Muscle for Life with Mike Matthews - Why Clean Eating Isn't the Key, Staying Patient, and More...

Episode Date: December 23, 2014

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 http://www.muscleforlife.com/clean-eating-and-weight-loss/ The Definitive Guide to Effective Meal Planning http://www.muscleforlife.com/healthy-meal-planning-tips/ How to Speed Up Your Metabolism for Easier Weight Loss http://www.muscleforlife.com/how-to-speed-up-metabolism/ The Best Way to Gain Muscle Without Getting Fat http://www.muscleforlife.com/the-best-way-to-gain-muscle-not-fat/ Want to get my best advice on how to gain muscle and strength and lose fat faster? Sign up for my free newsletter! Click here: https://www.muscleforlife.com/signup/

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

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Now, as you probably know, I'm not a fan of the supplement industry. I mean, I've wasted who knows how many thousands of dollars over the years on worthless supplements that really do nothing. And I've always had trouble finding products that I actually thought were worth buying and recommending. And well, 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 a hundred 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

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supplements at www.legionathletics.com. And if you like what you see and you want to buy something, use the coupon code podcast, P-O-D-C-A-S-T, and you'll save 10% on your order. All right, thanks again for taking the time to listen to my podcast and let's get to the show. Hey, this is Mike Matthews from MuscleLife.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. that you probably want to build, and kind of 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 kind of all starts to come together in the end. So let's just start with clean eating. Clean eating, it's a very popular 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% nutritious foods, that all your foods are certified clean, whatever that even means. And the truth is that, yeah, nutritious foods are important. You know, 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, you know, 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, you know, 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, you know,

that's enough. And then, you know, 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 balance. So if you're eating a bit less than your body's expending, then that would be 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 kind of 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 down. You 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. So that's 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. I mean, the only exception to that, I guess, would be that there are certain plant sources of proteins that just aren't very well absorbed by the body, like 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, 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, then 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 people, cause you know, you, you flip through Instagram or Twitter or, you know, you read random blogs or whatever, and everyone's always babbling about eat clean, train hard, got to eat clean, going to get lean, eat clean, all this crap. And again, it's good. Eating nutritious 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, well, you should just eat clean. That's how you get lean. No, not necessarily. It's possible. And it would, you know, let's say that like, 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 know you're gonna cut out you know you can easily cut out 1500 calories a day minimum of just junk food and if you were trying to replace those calories with clean foods you wouldn't be able to eat that much um you know think of it as like you can eat a Snickers bar, a couple hundred calories. You know, 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 know, you're going to be full for four or five hours just because clean foods generally are more filling. four or five hours just because clean foods generally are more filling. For instance, I mean, there's vegetables, of course, different, you know, 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 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 style of eating at all, especially if you're training, if you're weightlifting regularly, carbs are your friend. Carbs are what's going to help you. They're going to 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, also relate to insulin secretion and over time elevated insulin levels help. They help you build muscle not because insulin 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, that's net muscle gain. So you can increase muscle gain by increasing the 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 overtraining, you are causing too much muscle breakdown, which is going to be, you know, weighty weighing that negative side of that equation. So carbs, and I talk about this, I'll make a, I'll make a note of a, of an article where I kind of go into the science of this

with carbohydrates and their relation to building muscles. It's not just me saying this. I want you to be able to, 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, you know, also being synonymous with low-carb, high-fat, not necessary. Low-carb can help you lose weight faster in the short term. Um, mainly because you lose water faster. So, you know, if you, 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. I mean, you'll lose fat, but you'll also shed a bit of water. 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, I mean, 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 kind of feel mentally foggy. And yes, it's just 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, I don't know, two weeks. And then I'll probably have to drop just to continue, just because I have to cut my calories. Because when you reduce your, when you restrict your 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. 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 training days. And I'll keep the 2,000, 2,100 number on my off days and see how far that will get me. I'm starting at about 195, 8% 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 get there, but I don't expect to have to go lower than 2,300.

So also just on this point of low carb, cause usually the, you're sacrificing carbs to add fats and this is very trendy right now. Uh, you know, a lot of it's, it's all about, uh, testosterone production is really the big kind of button that is pushed that if you eat a high fat diet, you're, you know, you're gonna have these super high T levels and you're gonna build tons of muscle and lose all kinds of fat and stuff. And it's just not true. When you look at the research of people going 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 there, increase in free T levels. And that might sound cool. Okay. Wow. 13% 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, uh, energetic. You might feel maybe a little bit more sex drive from that. Like if your tea levels are at 700 NGDL, uh or 600 NGDL, which are kind of right down the middle and that, and that jumped up by, you know, 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. Um, 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. Um, and then beyond that, that's when you really start seeing differences in the gym. Um, so what you're gaining by going high fat is a basically insignificant increase in, in, in, uh, 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 kind of the overall view of clean eating. I'm not a fan of the, if it fits your macros, eat junk and get shredded and, you know, eat Pop-Tarts every day and all that crap. Health does matter.

And, you know, 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, a cheat meal becomes counterproductive if it's too high fat because dietary fats are basically just stored directly as body fat. It doesn't cost 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 huge insulin spike. You could just drink some olive oil and your body is able to store that as fat. It doesn't need a big insulin response to do that. So the best type of cheat meal really would be a high-protein, high-carb meal

because 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% 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. 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 produce hormones and, you know, it uses it to repair cells and such, but it doesn't need very much for that. So, you know, you could go to a restaurant and you can easily eat 400 gram, not 400, you could easily eat 200 grams of fat easy in a

restaurant. Like if you're going to go there, you're going to eat an appetizer or two, you're going to have an entree, you're going to have a side and a dessert, easy, easy, easy. And if you really go for it, I mean, 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, even though it's very calorie dense, carbohydrates are more filling. So that depends on, you know, 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 like 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 save the bulk of my daily carbs and fats for dinner. And then my wife and I would go to a restaurant and, you know, I don't go crazy, but I don't watch what I'm eating. I just kind of order whatever. And I, and I try to eat about like, I'm fairly, you know, pretty familiar with, 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, uh, maybe 500 calories higher than I normally would. Not a big deal. Um, however, for my cut, I'm going to be going to be doing what's called a refeed, which is where

you drop, you do it. I'm going to be doing it probably every 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, well, there's two, two main reasons. One is it replenishes glycogen stores in the muscles, which helps your training. So, you know, 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.

Well, when you carve up like that, it gives you some renewed vigor, I guess you could say you're, you're, 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 kind of use that where, you know, you're, you're kind of going over the week and you carve up and you come in and then you, you just kind of ride that. And so there's that benefit. And then there's also a benefit 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, you know, amount of carbs, um, 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, uh, for my cheat meals with my dieting. Um, but in terms of, uh, my, my dietary fat, uh, overall, you know, it's, your body doesn't need as much dietary fat as many people think. I'll, I will

link an article, uh, in the, in the description below. And so you can go check out the kind of science behind that and why I, my diets are, I wouldn't say they're low fat, but they're right kind of on the edge between moderate and low fat, um, high fat diets. I just don't really see the point of doing it. So yeah, that's, that's pretty much the whole story with clean eating. What I want you to understand is, uh, that you have to make sure that if you want your weight loss or weight gain endeavors to go as smoothly 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 will

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 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 videos and podcasts. And I'll link an article below again on it. So you can check that out. Um, but if that's the case, then the first, uh, 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. Um, and you know, eat, eat foods, uh, that you like also. Um, and that includes like,

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 cause it's unnecessary. I don't really care. Um, but I, I like chocolate a lot. So I'm kind of 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 of fat. I prefer just a pure carb because I would rather get my fats from elsewhere, but whatever. I have about 100 calories of chocolate a day with dinner. It tastes good. Some people, they like to kind of 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 because because they want it um i don't like to do that because well one i don't really care 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 uh 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 you have to sacrifice satiety normally, meaning that you're going to save 400 calories for your dessert and you start working that out in a meal plan, that means that, you know, you're probably going to be feeling pretty bad through the day just to get that 400 calories because you're just full fibrous foods, you know, obviously high protein, um, and rely on those foods. And then, you know, if you want to work in 10% of your calories for me, I even do less. It's really 5% 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. Um, I could have, you know, whatever that would be.

I think it'd be like 10 spoons of Talenti gelato. Talenti is the best. Uh, 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. Um, so that's, that's basically everything I want to say about clean eating. Um, just know that it's not, it's good. Yes. Eat nutritious foods, but that's not like all it takes to lose weight. Um, so let's move on to the, to the next thing I want to talk about, which is patience and what it takes to really build a great physique. Um, of course, you know, 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. And because, you know, if a guy starts out, he's never done anything, he never built any muscle. He's just a normal dude. And he looks at, um, let's say he doesn't, he doesn't have an unrealistic goal. He's not trying to look like a fitness model or a cover model. Uh, you know, he's not, let's say I'm six two. So if my goal was to be like two 20, uh, at 6%, impossible, unless I was going to, you know, 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, uh, 30 to 40 pounds of muscle and, uh, under 10% body fat would probably be like the general goal for most guys. And how, what that takes when you factor in that there is no, you know,

you can, your newbie gains, your first six months, you will see pretty rapid muscle growth. But you know, 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 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 so, you know, for the first six to eight months or so, you can build muscle, lose fat. And if you do a great job, you know, you can gain, 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, uh, it's a visual change, but depending on your height, that's not a transformation just yet. It's like, wow, people are going to be, you know, 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, you know, 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. Um, but you still will probably not be at the point where

you want to be in depending on what your goals are. Um, so generally speaking for guys, it probably takes uh to go from like a normal guy to somebody that looks let's say extremely fit like you know big well-developed muscles uh all over your body and lean probably takes it no less than two years more risk more realistically three to four years probably is a, is a, uh, like, you know, honest way to honest prediction of what it takes. And that, that means that you're training correctly and eating correctly. 95% of the time, you're not taking months off. You're not, uh, dragging on cuts for long periods of time. Like I've talked to guys that made the mistake of, they didn't want to, um, well, I mean, I mean, I guess it was more just a compliance and consistently 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 of weeks and then go back to cutting and then, and then just kind of juggle that state where they're like cutting for a couple of weeks and then just not really not cutting, but not bulking, just kind of in the middle, eating a bit more cheating too much kind of thing. Um, and, and doing that where then like six months goes by and they've only gained five, six, maybe max seven pounds of 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 you were in a calorie surplus. That doesn't mean that everyone should

start in a calorie surplus. If you are over 15% body fat, you should start with a cut for sure. you should start with a cut for sure. And I talk about why in an article that I will link below. Really the ideal kind of range that you want to be in is you want to be between 10 and 15% body fat. So you want to start around 10% and then you want to be in a calorie surplus up until 15, 16% and then go back down to 10%, rinse and repeat, and you will get the best gains over time being in that body fat percentage range. And those cutting periods become shorter and shorter 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% to 10%, um, 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 kind of bang it out and, uh 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. You know, 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 better than that, that's really good. So your first year or so as a guy is kind of spent just doing that where you're 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 then you go back and 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 kind of rinse and repeat rinse and repeat uh until you there's a point where once again it's not probably not year one.

And this is where it kind of goes back to the point I said originally, where people feel like it's too slow. Like, when are they going to look good? When are they going to finally be able to go to the beach and, you know, 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, um, probably

the 13, 14% range. And you actually start feeling too big. Like you're looking at yourself in the mirror and you just look like a big, blue fee, just too big. And you're like, then that's when you know, you're actually start looking good when you start cutting to not just 10%, but under, 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% and then cut down to 7% and feel tiny and be like what wow where did all my size go because you lose quite a bit of water and glycogen that just gives you that size or that that puffed up look you lose that when as you get leaner and leaner so really all you have left is like what uh lean mass do you

really have because you don't have that sarcoplasmic that fluid that's in there just kind of pumping everything up so that's how it goes for guys where the first year is like don't think that you're going to dramatically transform yourself in the first year. That's those crazy, you know, three months, six months, even one year transformations that you see the ones where guys are going from like nothing to jacked are, 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, and they're using drugs. So they're able to go from like, to, well, holy shit in like, you know, three months or even four or five months or whatever. Don't just, just ignore those transformations. Natural transformations are much, you can, they're just slower. It just takes more time. You can achieve the same. Well, 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% of that, you are, you're, you're probably feeling like it's going a bit slow and you know, you'll, you compare your body to maybe people you see online or in magazines and you're not that excited. Uh, but when it really starts to come together is after you've gained those first 30, 20, 30, 35 pounds of muscle. Um, and this depends on your height too. If you know, 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, seven, you know, the five, the person who's five, seven is going to look way different. Like, wow, you know, you're going to

think that they gained 20 pounds and I gained 10 pounds. Um, so it really depends on your height, but if you were, uh, you know, 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 look great. And that's just kind of how it goes. Uh, and, 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. 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. But if I wanted to drop to training three times a week, I could, and I would look the same if I wanted to be, you know, if I just had to eat certain types of foods or whatever, I could work it in, I could figure it out. Um, but I, I like the taste of all the, I like healthy foods just the way I am. Um, and you know, I like, you know, I don't need to go out to a restaurant and eat a bunch of crap more than once a week. Even that is just kind of 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 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're going to be enjoying your workouts. You're just going to enjoy the lifestyle. You feel good. You look good. Um, you know, it's not just like, you don't get there like, Oh, I finally made it. Now I can just be lazy. That's just not how it goes. And for women, uh, you know, you have it much easier than guys, uh, for, I would say that like a woman that goes from just a normal, you know, uh, the, the normal type of, of girl body would

be, um, you know, maybe 20 to 25% body fat, not very much muscle. And yeah, it just looks like a normal person to, um, a very fit type of look, which would be probably like, I don't know, 16 to 18% body fat with, um, um, with good muscle tone with, you know, some shape in their, in their, in their arms and legs and, you know, a button, whatever, uh, takes, I would say probably a year would be a good, um, it could be done quicker depending on where you're starting. Um, and depending on your genetics. Uh, but if you really stick to it, I, I, I think that pretty much any girl can go from wherever she's at to looking really, really good in about a year. Um, and even if that means that she has to lose 30 pounds of fat a year is enough time to do that. Um, and two years, never, I mean, two years, if a girl, uh,

is really on it for two years, I mean, she can look amazing. So it's just easier for girls because they don't have to build as much muscle. 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 requires a lot more work than burning fat and, uh, it just comes slower and it also comes with some body fat. So when you're, 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 know, you don't have the shape and the stuff that you want. Um, so yeah, just, just keep that in mind that it's, it's a, 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, uh, 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, you know, slave away, you know, 15 hours a week to, to maintain it. Not at all. Um, you're looking at worst case scenario, a few years of, you know, dedicating five, maybe six hours a week to exercise at most, you could get away with less. Uh, and then from

there, maintaining it requires less if you want. And, uh, that's pretty much it. So I hope that, uh, you know, hope the, this podcast, we've hopefully you found it helpful. Um, if you, you know, have any other things that you'd like me to talk about, head over to my website, muscle for life.com. Um, 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 mean I reply there in writing but I sometimes take up those subjects in podcasts as well and if you like the podcast please

subscribe to it or subscribe to my YouTube channel. A lot more stuff to come. Thanks again. See you next time.