Find Your Perfect Exercise

Maxime Sigouin

Good. Thank you for having me. I am excited to be here.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. We’re going to have a lot of fun talking because we’ve worked so much together. You are all about the exercise piece. Could you just give us a little bit about your background and how you came to start utilizing exercise and helping people find health?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, of course. I am a certified personal trainer. But I also have a very extensive background in competing in different sports, including basketball, bodybuilding, powerlifting, Iron Man, and, probably over 50 triathlons. If you’re on video, you can see all the medals behind me playing baseball. I have always been in sports my whole life until I started coaching almost four years ago. Then, with 700 transformations in the process, you learn a thing or a few things.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

A thing or a few. My goodness. That’s good. Now I know you have some amazing transformational stories.

Maxime Sigouin

You’re one of them.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes, I am. I. It made this middle-aged body much better than it was. For that, I am thankful, and it’s still in progress. But as far as speaking to the world of hypertension, I think we can just speak in generalities about chronic disease. But in particular with hypertension, we know that there’s lifestyle factors—sleep issues, your diet, exercise aids—all these different things. However, exercise can influence everything that will help with hypertension and stress management. Can we speak a little bit about the generalities of exercise and the benefits, and then maybe get a little bit more specific on the exercise that you’ve seen some changes happen? Through our exercise, we’re seeing more changes in people, and they have better health outcomes.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, of course. Exercise would be the foundation that would help everything else improve. As there are two types of exercise, they would be your cardiovascular exercise, do you think, in terms of cardio; cycling, cycling, swimming, biking, running, rollerblading, jumping on a trampoline, or whatever you prefer? On the flip side, it’d be kind of your strength training or resistance training. It doesn’t necessarily have to be in the gym. It could be a resistance band at home, using a reusable IKEA bag. What cans of black beans are there as weights? Your body doesn’t know what it’s lifting; all it knows is resistance against gravity. That’s why I’m going to encompass exercise, as all of these things put together from a heart standpoint are going to make your heart stronger. Ultimately, it’s going to make your heart more efficient by being able to move the blood to help regulate your blood pressure. 

On the flip side, it will help to improve your sleep, so your sleep quality is going to improve. If you think of all the situations that would have to happen for you to have massive hypertension, low sleep, be unhealthy, or be overweight, all the things that we know would affect exercise are going to bring you to the complete opposite. It is going to help improve your sleep. One of the main reasons is also because you’re going to be tired after working out. You get a better night’s sleep after a good, hard workout. me of the other ones that also stress management as well. If you’re able to manage your stress automatically, it’s going to help with your blood pressure levels as well. One cool thing is that when you start exercising, you naturally want to start fueling your body properly. You’re less likely to want to eat junk food, salty foods, processed foods, or oily foods that would cause your pleasure to kind of go up, and ultimately, you naturally want to eat fruits and vegetables and healthier foods that make you feel better because you already feel good from doing the exercise. The other components I wanted to talk about were sleep, nutrition, and fitness. The other one is escaping me, but it’s going to come back at some point.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. sleep, stress management, community, and you’re eating a plant-based diet for your weight loss?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. Weight management, ultimately. If you’re carrying less excess body fat on your body, we all know that’s going to help with blood pressure. Exercise is going to be the way to be able to accomplish that healthily while ultimately being able to. I know I will dive into it later. But you can strengthen your bones, improve your metabolism, and do all these fun things.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes, absolutely. Yes. It’s interesting. When I was younger, I did lots of other teaching and stuff, but I was looking at the different types of exercise, and there was a cool research article speaking to the different types of exercise. They all help anywhere between four and nine numbers, dropping on that top number, that systolic blood pressure. However, the one that they found that was statistically different was isometric exercises on the walls. 

Maxime Sigouin

Yes.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

I do these things, squeezing a ball and doing different things. Can we talk a little bit about what isometric exercises are and maybe some suggestions? Because I was quite significant. It was a nine-point drop on that top number for every point drop. It’s a magnitude difference in mortality, risk, cardiovascular events, and other things. But if you could just maybe speak to some of those, it would be cool.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, of course. It’s basically where you’re holding the movement versus going through the full range of motion. Eccentric in concentric motions. You’re going up and down with the weight symmetrically; you’re going to be holding two movements. Ultimately, I can’t remember which bodybuilder kind of made it popular. I believe it is potentially Tom Platz, but I may be wrong about the name, but ultimately he found that you can get a lot of stress on your muscle that would trigger an increase in lean muscle mass, which would increase the tension that would be on your bones, which would make your bones stronger. If you just have on a bench press machine and you just go about halfway to three-quarters and you hold it, you’re going to be able to hold a lot of heavier weight than if you were trying to go through the full motions. 

Let’s just say put you on the machine, Laura, and you can do 100 pounds for ten reps. As an example, I can probably load with 120 and 130 pounds, and you will be able to hold the tension there. It’s going to put a different amount of stress on the bones and the muscles. The same thing with the wall sits with the ball between you, you squeeze it. You’re putting that stressor on the muscle without having to go through the full range of motion. You feel that your quads are on fire, your glutes and your hamstrings are on fire, and you didn’t exert much force quite. You can go fully up and down. There’s a benefit to mixing both. But isometric training helps, especially when you’re new to fitness. There is potentially a little bit of a lack of coordination in the movement because if I get you to do a squat with the barbell and it’s your first time, your body and your nervous system are going to be affected. What the heck is happening here? You’re going to be tweaking, and your knee is going to do weird stuff. You’re going to your body, but you’re not going to know how to do the movement efficiently. A great place to start. Then you can move into basically doing the full range of motion.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Well yes. What they said the mechanism was that the heart rate decreased a little bit. But so, your cardio output is a stroke volume increase, meaning how much your body’s cardio output is going. The same, they said, was total peripheral resistance. It’s a tight tube, and you’re pushing blood into it. There’s a tightness or stiffness in the arteries from high blood pressure. But what happens is that something about this particular exercise or exercise type relaxes that. It can go into a more pliable tube, which is cool. But I did have a question: can you get back to isometric now? I’m bringing in some other questions that others might ask that I’ve had patients ask or that other people have asked and have done otherwise. If someone has some immobility issues, maybe they can’t do a wall or something. Is there anything that someone can maybe do who can’t get on them, say, the ground into a plank or something like that? Any suggestions?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, for sure. There’s always an easier variation. You can do all these movements, for example. a wall set, typically when you would do it, you’d be sitting about 90 degrees, You’d be holding a position there. If you’re holding 45 degrees, that’s still putting stress on the muscles in your legs.   If you think of 90 degrees being the hardest one, if you just bring your back up, kind of the opposite, but my hands straight this way, so as you kind of go up with your back against the wall, It becomes easier. But if that’s where you have to start, that’s where you have to start. Same thing with a push-up. We’ve had members that had to lose 100+ pounds, and we weren’t going to give them push-ups. It was: You’re going to do pushups on the wall. We’re going to start on the wall. Just started from there, and eventually, we went. 

Let’s go to our kitchen counter, then let’s go to a chair, then let’s go to your knees on the ground, and then let’s do a four-foot push-up. There’s always an easier variation of one of those exercises. If you’re carrying too much weight or if it’s because of mobility issues. Ultimately, you can work on improving your mobility to a certain extent. We had members with fused spines. There’s just so much that you can do at this point, but you can always work on improving your mobility. Ultimately, your body is always going to find a way to adjust. That’s why it’s important to make sure that you work on your mobility and keep your form. Because if you lack mobility in your hips, for example, and you’re trying to perform a squat, your body is going to try to do weird things. Your knees are going to go way over your toes to try to go low enough for the people you see in the videos. Well, that’s not the approach at first. Let’s just maybe start with a quarter squat. Just start with the base. Let’s start by loosening up your hips so that we can start to go lower with the proper form.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Exactly. Maybe we can also talk a little bit about mobility. What is mobility? How does someone know that they have a mobility issue? Because sometimes I’m just getting old or I’m feeling stiff, what can we expect as we get older, or just in general as humans, what should we be expecting your body to be able to do?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. As you get older, I can pretty much guarantee that you will have mobility issues. When you think about when we’re kids, we’re moving in all different planes of movement, We’re going sideways laterally, up, down, and backward, because we’re just playing. But as we get older, we kind of get stuck in our daily pattern, A lot of us just go forward. If we go sideways, we completely turn our body to go sideways, which is very rare when we do lateral movement. When I get a lot of people who are a little bit older to do a reverse launch, their brains have no idea what’s happening because they’re going backward on one leg. What is this? What is this movement? Your body’s trying to stabilize itself. 

As we get older, it’s important to continue to move in different directions. That’s why we see guys who are in their 40s or their 50s and are skateboarding. They have a lower risk of injury because they’ve been skateboarding and moving in different movements their whole lives. But for people who have been working a desk job or have just a regular kind of lifestyle, they sort of lack that mobility. How do you have a lack of mobility? Again, if you can, we call that Asian squat, but if you can sit down if you can do a squat down your feet, flat on the ground, and you can hold that, you probably have good ankle and hip mobility if you can do that. I don’t. I twisted my ankles ten times each. My ankle mobility is terrible, so I can’t do that. 

But that’s the ultimate definition of great mobility. If you can kind of go do that squat feeder flat on the ground again, if you can just simply lift your arms, you can move your arms and all the planes that they are supposed to be moving in your arms and go backward, whatever movement they’re supposed to be moving, without any restriction or any sense of tightness or pain. You have a greater sense of mobility. But chances are, if you’re anything above 18, you’re probably starting to lack mobility in certain aspects. The big one for the majority of people is hips. A lot of people spend a lot of time sitting. Your hip flexors are probably tight, which is why I see a lot of people walk this way there under activate their glutes, so their butt muscle is not activated properly because they’re walking this. After all, their hip flexors are so tight here. That would be a great one, too. It’s a stretch. I made you do animal flows, have you done animals flow on the warmups?

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes, we’re mostly walking, but. Yes.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. some of the animal flows are great. Yes. Bear walk, orangutan, sing the crab, the inchworm. Those are fun mobility exercises that you can start with that are safe and that you can do at your own pace. I got people in their 30s who are just struggling to do them, and they got members in their 70s that have been with me for six months and others who’re doing them; they’re flowing around; they’re hypermobile, so everyone can improve their mobility ultimately.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Absolutely. Yes. It’s never surprising to people. We just think that we will always be able to do what we did when we were kids. But you’re that sitting, you lose, you don’t use it, you lose it type thing. While there’s a lot of discussion, maybe there’s some confusion on what anaerobic is versus aerobic-type exercises. Could you just give some general definitions of what that type of exercise is?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, for sure. Aerobic, would be if there’s enough oxygen to meet the demand that you’re asking of your body. Anaerobic, as there wouldn’t be enough. If you’re doing anything that’s lower intensity, basically your body has time to kind of catch up in terms of whether there’s enough oxygen to meet the demand that you’re asking of it or strength training a zone to run. a very low-intensity run where you can maintain its pace. We can maintain a conversation with someone beside you. Then, on the opposite side, you’re doing a full-out sprint. A lion is running after you. You kind of talk about that ATP storage in your body. You have maybe 11 11, or 15 seconds of ATP stored in your body, and then you find a different source of energy. Isn’t there not enough oxygen to meet the demand that you’re asking of your body? That’s why you can sprint, but not forever. Eventually, you slow down, When I talk about a sprint, I’m talking about a full-out sprint. Literally. There’s a line after your life. It depends on this. You will run fast, but at one point you will start to slow down because there’s not enough oxygen coming in for what you’re asking of your body. That’s kind of the difference between the two.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Alternatively, you could use high-intensity interval training.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, to a certain extent. Yes. That’s why the high-intensity component is very short. It’s never 5 minutes of high intensity. The short bout, and then you have a slower period, very intense, and then a lower, slower period.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Perfect. Exercise is a big part of weight maintenance. They don’t say you can’t eat what you eat; the kitchen is the main component of weight loss. But, of course, both of these things are important. Exercise and diet contribute to weight loss, which is one of the higher risk factors for hypertension. Can you speak about how you help people? Those 700 transformation stories—how do you begin this? What are you telling them exactly to do, and what is their journey?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, for sure. The big part of strength training is that it’s such a big component of any great transformation because strength training or resistance training against gym resistance means that as long as there’s resistance against gravity, that’s what your body cares about—the thing that builds and molds your body. Not saying that you want to look like a bodybuilder, Arnold, or anything like that. Most people will never look at that. A lot of men train for 30 years and don’t even look close to Arnold. No one has to worry about it. Women or the masses worry about it. But the strength training is there to help you build lean muscle and shape your body. Here’s why lean muscle is more beneficial for a few reasons. 

One of them is that the more muscle mass you have, the more energy it requires for you to be able to maintain it and fuel that muscle, so your metabolic rate goes up. You’re able to consume more. You have to consume more food to be able to maintain this amount of lean muscle mass; you’re stronger. The more muscle you have, the stronger you are to injury because your joints are better protected from having more muscle. When you’re doing something that would be strenuous, instead of going on your ligaments and tendons, your muscles will take the majority of the load. You’re less likely to injure some of those joints—back, knee, hip, elbow, shoulders, etc. On the opposite side, when you’re helping your body build more lean muscle, you’re also burning more calories because it requires more calories to kind of burn it, so it’s easier to stay at a healthier body weight. 

Strength training and slash resistance training are there to help build the body, and nutrition is there to reveal the body because you can train all you want. If the nutrition isn’t there, you’re just if there’s a layer of fat on your muscle and you build muscle, the layer of fat will just be pushed out. You’ll look bigger—not in a good way, but it’s just muscle that you put on. But if there’s that thick layer of fat in front of it, you’re not going to look too different. So nutrition is the thing that’s going to reveal the body, and resistance training is the thing that’s going to build it. If you want to have a great transformation, you should not just focus on the superficial aspects. I want to look great, but when your body feels lean, tight, and toned, do you just feel good? It’s one of those days you wake up and have a great night’s sleep. It’s sunny outside. You’ve got your favorite outfit on. That’s the feeling that having a fit, lean, and tight body gives you. But you get to be naked, and you look and feel that way without having to have clothes on. Yes, nutrition reveals; that the training builds.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

It looks fantastic. Well, just at my own expense. I’ve never been overweight, except when I was nine months pregnant. But what was interesting was that my BMI was always under 22. But when I started working with you, it was a matter of postmenopausal at this point. Things have changed with hormonal changes. Over the last couple of years, 10 pounds has kept up. But working with you and then doing the moderate caloric deficit and the strength training, for which I’ve always been a runner, I did some strength training intermittently, but more focused on losing. I think I’m close to 14 pounds now. Yes, somewhere in there. It is crazy. When I look at these pictures, they aren’t in, you can see it more than the pictures do. I think that you were nice in these.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

But freaking amazing. Four inches off my hips. What the heck? Four inches. It wasn’t even that. I mean, I was still wearing single-digit clothes, which would cut that down. But it was, I’m pulling out because I pulled the treatment, and I’m holy smears. I’ve had to give away clothes—my favorite clothing—to all of us. As you said, when you wake up, you feel stronger, especially as we get older, especially for women. I think it’s such an important message to say you can. Even if you aren’t fitting the category of overweight or obese, there can still be a significant body composition change that makes you feel even better than you already feel, even if you feel pretty good. I felt pretty good. But now it’s all good. It may help me run faster, which is my place for mental recharge, with running. Those are the cool things. I wanted to share this not just for someone who is overweight, but because it gets a little harder to lose the last 3 pounds.

Maxime Sigouin

But yes, the leaner you are, the slower the fat loss is; there’s less fat. Your body’s putting up a fight for it. But it’s all been I was talking about this, my fiancee, I was, but some people have thyroid issues or PCOS or hypothyroidism, blah, blah. It’s genetic, they’re bigger. I was. I’ll be honest with you, I’ve never not been able to help someone lose weight, whether it’s peri-postmenopausal PCOS. I was, look, whatever condition you want to throw at me, I’ve not been able to transform someone, because the truth is, if you’re strength training and you’re eating whole food plant-based with the proportions that we give you, it’s impossible to not be able to transform.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Because a lot of people will say, You can’t gain weight on plant-based foods. Yes, you can.

Maxime Sigouin

For sure. Yes. Especially nowadays.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. With all the processed foods, even still, we’re eating nuts and avocados. I mean, people just don’t pay attention to that.

Maxime Sigouin

Dates, mangoes. They’re great, but they’re so dense and energy-dense. 

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

You’re. It’s remarkable.

Maxime Sigouin

All the people said yes. All the people tell me that they can’t pull weight, that they’re eating a whole food plan, and that they’re exercising. I’m wondering, what does that mean? Then you discover that they’re doing their best exercise. second, that maybe they’re enjoying a lot of fried food on the weekend, but they’re not going to tell you that part. You’re being honest with yourself. Maybe there are a few things that can be adjusted. Losing fat is not complex, not to diminish how hard the process is. There are over 700 people now, but it’s simple. The hard part is sticking to it. That’s where the sustainability of the method matters.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Perfect. I think that’s a great place where we’ll be, and we’ll get into your method. Hold on, everyone. But for those of you who are here, thank you for joining us today. I hope you found this conversation insightful and engaging. But if you’re a summit purchaser, stay right here because we’re about to dive even deeper into this conversation and get into the madness in the method of whatever the word is that I’m looking for. But if you’re not, you can click on the button below or to the side and get access to the rest of this conversation. If you are watching this, thank you for being a valuable member of our community, and let’s continue, Maxime. What is your specific method? Walk us step by step. What can someone expect? What is their day-to-day regimen going to be?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, great question. Let’s get into the secret sauce of it all. A big part is that we want strength training at a minimum of three times a week. Your body’s always looking to be in homeostasis, always looking to be neutral. Your body does not want to change if it doesn’t have to. That’s why the comfort zone is so comfortable, and so many people have a hard time getting out of it. If your body doesn’t have a reason to change, it won’t. You have to give it a reason to. You can do that consciously by putting yourself through a strength training session. If you want your body to become stronger and have more lean muscle, you need to give it a reason. You need to go and lift things that are challenging for your body so that it’s, Now I need to adjust to this. This is the new level that I need to adjust to, The thing is, it can just be small increments. 

Let’s just say you can lift, curl 10-pound dumbbells, or grab a 12.5-pound dumbbell and then do that. Eventually, that will become easy. then grab a 15-pound dumbbell, and eventually, that becomes easy. Then you can do that for many years before you reach your maximum genetic potential. But that’s, far. I’ve been trained for 18 years, but I’ve never reached it yet. You’re eventually going to increase in age and slow down. It’s not going to progress as fast, but you’ll always be able to make progress, so strength training should be done at least three times a week, because less than that, it’s not enough of a constant stressor for the body to feel like it has to adjust to it. Personal preference: 3 to 4 max, five strength training sessions a week. Anything more than that, it’s overkill. You should just be tired from working out all the time because it does not take your body to strength train that much. That’s the first thing. 

For the cardio aspects of the cardiovascular aspect of fat loss. I don’t want people to use cardio as a means to lose fat, because that’s not the thing. As we talked about earlier, nutrition is the thing that reveals the body to exercise, the thing that shapes and molds the body. Cardio is simply a tool to create an additional deficit to a certain extent. But the main reason is that it helps to make this thing stronger. Your heart rate. You can have the best body in the world, but if your heart gives out, you still die. It’s very important to take care of your heart ultimately. We want to keep a little bit of cardio at the base, but we don’t want to start too high. The reason why is that your body is an adaptation machine. Again, as I mentioned, it’s always looking to be kind of in that neutral state where it knows what’s going to happen. If you start with doing, and now we’re off cardio every single day, which seems to be a big trend around New Year’s resolution. I’m going to work out every day. I’m going to do one hour of cycling or running every day. 

Well, if you do that, you will lose weight initially. But the thing is, your body will adjust to it. It will try to adjust to it as fast as possible because all your body sees is, Okay, I’ll grab you, Laurie, as an example. Okay, Laurie is expanding all this energy, and she’s only taking in this amount of energy. If we continue that, this trend will die ten years early because we’ll run out of energy storage. What do we do? We have to slow down the metabolism so that we’re able to do all this stuff with less energy. You’re turning your body into a Prius. What you’re doing and what you want when you’re looking to improve your body composition is to be a Hummer. You’re going to be extremely inefficient with your feet, and you want to be able to burn through everything so you can consume more food. Knowing that, start your cardio at a minimum of 30 minutes a week. Then, after a few weeks, maybe bump it up to 40. Just slowly increase it. That’s for someone who’s not looking to compete. 

Because Dr. Laurie is in a different position. She’s going to race to her car. It was a lot higher when she started. But for someone who’s not looking to compete, just slowly graduate because whatever you give your body at first, it will try to adjust. Do it as fast as possible. When it does adjust, you’re going to plateau, Which is working. A lot of people get stuck. When you plateau, guess what? You have to add more cardio now, to create a deeper deficit because your body is used to this one now. What would you rather do? Start with one hour a day of cardio or six days a week and lose some weight; eventually, plateau. We know you have to do more than one hour a day or start with 30 minutes a week, and then once it plateaus, great. But up to 40, It’s still manageable for everyone. 

Now that concept applies to your nutrition as well. Strength training is covered; cardio is covered. Let’s go to the nutrition class. A big thing that’s going to reveal people’s bodies, help them manage their weight, manage their hypertension, their blood pressure, and everything. Protein, I’m not saying I don’t want to sound like all the bodybuilders, but there’s an importance that you need to give to protein to a certain extent. That is 1.2 to 2 grams per KG of body weight. I don’t have the conversion in pounds. I’m sorry, but if you grab your weight divided by 2.2, it gives you the KGS. Between 1.2 grams of body weight gives you the protein you need to be consuming per day because if it’s not, the protein precedes the amino acids that make it the important protein. There are not enough amino acids, which are the building blocks of muscle, in your body. Your body will look elsewhere while trying to recover from your workouts. Where is the other best place where there are amino acids? Your muscle. Your body will start to eat its muscle, what we call a catabolic state. Your body starts to eat its muscles. It’s very counterproductive because you’re trying to build some, but your body’s eating it because it’s looking for those amino acids that it needs. 

You want to give your body just enough protein, and it’s kind of within that range that I just mentioned for your calorie deficit, three calories. You cannot lose weight if you’re in a calorie surplus. It’s just that it doesn’t have it. If you’re doing caloric maintenance, guess what you will maintain. If I lose weight, I need to be in a calorie deficit. But here’s where a lot of people make a mistake: they’ve heard online from a TikTok influencer somewhere that if I lose a pound a week, I need to remove 3,500 calories a week. Because 500 pounds is equal to 1 pound of fat. It’s 500 calories a day in deficit. People think that if they want to lose 2 pounds a week because everyone’s in a hurry these days. No one wants to take their time. Well, these two must remove a thousand calories a day. 

If you’re a woman, your maintenance calories are probably 21 or 200 calories, depending on your height and age. That means you’re going to go down 2,000 to 1,000 calories per day. That’s half your food intake that you’re dropping because you want to lose 2 pounds a week. Here’s what happens when you have a steep calorie deficit. I don’t recommend that any of you have a calorie deficit. I’ll explain kind of what I did with Dr. Laurie, which is the complete opposite. If you do a steep calorie deficit, the same thing as cardio, your body will look to adjust the deficit as fast as possible. guess what? Once it adjusts to you eating 1,000 calories a day and you’ve plateaued, guess what if you eat less food now after going to 900, 800, or 700? That’s not a lot of food. That’s my breakfast. That’s why no one should be consuming that for the whole day. 

When you have a steep calorie deficit, your body will adjust, and then you’ll have to go lower once it plateaus. The other part of that is your body, which is, as I mentioned, a survival machine. If I remove a thousand calories of energy intake, my body will be, and Dr. Laurie is only eating 1,000 calories. She’s putting out all this energy. If we continue, this train will die ten years early. Two things need to happen. We need to slow down the metabolism so we’re able to operate on less energy. Second, let’s get rid of the things that cost us a lot of energy. Guess what costs the most amount of energy, your muscle mass? Your body’s going to start getting rid of muscle mass because it demands so much energy and doesn’t have enough coming in, and it needs to be able to survive for a long period. Guess what? You can be skinny and live for a long time. Muscle mass is not essential to your life up to a certain point. 

But for the most part, you’ll be able to lose a lot of it. When people do see calorie deficits, that’s when they start to have that look where they look skinny, fat, just soft, pudgy. They’re just, I’m lighter, but I just don’t feel lighter, I just feel like, I look a little bit soft. That’s what happens. You do see a calorie deficit. What we did with Dr. Laurie, which is the way to do it, you just small decreases in a calorie deficit, If we just start with a 200-calorie deficit, her body is going to be, what the heck is happening? We need to look; we need to drop weight. Because there’s not enough energy coming in. It’s not going to go for the muscle yet because there’s not enough of a calorie deficit for the red alert to go on in your body. It’s just enough that your body goes. Something is happening here. Let’s just use some of that energy storage because we’re just trying to compensate for not having it. 

Then, once your body plateaus, it realizes that what’s happening is plateauing. Then we just remove 100. Nobody goes. Something’s happening here. We need to adjust to this. It was a little bit of fat. What happens when you go slower is that you retain and build more lean muscle. Ultimately, your body composition improves because you have more muscle and less fat, and you look leaner, tighter, and stronger. Your metabolic rate goes up, and your bone density goes up. You’re stronger because you can lift heavier weights. That helps as well, as does that aspect. That’s kind of the secret sauce of it all.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Which is good because I think it’s the progressive overload is fun because I’m sure you remember how much I started with the thing. I started with 12 pounds just with the bicep curls, and then I was moving. I got to 20 pounds and I’m, I should go into my young men, sons. I’m wondering: How much are you curling?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. That’s why you lost nearly 14 pounds. That’s unheard of for a lot of people in the fat loss community because they get weaker when they lose weight. 

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. I was getting stronger. My runs are getting faster now. It is. My runs got longer. There is a place where I needed to eat more food because then I was getting just fatigued, and we adjusted, and that’s better. But then also, with menopause comes difficulty sleeping. But you’re. If you’re chewing enough to sit for those darn hot blood, they come on occasion, and you’ll sleep better. I found that if I can hit those 12 to 15,000 steps, however, I get there in the weight training, I sleep a champ. But yes, it is quite a journey to see. I’m at the weight; I’m under the weight. I got married 30 years ago, and I am now 3 pounds away. The scale matters, but the scale matters. When I was in high school, which was a very long time ago, and yes, I know. This has been a lot of fun, and it’s funny to see people’s reactions because, as you can tell again, more is already a thin person. You lose weight. But now I’m kind of getting even when I’m walking. Now that I’m voice-thinking, how can I move forward? I started wearing the weighted vest and rocking when I was just doing my regular walks. This is kind of fun, but yes, it’s fun to see what you can challenge yourself when you start doing these things. You’re, okay, what can I do to bring it to the next level and see what the party does? Then you can kind of experiment with this kind of fun. Being a little kid, you’re exploring and doing things.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes, I think that’s the beauty of being able to master your own body because not a lot of people will get to experience in their lifetime how incredible the human body is and what it can accomplish. Not saying you have to go do 100 iron means in 100 days. Kind of, Iron Cowboy did. But once there’s something magical that happens—once you get to a place where you’re at a healthy body weight, you’re lean, you’re feeling strong—you’re just on top of the world. They are. What else can I do? I do a marathon. Can you do a triathlon? Can I do an Iron Man? Can I do a 5K?  It doesn’t have to be something crazy. It starts to become fun. Then you can start, get to experiment with your body, and then you do that thing that you thought was hard or potentially impossible before, and you’re, I’m incredible. What else can I do in my life? That’s why I love fitness because it’s the foundation for leveling up your relationship, your career, your business, and everything else.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. So, kind of going back to the topic at hand, hypertension. You’ve lost weight, you’re feeling stronger, you’re moving, and your blood pressure will improve. When you’re stopping some of these medications, that’s the other big thing, because a lot of these medications will have side effects, and we remove that layer of side effects. Some of them will cause fatigue, erectile dysfunction, and difficulty. I know feeling tired again and not feeling well. I think the additional benefit of doing this is that you’re reversing the current disease that might have been hindering you from making progress even before. Yes, it’s all pretty cool. Very cool.

Maxime Sigouin

I see no negative side to this strength training and being in a healthy body weight. There is not only everything to gain but nothing to lose.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Absolutely. Perfect.  Any final things you want to share with the audience, Maxime?

Maxime Sigouin

Do you want to talk about reverse dieting?

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. 

Maxime Sigouin

For a lot of people.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Let’s get to that piece. That’s the fun part of the chain. It’s not that you’re not going to be in this deficit forever.

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. That’s kind of where let’s just start with the stats. 95% of people in North America, once they’ve lost weight, will put it back on within six months to a year. That’s crazy. It’s almost 100% of people within a year are back in the same spot or a worse position. This is a process called the reverse side, which we do with all our members. Dr. Laurie’s nearing starting that process for herself. It’s where you’re able to speed up someone’s metabolism post-fat loss. Typically, when you’re going to see a calorie deficit and you kind of do your journey and lose the whole body weight that you wanted, a lot of people will kind of just slowly revert to their old way of being or understand that they can’t just sustainably eat that little amount of food, and it does go back up. What happens is your body goes. We’ve basically been in a desert all this time working out, and now there’s a buffet at the food, let us store all of this for future energy usage, and everyone just puts the weight back on. It takes six months to a year. 

Reverse dieting is where you slowly and methodically read calories every week, depending on how your body’s responding. You can go from a 25-calorie increase per day up to a 200-calorie increase. It very much depends on how the body responds, but it’s a four-month process, and what we do is just slowly increase your food until you get back up to your maintenance calories. On average, we can add about a thousand calories to our food intake over those four months. On top of what you’re eating, we’re able to have 1,000 calories of food intake. The statistics for it are that 80% of people stay at the same weight. After we add 1,000 calories, 10% of people lose more weight. After, we had a thousand calories. We’re a small percentage of people. then the last 10%, which is the worst-case scenario, people put on a pound or two for an exchange worth a thousand calories more, which is a pretty good tradeoff as a worst-case scenario, if you asked me. 

As for how it works, I assume the analogy of the thigh of a fire. If you go camping and you have a small flame on your fire, you light up the newspaper, you have a few pieces of wood, and you have a little tiny flame. What most people do in North America is throw a big log of wood on it, and they expect the fire to be able to handle it. The fire is your metabolism at the end of a fat loss. How do you make a small flame bigger, efficiently? You can’t cheat. You can’t pour gas on it. It doesn’t exist in the health world. You have to add smaller pieces of wood to it over time. If you had smaller pieces of wood on it over time, guess what? That’s going to get bigger and bigger and bigger, and eventually, we can burn a log in. Burn a house. 

It’s patience that you need to have; why did you build up that metabolism? Why did you build up that inner fire? That’s why it takes four months. If you get anything faster than that, you see a higher gain and a higher rate of fat loss on that. Anything longer than four months is great. I reverse. I did it for a year at one point, but it’s not sexy for a lot of people to do it for that long. Four months is kind of the fastest that we can go. That’s sort of residing in a nutshell, which you only do once you reach your goal.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

Yes. Close. Almost. Almost there. Well, thank you so much. Yes, this has been a fun journey. I know we’ll have some free handouts to download for me. Can you tell people where to find you?

Maxime Sigouin

Yes. If you go to fitvegancoaching.com, you’ll find everything. There’s the podcast, YouTube, and Instagram; all the channels are linked there. If you want more information, you will see my mom’s transformation. It’s the video on the website. 58 years young, lost 54 pounds got a six-pack for the first time in her life at 58. All whole food plant-based strength training is kind of everything that Dr. Laurie is doing. We’ll have to make a video with Dr. Laura.

Laurie Marbas, MD, MBA

My goodness. That’s fun. But yes. Fitvegancoaching.com. Guys, check it out. Thank you again for a wonderful conversation. We appreciate you being here.

Maxime Sigouin

Thank you for having me.