, that’d be the only way to do it. So let’s say the average guy in my experience probably wants to gain the look that he wants is probably a 30 to 40 pounds of muscle and under 10 percent body fat would probably be like the general Goal for most guys and what that takes when you factor in that there is no, you can, your newbie gains your first six months, you will see pretty rapid muscle growth.
Rapid muscle growth is maybe 10 pounds in your first six months. If you gain 10 pounds of muscle in six months, you’ve done very well. You can also lose some body fat in that time. This is really is just a function of newbie gains. As you become more experienced and you lift for longer and longer, you are no longer able to build muscle and lose fat at the same time.
Then the game becomes maintain your muscle and lose fat. But for the first six to eight months or so, you can build [00:24:00] muscle, lose fat. And if you do a great job you can gain, you I’d say the max would be 25 pounds of muscle in your first year. That would be like very good genetics though.
Average that I see is probably 15 to 20 pounds in the first year. Now that’s a lot, 15 to 20 pounds, but when it’s spread throughout your entire body it’s a visual change, but depending on your height, that’s not a transformation just yet. It’s wow, people are going to be, whole, wow, what are you doing?
But when you are looking at yourself, you’re not going to feel transformed as a guy in your first year. If you’re starting out on the, skinnier side, if you’re quite overweight and you lose, let’s say 40 pounds of fat, even 50 pounds of fat Maybe 50 is a bit high, I’d say 30 or 40 pounds of fat in your first year and build some muscle.
That’s going to be a much dramatic, much more dramatic visual change and visual transformation just because you’re going to go from overweight to having abs and having some muscle. But you still will probably not be at the point where you want to be in depending [00:25:00] on what your goals are. So generally speaking for guys, it probably takes to go from like a normal guy to Somebody that looks, let’s say, extremely fit big, developed muscles all over your body and lean probably takes no less than two years.
More realistically, three to four years probably is a honest way to honest prediction of what it takes. And that means that you’re training correctly and eating correctly. 95 percent of the time. You’re not taking months off. You’re not dragging on cuts for long periods of time.
Like I’ve talked to guys that made the mistake of they didn’t want to guess it was more just a compliance consistency issue. But what happened is so they would start cutting for a bit And then they would go off their diet and eat a bit more for a little bit and not lose weight for a couple weeks and then go back to cutting and then just juggle that state where they’re like cutting for a couple weeks [00:26:00] and then just not really not cutting but not bulking just in the middle eating a bit more cheating too much kind of thing.
And doing that were then like six months goes by and they’ve only gained five, six, maybe max seven pounds muscle because. When your body’s in a calorie deficit, it can’t build muscle efficiently. Yes, if you’re new, you can build some muscle, but you’re not going to build as much muscle as you would if, as if, if you were in a calorie surplus.
That doesn’t mean that everyone should start in a calorie surplus. If you are over 15 percent body fat, you should start with a cut for sure. And I talk about why in an article. That I will link below the, really the ideal kind of range that you want to be in is you want to be between 10, 10 and 15 percent body fat.
So you want to start around 10 percent and then you want to be in a calorie surplus up until 15, 16 percent and then go back down to 10 percent rinse and repeat and you will get the best gains over time being in that body fat. Percentage range [00:27:00] and those cutting periods become shorter and shorter as you go as, as you continue, as you have more muscle, your body’s able to burn fat faster.
And I’m not even exactly sure why beyond that it just is easier. It’s probably just a compliance issue. It’s probably once, once you’ve done it once, once you see that it’s not very hard to go from 15 percent to 10% I guess you can just gain that mental confidence and just know that.
Okay, fine. It’s time to do it again, time to do it again, and you don’t mess up on your diet. You just bang it out and get done. So really as a guy, your first, minimally your first year is spent doing this where you are in a slight calorie surplus and you are slowly gaining body fat. And this is most guys.
Some guys have really good genetics and they don’t gain much body fat. They’re able to put on lean mass fairly efficiently. With very little fat, and then that’s great for them, but I’m not even one of those people general, like you’re doing well for every pound of fat that you gain, you’re gaining a pound of muscle.
That’s pretty good. If you’re doing [00:28:00] better than that’s really good. So your first year or so as a guy is spent just doing that where you’re getting bigger, you’re getting fatter and then you’re getting leaner. And then by the end of your cut, you feel small. And then you go back, then you get a little bit bigger, you add a little more muscle, a little bit of fat, and then you strip it back down, you look a little bit better and it’s just rinse and repeat until you, there’s a point where once again, it’s not, probably not year one.
And this is where it goes back to the point I said originally where people feel like it’s too slow. Like when are they gonna look good? When are they gonna finally be able to go to the beach and, impress everyone and have girls stare at them and whatever. It just takes time.
You’ll reach a point where if you do that enough and you do it well where you start hitting probably the 13 14 percent range and you actually start feeling too big. Like you’re looking at yourself in the mirror and you just look like a big, bloofy guy. just too big. And you’re like, then that’s when you know, you’re actually, you start looking good when you start cutting to not just 10%, but under, [00:29:00] especially when you go under 10%, you lose quite a bit of size.
You can look you could feel like you’re the perfect size at 10 percent and then cut down to 7 percent and feel tiny and be like, what, wow, where did all my size go? Cause you lose quite a bit of water and glycogen that just gives you that size. That puffed up look, you lose that when you get leaner and leaner.
So really all you have left is what lean mass do you really have? Cause you don’t have that sarcoplasmic, that fluid that’s in there, just pumping everything up. So that’s how it goes for guys where the first year is don’t. think that you’re going to dramatically transform yourself in the first year.
That’s those crazy, three months, six months, even one year of transformations that you see. The ones where guys are going from nothing to jacked are almost always involving steroid use. And also in many cases, like you have guys that were once in great shape, so they have muscle memory on their side, which is a very real thing.
So they go from that, they start training again and [00:30:00] they’re using drugs, so they’re able to go from to, whoa, holy shit, in three months, or even four or five months, or whatever. Don’t just ignore those transformations. Natural transformations are much, you can, they’re just slower.
It just takes more time. You can achieve the same I can’t say you can achieve the same look because you can’t depending on what drugs are being used, but you can achieve a dramatic transformation. It just takes longer. That’s all. So as a guy, you can think of it as like the overall journey from normal to an impressive physique.
75 percent of that time you are you’re probably feeling like it’s going a bit slow. And, you’ll, you compare your body to maybe people you see online or in magazines and you’re not that excited but when it really starts to come together is after you’ve gained those first 30, 20, yeah, 30, 35 pounds of muscle and this depends on your height too.
If I’m six two, so I have to put on, 10 pounds of muscle on me looks very different than 10 pounds of muscle on somebody who’s five, [00:31:00] seven, the five, the person who’s five, seven is going to look way different. Wow, you’re going to think that they gained 20 pounds and I gained 10 pounds.
So it really depends on your height. But if you were if you’re my height, then it’s going to take probably 30, 35 pounds of muscle. And then you get lean. And then all of a sudden, you’re You look great. And that’s just how it goes. And once you reach that point, then you just maintain it and that’s much easier.
Maintaining a great physique is much easier than building one. You don’t, it doesn’t take maximal effort your entire life to look great. You can train like that and you can do that if you want. I like training hard. I like the foods I eat. It doesn’t feel like a burden to me. If I wanted to drop to training three times a week, I could, I would look the same if I wanted to be, if I just had to eat certain types of foods or whatever, I could work it in, I could figure it out.
But I like the taste of all the, I like healthy food is just the way I am. And I like, I don’t need to go out to a restaurant and eat a bunch of crap more than once [00:32:00] a week. And even that is just like. All right, cool. Let’s do it. But I’m not, salivating at the thought of it.
So yeah, once you’re there it’s very easy to maintain it. And and by the time you get there, you also really learn to enjoy the process. You’re going to be enjoying your workouts. You’re just going to enjoy the lifestyle. You feel good. You look good. It’s not just You don’t get there oh, I finally made it, now I can just be lazy.
That’s just not how it goes. And for women you have it much easier than guys. For, I would say that a woman that goes from just a normal, the normal type of girl body would be maybe 20 to 25 percent body fat, not very much muscle and yeah, it just looks like a normal person to a very fit type of look, which would be probably like, I don’t know, 16 to 18 percent body fat with with good muscle tone with, some shape in their arms and legs and a button, whatever takes, I would say probably a year would be a good it could be done quicker depending on where you’re [00:33:00] starting.
And depending on your genetics, but if you really stick to it I think that pretty much any girl can go from wherever she’s at to looking really good in about a year. And even if that means that she has to lose 30 pounds of fat a year is enough time to do that. And two years never. Two years, if a girl.
is really on it for two years. She can look amazing. So it’s just easier for girls because they don’t have to build as much muscle. That’s the, that’s what makes it tough for us guys. We have it a bit easier when it comes to losing fat. That’s true. But building muscle is a much slower and a much more frustrating type of experience because it comes it requires a lot more work than burning fat and it just comes slower.
And it also comes with the, So when you’re having to eat a bit more food and you’re building some muscle, but you’re also getting fatter, you don’t really feel like you’re looking much better. You just look bigger, but you’re not, you don’t have the shape and the stuff that you want.
So yeah just keep that in mind that [00:34:00] it’s a process. It’s not an overnight thing. You have to look at it more as a lifestyle change, but just know that there is there is an end to the tunnel. It’s not a never ending. where it takes 20 years to get fit and then you have to, slave away, 15 hours a week to maintain it.
Not at all. You’re looking at worst case scenario, a few years of, dedicating five, maybe six hours a week to exercise. At most, you could get away with less. And then from there, maintaining it requires less if you want. And that’s pretty much it. I hope that hope the, this podcast, we’ve hopefully you found it helpful.
If have any other things that you’d like me to talk about, head over to my website, musclefullife. com. There’s a, an ask me anything type of ad right in the front page. So you can click on that. And I also, I reply there in writing, but I sometimes take up those subjects and podcasts as well.
And if you like the podcast, please subscribe to it or subscribe to my YouTube channel. Bye bye. A lot more stuff to come. [00:35:00] Thanks again. See you next time.