Find Your Perfect Exercise

Introduction and background 0:00

Well, welcome back for another cool conversation to one of my dear friends. Maxime Sigouin. How are you today? Good, good. Thank you for having me. Excited to be here. Yeah. We're we're going to have a lot of fun talking because we've worked so much together. And 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, exercising, helping people find health? Yeah, of course. Certified personal trainer. But I also have a very extensive background in competing in different sports from basketball, bodybuilding, powerlifting, Iron Man that several like oh, probably over 50 triathlon.

If you're on video, you can see all the medals behind me played baseball. So always been in sports my whole life until I started coaching almost four years ago. And then, you know, 700 transformations in the you know, you learn a thing or a few a few things. Thing or a few. Oh, my goodness. That's good. Now I know you have some amazing transformational stories. So you're one of them. Yes, I am. I absolutely, absolutely. Definitely made this middle age body much better than it was. And so to that, I am thankful and it's still in progress.

But as far as, you know, 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 like sleep issues, your diet, exercise aids, all these different things. But exercise can influence everything that will help hypertension, stress management. So 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?

Our exercise, we're seeing more changes in people and them having better health outcomes. Yeah, of course. So exercise would be the foundation that would help everything else improve.

Exercise benefits for hypertension 2:06

So as there's two types of exercise, they would be your cardiovascular exercise, do you think, in terms of cardio? So cycling, cycling, swimming, biking, running, rollerblading, jumping on a trampoline, whatever you prefer. And on the flip side, it'd be kind of your strength training, resistance training. So it doesn't necessarily have to be in the gym. It could be a resistance band at home, you know, using a reusable IKEA bag. What cans of black beans in there as weights like your body doesn't know what it's lifting you just know is resistance against gravity.

So that's I'm going to encompass exercise as all of these things put together from a heart standpoint, it is going to make your heart stronger. So ultimately it's going to make your heart more efficient and being able to move the blood or help to regulate kind of 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 like massive hypertension, low, you know, low sleep, unhealthy, overweight, like all the things that we know would affected exercise is going to bring you to the complete opposite.

So it is going to help improve your sleep. One of the main reasons also is because you're going to be tired as you worked out. All right. So you get a better night's sleep after you had a good a good, hard workout. Some of the other ones that also stress management as well. So if you're able to manage your stress automatically, it's going to help with your blood pressure levels as well. And you know, one thing that's that's really cool when you start exercising, you naturally want to start fueling your better your body properly, right?

You're less likely to want to eat junk food or salty foods processed food, oily food that would cause you both pleasure to kind of like go up and ultimately so you naturally want to eat fruits and vegetables and eat healthier food that make you feel better because you already feel good from doing the exercise. Right. And the other component I wanted to talk about was sleep, nutrition and fitness. The other one is escaping me, but it's going to come back at one point. Yeah. So sleep, stress management, community, you're eating a plant based diet in your weight loss?

Yeah, yeah. Weight management, ultimately. So if you're carrying less excess body fat on your bodies, we all know that's going to help with with blood pressure. Right. And exercise is going to be the way to be able to accomplish that in a healthy manner while ultimately being able to, I know will dove into it later. But like strengthen your bones, improve your metabolism and all these fun things. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. It's really interesting. So when I was I do lots of other teaching and stuff, but I was looking at the different types of exercise and there was a really cool research article speaking to the different types of exercise.

So they all help like anywhere between 4 to 9 numbers dropping on that top number, that systolic blood pressure. But the one that they found that was really statistically different is isometric exercises like the walls. It's because. Yeah. Me me 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 really quite significant. It was like a nine point drop on that top number in for every, you know, point drop.

It's a magnitude difference in mortality, risk and cardiovascular events and things. But if you could just maybe speak to some of those, it would be cool. Yeah, of course. It's basically where you're you're holding the movement in versus going through the full range of motion right? Eccentric in concentric motions. You're actually going up and down with the weight by symmetric, you're going to be holding two movements. So ultimately I can't remember which bodybuilder kind of made it popular.

Isometric training and easier modifications 5:34

I believe is potentially Tom Platz, but I may be wrong in the name, but ultimately he found that you can get a lot of a lot greater stressor on your muscle that would trigger an increase in lean muscle mass, that would increase the tension that would be on your bone, which would make your bones stronger. So if you just kind of have on a bench press machine and you just kind of like go about like halfway to three quarters and you hold it, you're going to be able to hold a lot of a heavier weight than if you were trying to go through the full motions.

So let's just say put you on machine, Laurie, and you can do 100 pounds for ten reps. As an example, I can probably loaded with 120 and 130 pounds and you be able to hold the tension there, right? It's going to put a different amount of stressor on the bones and on the muscle. So same thing with the wall sits with the ball between you like you squeezing it, right. You're basically putting that stressor on the muscle without having to go through the full range of motion. You feel that your quads on fire, your glutes and your hamstrings are on fire and you didn't do a force quite.

You can go fully up and down. So there's benefits to mixing both. But isometric training helps, especially when you're newer to fitness. And 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, your nervous system is going to be like, what the heck is happening here? And you're going to be tweaking and your knee is going to do weird stuff. You're you're going to your body is not going to know how to do the movement efficiently.

So a great place to start. And then you can move into the basically doing the for full range of motion. Well yeah. And what they said the mechanism was is that the heart rate's decreasing a little bit. But so but your cardio output is stroke volume increase, meaning how much your body, the cardio output is going. The same, they said, was a total peripheral resistance. So it's basically maybe a tight tube and you're pushing blood into it. There's a tightness or stiffness with the arteries from high blood pressure.

But what happens is something about this particular exercise or exercise type relaxes that. So it can go into a more pliable tube, which is really cool. But I did have a question I had can you get back to isometric now? I'm bringing in some other questions that others might, you know, that I've had patients ask or other people have asked and have done otherwise is if someone has some immobile in mobility issues, maybe they can do a wall or something. Is there anything that someone can maybe do who has can't get on them like say the ground into a plank or something like that?

Any suggestions? Yeah, for sure. So there's always an easier variation. You can do have all these movements, for example. So a wall set, typically when you would do it, you'd be sitting about 90 degrees, right? And you'd be holding a position there. If you're holding 45 degree that's still do you're still putting stress are on the muscle in on your legs. Right. So if you think of 90 degrees being the hardest one, if you just bring your your 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. Right, it becomes easier.

But if that's where you have to start, that's where you have to start. Right. Same thing with a push up. We've had members that had to lose like 100 plus pounds and we weren't going to give them push ups. Right. It was like, you're going to do pushups on the wall. We're going to start on the wall upright. Right. Just start from there and eventually we went like, let's go to our kitchen counter and then let's go to a chair and then let's go to your knees on the ground and then let's do a four push up.

So there's always an easier variation of of those exercises. If you again, if it's because of you're carrying too much weight or if it's because of mobility issues, but ultimate, you can work on improving your mobility to a certain extent. Right. We had members with fuzed spines. There's just, you know, so much that you can do at this point, but you can always work on improving your your mobility. And ultimately, your body is always going to find a way to adjust.

Mobility, aging, and movement patterns 9:20

That's why it's important to make sure that you work on your mobility and you keep the right 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 potentially. Like your knees are going to go way over your toes to try to go low enough like the people you see in the videos. Well, that's not the right approach at first. Right? Let's just maybe start with a quarter squat. Just start with the base. Right. Let's start on loosening up your hips so that we can start to go lower with the proper form.

Mhm. Exactly. So maybe we can talk a little bit also about the mobility. What is mobility. How does someone know that they have a mobility issue. Because sometimes it like I'm just getting old or I'm feeling stiff and like why can we expect as we get older or just in general as a human, what should we be expecting your body to be able to do? Yeah. So as you get older, I can pretty much guarantee you that you have mobility issues. So when when you think about when we're kids, we're moving in all different planes of movement, right?

We're going sideways laterally, up, down, backwards, because we're just playing. But as we get older, we kind of get stuck in our daily pattern, right? A lot of us just go forward. If we go sideways, we completely turn our body to go sideways very rarely where we do lateral movement. When I get a lot of people that are a little bit older to do a reverse launch, their brain has no idea what's happening because they're like, Oh, we're going backwards on one leg. What is this? What is this movement?

So your body's trying to stabilize itself. So as we get older, it's important to continue to move in different planes of movement. That's why we see guys that are in in their forties, in their fifties and are doing skateboarding. They have a lower risk of injury because they've been skateboarding and moving in different movements their whole life. But for people have been working a desk job or just a regular kind of lifestyle, they sort of lack that mobility. So how do you know 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 all the way 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, right. I personally don't. I twisted my ankle ten times each. My ankle mobility is terrible, so I can't do that. But that's basically would be 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 all the way up, you can move your move your arms and all the planes that they are supposed to be moving in your arms and go backwards, whatever movement they're supposed to be moving it 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 is a lot of people spend a lot of time sitting. So your hip flexors are probably tight, which is why I see a lot of people walk like this right there under activate their glutes so they're there, but muscle basically is not activated properly because they're they're walking like this because their hip flexors are so tight here.

So that would be a great one, too. It's a stretch. I made you do animal flows, right? You're done. Animal flows on the warmups. Yes, we're mostly walking, but. Yeah. Yeah. So some of the animal flora. Yeah. Bear walk, orangutan, sing the crab, the inchworm. Those are fine mobility exercises that you can start off with that are safe, that you can do at your own pace. And I got people in their thirties that are just struggling to do them and they got members in their seventies that been with me for six months and other they're doing them, they're flowing around, they're hyper mobile so everyone can improve on mobility ultimately.

Absolutely. Yeah. It's never surprising in people. We just think that we can always be able to do what we did when we were kids. But you're absolutely right that sitting, you lose, you know, you don't use it, you lose it type thing. So yeah. And while there's a lot of discussion also people 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? Yeah, for sure. So aerobic it would be with there's enough oxygen to meet the demand that you're asking of your body.

Right. And anaerobic as there wouldn't be enough. So if you're doing anything that's lower intensity, basically your body has time to kind of catch up

Aerobic vs anaerobic exercise 13:42

in terms of there's enough oxygen to meet the demand that you're asking of it or strength training a zone to run. So like a very low intensity run where you can maintain it's a pace. We can maintain a conversation with someone beside you. And then on the opposite side is you're doing a full out sprint. There's a lion running after you. All right. You kind of talk about those are ATP stoppages in your body. You have like maybe like 11, 15 seconds of ATP stored in your body and then you find a different source of energy wasn't there's not enough oxygen to meet the demand that you're asking of your body.

And that's why you can sprint, but not forever. Eventually you slow down, right? So when I talk a sprint, I'm talking a full out sprint. Literally. There's a line after your life. Depends on this. You will run really fast, but at one point you will start to slow down because there's not enough there's not enough oxygen coming in for what you're asking of your body. So that's kind of the difference between the two. Or that be like hit training, high intensity interval. Yeah, to a certain extent. Yeah.

And that's why the the, the high intensity component is very short. It's never 5 minutes long of high intensity. Right. The short bout and then you have a slower period and very intense and then lower, slower period. Perfect. So you know exercise is a big piece of weight maintenance. You know, they don't say you can't eat what you you know, the kitchen the kitchen really is the main component of weight loss. But of course, both of these things are really important. Exercise and diet with weight loss, which is one of the higher risk factors for hypertension.

Can you speak to how you help people? You know, those 700 transformation stories like how do you begin this? Like, what are you telling them exactly to do and what is their journey like? Yeah, for sure. So the big part of strength training is such a big component of any great transformation because strength training or resistance training against gym resistance being as long as there's resistance against gravity, that's how your body cares about is the thing that builds and molds your body.

Strength training, nutrition, and fat loss strategy 15:48

Not saying that you want to look like a bodybuilder or like Arnold or anything like that. Most people will never look like that. Right. And a lot of men train for 30 years and don't even look close to Arnold. So no one has to worry about it. Women or mass worry about it. But the strength training is there to help you build lean muscle and shape your body. So here's why. More lean muscle is more beneficial for a few reasons. One of them is 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 basically.

So 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. So the more muscle you have in a stronger you are the lesser prone to injury because your joints are better protected from having more muscle. So when you're doing something that would be strenuous, instead of going on your ligaments and tendon, your muscle will take the majority of the load. Right? You're less likely to injure some of those joints back knee, hip, elbow, shoulders, things like that.

On the on the opposite side, when you're helping your body Mali build more lean muscle you're also burning more calories because the requires more calories to kind of burn it so it's easier to stay at a healthier body weight. So the strength training, slash resistance training is there to help build the body and the nutrition is there to reveal the body because you can train all you want. If the nutrition isn't there, you're just if 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. And so the nutrition is the thing that's going to reveal the body and the resistance training is the thing that's going to build it. And if you want to have a great transformation, which not to just focus on the superficial aspect of I want to look great, but when your body feels lean and tight and toned is a you just you just feel good, right?

It's like it's like one of those days you wake up, you slept great night asleep. 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. Right? But you get to be naked and you look you get the feel that way without having to have clothes on. So, yeah, nutrition reveals, the training builds. It looks fantastic. Well, you know, just even my own expense. I've never been overweight, except when I was like nine months pregnant. Right.

But what was interesting, my BMI was even always under, like 22. But when I started working with you, it was a matter, you know, postmenopausal at this point. And, you know, so things have definitely changed with hormonal changes. And over the last couple of years, you know, £10 keeps up. But working with you and then doing the moderate caloric deficit and the strength training, which I've always been a runner, did some strength training intermittently, but definitely more focused in losing. I think I'm close to £14 now.

Yeah, somewhere in there. It is crazy. Crazy. When I look at these the pictures, art is in person. You can I can see it more than I the pictures are. I think that you were nice in these. Yeah. But fricking amazing. Four inches off my hips. What the heck. Four inches. And it wasn't even that. I mean, I was still wearing single digit clothes would definitely cut that down. But it was like, you know, I'm pulling out because I pulled the treatment and I'm like, holy smears. I've had to give away clothes, my my favorite clothing, all of me.

So, you know, those are like 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 still can be a significant body composition change in makes you feel even better than you were already feel, even if you felt pretty good. Like I felt pretty good. But now it's like it is good. It's May helps me run faster, which is my my my place for like my mental recharge is with running.

And so those are those things that are really cool. So I really wanted to share this not just for someone who has overweight, you know, but it, it gets a little harder to lose the last £3. But yeah, the so the leaner you are, the slower the fat loss is, there's less fat. So your body's putting up a fight for it, basically. Right. But it's all been I was talking about this, my fiancee, I was like, but some people have thyroid issues or PCOS or, you know, hypothyroidism, blah, blah. So it's or genetically they're they're bigger.

I was like, I'll be honest with you, I've never not been able to help someone lose weight, whether it's it's Perry post menopause PCOS. I was like, look, whatever condition you want to throw at me, I've never not been able to transform someone because the truth is, if you're strength training and you're eating whole food plant base with the proportions that we give you, like it's impossible to not be able to transplant. Because people, you know, a lot of people will say, oh, you can't gain weight on plant based are like, yes, you can.

Oh, for sure. Yeah. Especially nowadays. Oh yeah. With all the processed foods and even still we're eating a nuts and avocado. I mean, people just don't pay attention to that, but it's mangoes. They're great, but just they're so dense and energy. You're right. It's yeah, yeah. Remarkable. All the people that yeah. All the people that tell me that they, they can't lose weight and they're eating whole food plan base and they're, they're exercising. I'm like, what does that mean? And then you discover that they're walking best their exercise.

And second, that maybe they're enjoying a lot of fried food on the weekend, but they're not going to tell you that part. So you're being honest with yourself. Maybe there's a few things that can be adjusted, like losing fat is not is not complex, not to diminish how hard the process is, over 700 people now, but it's actually really simple. The the part that's hard is sticking to it. All right. Absolutely. That's where the sustainability of the method matters. Alright Maxime What is your specific method like?

Walk us step by step. What can someone expect? What is their day to day regimen going to be? Yes, great. Great question. Let's get into the secret sauce of it all. So a big part is we want strength training at a minimum three times a week, right? Your body's always looking to be in homeostasis, always looking to be neutral. Right. 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. So if your body doesn't have a reason to change, it won't.

So you have to give it a reason to write. And you can do that consciously through putting yourself through a strength training session, right? If you want your body to become stronger, have more lean muscle, you need to give it a reason to. So you need to go and lift things that are challenging for your body so that it's like, Oh, now I need to adjust to this. This is the new level that I need to adjust to, right? And the thing is, it can just be small increments. Let's just say you can lift, you can curl £10 dumbbells, grab a £12.5 dumbbell.

Right, and then do that. And eventually that will become easy. And then grab a £15 dumbbell and eventually that becomes easy. And then you can do that for many, many, many, many, many years before you reach your maximum genetic potential. Right. But that's really, really, really far. I've been trained for 18 years and I never reached it yet. So you're eventually going to increase of age is going to slow down. It's not going to progress as fast, but you'll always be able to make progressions and so strength training three times a week minimum because less than that, it's not enough of a constant stressor for the body to feel like it has to adjust to it right.

Personal preference, like 3 to 4 max, five strength training sessions a week. Anything more than that, it's an overkill. You should just be really tired from working out all the time because it does takes your body to strength train that much. Right. So that's the first thing for the 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. Right. Like we talked about earlier, the nutrition is the thing that reveals the body right to exercise, the thing that shapes and molds the body cardio is simply a tool to create additional deficit to a certain extent.

But the main reason is 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. So it's very important to take care of your heart ultimately. So we like to keep a little bit of cardio at the base, but we don't want to start too high. And the reason why is because your body is an adaptation machine. Again, as I mentioned, it's always looking to be kind of that neutral state where it knows what's going to happen. So if you start off with doing and now we're off cardio every single day, which seems to be a big trend around New Year's resolution.

Like 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, right. 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 like, okay, I'll grab you, Lori, as an example.

Progressive overload and personal results 24:58

Okay. Lori 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. So what do we do? We have to slow down the metabolism so that we're able to do all this stuff on less energy. So basically you're turning your body to a Prius. Basically what you're doing, what you want when you're looking to improve your body composition is be a Hummer, going to be extremely inefficient with your feet and you want to be able to burn through everything so you can consume more food.

All right. So knowing that, start your cardio at a minimum 30 minutes a week, right. And then after a few weeks, maybe bump it up to 40. Right. Just really slowly kind of increase it. And that's for someone that's not looking to compete, right? Because Dr. Laura is in a different position. She's going to race to her car. It was a lot higher when she started. But for someone that'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.

And when it does adjust, you're going to plateau, right? Which is working. A lot of people get stuck. And when you plateau, guess what? You have to add more cardio now, right? To create a deeper deficit because your body is used to this one now. So 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 bone, but up to 40, right.

It's still manageable for everyone. Now that concept applies to your nutrition as well. Strength training is cover, cardio is covered. Let's go to nutrition class. A big thing that's going to reveal people's body, help them manage their weight, manage the hypertension to blood pressure and everything. So protein, I'm not I don't want to be sound like all the bodybuilders, but there's an importance that you need to give to protein to a certain extent, right? That 1.2 gram to two gram per CG 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 CGS. So between 1.2 grams of body weight give you the protein you need to be consuming per day because if it's not, the protein precedes the amino acid that make it the protein that are important. There is not enough amino acids which are the building block of the muscle in your body. Your body will look elsewhere to trying to recover from your workouts. And where is the other best place where there's amino acids, your own muscle.

So your body will literally start to eat its own muscle, what we call a catabolic state, right? So your body starts to eat its own muscle. So it's very counterproductive because you're trying to build some, but your body's eating it because it's looking for those amino acid that it needs. So 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. Right. It's just it doesn't have it.

If you're caloric maintenance, guess what you will maintain. So if I lose weight, you need to be in a calorie deficit. But here's where a lot of people make a mistake is they've heard online from Tik Tok influencer somewhere said if I lose a pound a week, you need to remove 3500 calories a week, right? Because to just 500 is equal to £1 of fat. So it's 500 calories a day of deficit. So people think that if they want to lose £2 a week because everyone's in a hurry these days. Right. No one wants to take their time.

Well, these two must remove a thousand calories a day. So if you're a woman, maintenance calories probably like 21, 2200 calories, depending on your height and your age. That means you're going to go down 2000 1000 hundred calories per day. That's half your food intake that you're dropping because you want to lose £2 a week. So here's what happens when you do a steep calorie deficit. And I don't recommend that any of you do a calorie deficit. And I'll explain kind of what I did with Dr. Lauren, which is the complete opposite.

If you do a steep calorie deficit like the same thing as the cardio, your body will look to adjust adjusted as deficit as fast as possible. And guess what? Once it adjusts to you eating 1000 calories a day and you've plateaued, guess what if eat less food now right after go to 900 800, 700. That's not a lot of food. That's my breakfast. That's no one should be consuming that for the whole day. All right. So when you do a steep calorie deficit, your body will adjust and then you'll have to go lower once it plateaus.

The other parts of that is your body is, like I mentioned, a survival machine. So if I remove a thousand calories of energy intake, your body will be like, Oh shit, Dr. Doctor is only eating 1000 calories. She's putting out all this energy. If we continue on, this train will die ten years early, right? So two things need to happen. We need to slow down the metabolism so we're able to operate on less energy. And second, let's get rid of the things that cost us a lot of energy. Guess what costs of most amount of energy, your muscle mass, right?

So your body's going to start getting rid of muscle mass because it demands so much energy and it doesn't have enough coming in and it needs to be able to survive for a long period of time. And guess what? You can be really skinny and live for a long time. So muscle mass is not essential to your life up to a certain point, right? But for the most part, you'll be able to lose a lot of it. So 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 they're like, I'm I'm lighter, but I just don't feel

Hypertension improvements and medication benefits 30:10

lighter, right? I just feel like I look a little bit soft. So that's what happens. You do see calorie deficit. What we did with Dr. Lori, which is the right way to do it, you just small decreases in calorie deficit, right? If we just start with a 200 calorie deficit, her body is going to be like, what the heck is happening? We need to look, we need to drop weight, right? Because there's not enough energy coming in. It's not going to go for the muscle yet because it's not big enough of a calorie deficit for the red alert to go in to turn on in your body.

Right. It's just enough that your body goes like, oh, there's something happening here. Let's just use some of those energy storage is because we're just trying to compensate for not having that. And then once your body plateaus, it realizes that like what's happening, it plateaus. Then we just remove not 100. Nobody goes, Oh, something's happening here. We need to adjust to this. And it was a little bit of fat. What happens when you go slower is you retain and you build more lean muscle. So ultimately your body composition improves because you have more muscle and less fat and you look leaner, tighter, you're stronger, your metabolic rate goes up, your bone density goes up because you're stronger because you can lift heavier weights.

So that helps as well and that and that aspect. So that's kind of like the the secret sauce of it all. Know which is it was really good because I think it's the progressive overload is really fun to because I'm sure you remember how much I started the thing I start with £12 just with the bicep curls and then I was moving. I got to like £20 and I'm like, huh. Like I should go into my, my young men, sons. I'm like, How much are you curling? Yeah. And that's and that's why you lost almost £14, right?

Like, that's unheard of for a lot of people in the fat loss because they get weaker when they lose weight. Yeah. I definitely was getting stronger. My runs are getting faster now. It was definitely is. My runs got longer. There is definitely a place where I needed to eat more fear because then I was getting just fatigued and we adjusted and that's better. But then also, you know, with with menopause comes difficulty sleeping. But you're right. Like if you're you're chewing enough to actually sit for those darn hot blood, they come on occasion you're you will sleep better.

So I found that if I can hit like that 12 to 15000 steps, however I get there in the weight training, I sleep like a champ. But yeah, but it is really a quite a journey to, to see.

Reverse dieting and long-term maintenance 32:28

I'm, I'm at the weight I'm under the weight. I got married 30 years ago and I am £3 away. The scale really matters, but the scale matters. Like when I was in high school, which was a very long time ago and but yeah, I know. So this has been a lot of fun and it's funny to see people's reactions because, you know, you can tell again, more is already a thin person. You lose in the amount of weight. But now I'm kind of getting even when I'm walking. So now I'm voice thinking, how can I move forward?

So I started wearing the weighted vest and rocking when I'm just doing my regular walks. Like, this is kind of fun and but yeah, it's, it's, it's fun to see what you can challenge yourself when you start doing these things, you're like, okay, what can I do to bring it to the next level and see what the party does? So then you can kind of experiment this kind of fun, like being a little kid, you're exploring and doing things. So yeah, I think, 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 like 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 like, What else can I do? Right? I do a marathon. Can you do a triathlon? Can I do an Ironman? Can I do a5k? 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 really hard or potentially impossible before, and you're like, Oh my God, I'm incredible.

What else can I do in my life? And that's why I love fitness, because it's the foundation to level up your relationship, your career, your business, everything else. Yeah. And so, you know, kind of going back to the topic at hand, the hypertension. So you've lost weight, you're feeling stronger, you're moving, more blood pressure will improve and 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.

You know, some of them will cause fatigue erectile dysfunction difficulty was know feeling tired again that not feeling well I think that's the additional benefit from doing this is that you're reversing the current disease that might have been hindering you from making progress even before. So yeah, it's all pretty cool. Very, very cool. So I see no negative side to this training and being in a healthy body weight. There is not only everything to to gain nothing to lose. Absolutely, absolutely. So perfect.

So any final things you like to share with the audience? Maxime? You want to talk about reverse dieting? Yes. Oh, yeah. So for a lot of people. Let's get to that piece. That's that's the fun part of the of the chain. It's not like you're not to be in this deficit forever. Yeah. So that's kind of where like let's just start with the stats. So 95% of people in North America, once they've lost a weight, will put it back on with it within six months to a year. That's crazy. It's almost 100% of people within a year are back in usual same spot or in a worse position.

This is a process called reverse side and that we do with all our members. And Dr. Laurie nearing starting that process for herself. It's where you're able to speed up someone's metabolism, post fat loss. So typically when you're going to see a calorie deficit and you kind of do your journey and that the whole body weight that you wanted, a lot of people will kind of just slowly revert back 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.

So what happens? Your body goes like, Oh, we basically been in a desert all this time working out and now there's a buffet of Food Leisure store, all of this for future energy usage, and it just everyone puts the weight back on. And so I take six months to a year. So reverse dieting is where you slowly and methodically read calories on a weekly basis depending on how to body's responding. So you can literally go from 25 calories increase per day, up to 200 calorie increase. It very much depends how the body responds, but it's a four month process and what we do is we just slowly re increase your food until you get back up to your maintenance calorie.

And on average, we can add about a thousand calories of food intake over the course of that four months. On top of what you're eating, we're able to have 1000 calories of food intake. The stats for it are 80% of people stay to same weight. After we add 1000 calories, 10% of people lose more weight. After we had a thousand calories. Right. We're a small percentage of people. And then the last 10%, which is worst case scenario, people put on a pound or two for an exchange reading a thousand calories more,

Where to find Maxime 37:18

which is a pretty good tradeoff as a worst case scenario, if you asked me. So how it works, I assume the analogy of the thigh of a fire. So if you go camping and you have a really small flame on your fire, you light up the newspaper, you have a few pieces of wood, you have a little tiny flame. What most people do in North America is you throw a big log of wood on it, and they expect the fire to be able to handle it. Right. So the fire is your metabolism at the end of a fat loss. So how do you make a small flame bigger, efficiently?

Right. You can't cheat. You can't pour gas on it. It doesn't exist in the in the health world. You have to add smaller pieces of wood on 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 can burn a log in. Burn a house. Right. It's patience that you need to have, why you built up that metabolism, why you build up that inner fire. And so that's why it takes four months. If you got anything faster than that, you see a higher gain, higher rate of fat loss of fat gain on that.

Anything longer than four months is great. I reverse. I did for a year at one point, but it's not sexy for a lot of people to do it for that long. So four months is kind of the fastest that we can go. So that's sort of residing in a nutshell, which you only do once you reach your goal right? Yeah. So close. Almost. Almost there. Yeah. All right. Well, thank you so much. And yeah, this is a it's been a really fun journey. And I know we'll have some free hand out download for me. Can you tell people where to find you?

Yes. If you've go to fitvegancoaching.com, you'll find everything. There's the podcast, YouTube, Instagram, all the channels are linked on there about me, find more information and you will see my mom's transformation. It's the video on on the on the website 58 years Young's lost or like 54 pounds, got six pack for the first time in her life at 58 all whole food plan base strength training kind of like everything that Dr. Laurie is doing, basically. So we'll have to make a video with Dr. Laurie.

Oh, my goodness. That's fun. But yes, absolutely. So fitvegancoaching.com. Check it out. And thank you again for a wonderful conversation. And we appreciate you being here. Thank you for having me.