Pursuit of Wellness - How To Gain Lean Muscle, Lose Weight & Lift Weights w/ Sal Di Stefano of Mind Pump

Episode Date: August 22, 2024

Ep. #126 This week on POW, we’re thrilled to bring back fan favorite Sal Di Stefano, host of the Mind Pump Podcast, for an enlightening discussion weightlifting and holistic health. Join us as Sal shares his evolution from a focus on aesthetics to embracing a holistic approach, highlighting the dangers of insecurity and the power of listening to your body. We explore the benefits of weightlifting, especially for women, and the importance of mindful eating, self-care, and the impact of social media on our health perceptions. Packed with practical tips, from intuitive eating to effective strength training, this episode is a must-listen for anyone looking to balance fitness goals with a healthier, more empowered mindset. Leave Me a Message - click here! For Mari’s Instagram click here! For Pursuit of Wellness Podcast’s Instagram click here! For Mari’s Newsletter click here! For Sal Di Stefano’s Instagram click here! For Mind Pump podcast click here! For Mind Pump free resources click here! For Mind Pump’s MAPS fitness program click here! For POW Brand Promo Codes click here! Sponsored By:  Go to boncharge.com and use coupon code PURSUIT to save 15%. Show Links: Mind Pump MAPS Fitness Program Mind Pump Media Free Resources Mind Pump Podcast Topics Discussed 03:06 - Meet Sal Di Stefano, host of the Mind Pump Podcast 04:44 - Sal’s experience with crohn's disease 08:59 - It’s not about the results, it’s about the journey  16:38 - Creating a sustainable lifestyle 18:21 - Leaky gut syndrome 20:47 - Leaky gut, overeating, and bodybuilding  22:07 - Intuitive eating 27:33 - The importance and effectiveness of weightlifting 34:27 - Proactive tissue growth  35:43 - Empowering women to strength train  37:32 - The impact of bodybuilding on body image and food 40:51 - Best body acceptance age 43:12 - Social media and body image  44:54 - Advice for beginners with strength training 49:41 - Value of tracking your food and when not to 55:48 - Maintenance calories  57:56 - The right amount of weight to lose a week 01:00:31 - The power of the pursuit of health 01:03:35 - Advice for beginners intimidated at the gym 01:09:41 - Where Sal is at in his fitness journey

This is the Pursuit of Wellness podcast, and I'm your host, Mari Llewellyn. What is up, guys? Welcome back to the show. Today, I am bringing back one of my favorite guests and your favorite guests, Sal DiStefano of MindPump. Sal is an expert when it comes to weight loss, weightlifting, muscle gain, etc. So today we're talking how to gain lean muscle, lose weight, and lift weights. I just want to remind you guys before we hop in that there is a giveaway happening on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast page on Instagram, so make sure you check that out. Some things we'll be discussing in today's episode. I will be talking about my personal

fitness journey as that is super in line with everything that Sal stands for. Of course, you guys know I lost over 90 pounds lifting weights and I'm such a believer in strength training. We're talking about food as medicine, looking your best versus feeling your best, because there is a big difference. Bodybuilding and mindfulness, intuitive eating, is it a real thing and how to do it, the importance and effectiveness of weightlifting, fat versus muscle, the impact of bodybuilding on body image and food, advice for beginners and women with strength training, the right amount of weight to lose a week, advice for beginners intimidated by the gym. I know that's something I really struggled with at the beginning of my journey and I really wanted to make sure we

touched on that. So I know you guys are going to love today's episode. If you did, please share it with a friend. This is one that's going to really benefit anyone who's on a fitness journey or trying to get into strength training for the first time. Without further ado, let's hop right in and chat with Sal DiStefano. Okay, guys, today on the show, I am joined by Sal DiStefano, host of the Mind Pump podcast. Sal, welcome to the show. Thank you. And you said my last name properly. Did I?

Yeah, a lot of people mess that up. Oh, fantastic. What do people say? DiStefano. Oh, that's like an interesting twist. Yeah, but it's not how it's said. So thank you for saying it right. Di have to know. Perfect. Thank you. Today, we're talking all things health, fitness, weightlifting, fat loss, muscle gain, protein, and more. People were pumped when I said you were coming on. Oh, awesome. So much good feedback. Oh, very cool. Great. I feel like this is a bro

episode right now. Yeah, yes. Yeah. But you know, I love, first of all, I love the vibe in here. And our message resonates very, very strongly with women. And I don't, not because we tailor it to women, but I think that women have been misled more than men have in the fitness and health space. You just market it a lot more too. So when they hear some of our message, they're like, oh my God, that's so different and refreshing. I like how straightforward you are. And I feel like you're right in the women's health space. It's a bit cloudier because people like to take advantage of sort of the emotional side of health and fitness. And we have different experiences like motherhood. I've personally been through,

you know, weight gain, weight loss. So there's so much to kind of toy with there. So I'm excited to dive in and talk about the facts. I'd love to start all the way at the beginning of your journey and how you first got interested in fitness. Yeah. So I got started for a lot of the same reasons a lot of people do, right? I had some insecurities, some body image issues. So I was a skinny kid and I wanted to change that. And so I started to strength train. I started to lift weights and I fell in love with it because it was this thing that I could do that could have an effect. It was this, I felt empowered by it, right? Now, because it was driven from an insecurity, it wasn't always the best. I didn't always do it in the best way for myself.

Once I became a personal trainer, so that was at 14, 18, I became a personal trainer. I love people so much that was this perfect fit. And I was a much better trainer for people than I was for myself because it was really easy for me to be like, this is what's best for you. For myself, maybe not so much. That took me a lot longer. But I did that for a long time. I trained people, managed gyms, grand opened them. And then I opened my own wellness facility at, I believe I was 23. So I owned a wellness facility. In there, we had personal trainers, body work, acupuncture, gut and hormone testing, physical therapy. And I did that for 15 years, I believe, until we started the Mind Pump podcast. And then that took off. So I sold my facility and that's

what I've been doing ever since. Wow. So I know you've spoken about this mindset shift you had from aesthetic bodybuilding to more of a wellness approach. What happened that initiated that mindset shift? Gosh, well, I'll tell you my personal story and then, you know, why I love to communicate this so much. So what drove me for myself was this insecurity around my body. And if, you know, if I dug deeper, it really was not being good enough. And, you know, we can go into that as well. But, you know, that's what drove me. And what happens when you're driven by this self-hate kind of model is you're not going to always make the best decisions for yourself. Beating yourself up feels cathartic. Restricting yourself or stuffing yourself, in my case, felt cathartic.

And every other value kind of bent itself to serve that. And so I wasn't doing what was good for me. I was doing what I thought I could do, what I thought I should do to satisfy this insecurity. So I over-trained. I didn't listen to my body signals when it came to diet. I abused, at the time, designer steroids. These were over-the-counter anabolics that you could buy at the time. It just, it wasn't good. And I was ignoring a lot of the signals that my body was telling me. But right around 30 or so, my body rebelled in a big way. So, and this is when I

learned that if you don't listen to your body's signals, they just get louder until you can't ignore them. And so for me, this culminated in these really severe gut issues. At one point, I thought it was Crohn's disease or something like that. And I lost 13, 14 pounds of lean body mass. None of my old tricks would help. I thought I was eating right and everything, and it just wasn't working. And I was deteriorating. And this shell that I had built around myself was disappearing. It was very, very, very challenging time. Now, luckily, again, I think my saving grace at the time was that I trained other people and I cared about other people.

So I had a wellness studio. In my studio, I had modalities that I had seen had value for other people. Even though I didn't apply it to myself, I knew that this would provide value to other people. So out of desperation, I sat down with my body work specialist who also understood mindfulness, my gut and hormone health specialist. And I sat down with them and I said, I need your help.

I said, I don't know what's going on. I can't figure this out. And I'll do whatever you guys tell me. So I basically gave up, gave in. And so we did gut testing and I focused on mindfulness. I changed my workout. I had to change my diet completely. Now, in order to go through this process, I had to, at the time, avoid looking at myself in the mirror because it was such a trigger. So I can't focus on the appearance. I had to change my workouts and almost ignore the amount of weight that was on the bar because that would also be an issue. Like, I got to lift more or whatever. And I did this for an entire year. So it was a whole year of me completely submitting, giving up,

avoiding the scale, avoiding the mirror, just, I got to just get better. I got to get healthy. And there was this moment, I've talked about this so many different times, but it was this crazy moment. I was at one of my coworkers house, they were having like this pool party and we were all hanging out. This was about a year into this process. And I had walked into the restroom and there were mirrors in the bathroom where you could catch a reflection of a reflection of yourself.

And for an instant, I saw myself and I didn't recognize that it was me. I don't know if this ever happened where you see a reflection of reflection. You're like, oh, okay, that's me. It took me a second. But within that moment, I was able to see myself objectively. So without the lens of insecurity. And I remember looking at myself and

then realizing it was me. And then I allowed myself to look at myself and I looked better than I'd ever looked before. And it was just, it was just crazy realization. Like, wow, okay. Being healthy gave me what I thought I would get by chasing the look, by chasing aesthetics. And then I changed. That's how I changed really my message and my approach. It's really the voice that you hear on my podcast now. It came from that moment. Wow.

I feel like there's also so much freedom in knowing that you are the healthiest version of you through being healthy on the inside, because there's only so long you can go by keeping up with the aesthetics of it all. And my husband and I went through kind of a similar journey. I got into fitness around 2017. It was like an if it fits your macros, bikini competitor era. So when I got started, I was also, you know, I was overweight. I had mental health issues. I was on medication. So I was very much driven by insecurity as well. And I will say it served me when it needed to,

like that drive served me when I needed to lose the weight, but I kept going with it for too long. And I recently had my own hormone journey and I had to slow down the workouts. I had to take all the supplements. I had to change the diet and it was transformative for me. And it made me realize how much more impactful food as medicine can be. Like when you shift the mindset away from aesthetics and to how you feel, I feel like it's so powerful. It is. It's extremely powerful. You know, there's this interesting belief that, and we somewhat promote this in the fitness space, right? Because in order to effectively get someone's attention

and communicate to them, you really talk about the results. Lose weight, get fit, look this particular way. So I get that. But here's the interesting thing. Okay. If you fall in love with the results, uh, it'll be very difficult to get the results. And if you do, it'd be almost impossible to sustain them. And at some point you will actually create and cause a lot of damage to yourself. The irony is that it's not about the results. It's about, and this is going to sound cliche, but it's about the process and the journey. And it takes a long time to get there to really figure that out. But when you do that, consistency kicks in, balance naturally kicks in.

It becomes more about self-care and the value around the routine and how I'm feeling and how this affects every other part of my life. And the side effect of that is you look better than you ever did before. So we try to communicate that a lot. And, you know, we were talking earlier about why our message resonates to the female audience. Women are marketed to a lot more around this. And women are also, and you can say society, you can talk about evolution, whatever.

They're far more aware of their appearance and their value and how much value is placed on that. So they make the perfect consumer, if you will. And the fitness space is like any market, is profit-driven. Nothing wrong with that, but markets give us what we want, not necessarily what we need. And so they drive that, they push that constantly. And so what ends up happening is, you know, you can use yourself as an example. I know many people like this. They get to this point where they look the best they've ever looked, but they really feel the worst that they've ever felt because of that process and what they're obsessing or comparing themselves to. I mean, social media paints this picture of comparison that doesn't exist in the real world. I've talked about this on the show.

There's more millionaires than people with six packs. You wouldn't believe that if you looked at social media. You think everybody looks, you know, ripped or whatever. And then that comparison really puts you in this kind of negative, bad place. If you pursue this from a mode of self-care, and I mean that sincerely, I don't necessarily mean the feeling of it because we don't always feel that way.

I mean, I have children, you know, I love my kids. I don't always feel the feeling of love. Sometimes I'm annoyed, sometimes I'm upset. So it's really an action, okay? So if you go through the action of self-care, then the decisions you make start to balance themselves out. They really do. So it's not because it can go extremely the other direction, which you probably experienced

going in that bikini competitor route, right? You could go orthorexic. You could go body obsession, very unhealthy. The fitness space has more body image issues, more dysfunctional eating than other spaces, than almost any other space. It's full of it. So if you go into it with this kind of self-care attitude,

then, you know, you go out with your friends and they want to have pizza and a beer. Then the question isn't, I can't. It's more like, you know, I feel pretty good. I've been eating kind of healthy and we're going to bond over this. This will be fun. Let's can't. It's more like, you know, I feel pretty good. I've been eating kind of healthy and we're going to bond over this. This will be fun. Let's do this.

That's great. Or maybe, yeah, and I've actually been eating kind of bad. My body feels good. No thanks, but I'm gonna hang out with you. Anyway, so balance is kind of, you start to develop that. You made another comment about how the insecurity drove you initially. Weakness is the doorway towards personal growth.

Nobody moves towards personal growth unless they're uncomfortable. And insecurity is uncomfortable. It doesn't feel very good. But if you pursue this long enough, you will eventually move out of it or at least identify and then start to move in the right direction, which is, it sounds like that's what you've done. That's what I've experienced as well. That's what we try to communicate to people because our space does a terrible job of doing that. If you follow the advice, the popular fitness advice, you'll find yourself miserable, sick, and unhealthy. That's unfortunately true.

I get a lot of questions about the red light that I use. You guys have seen on my Instagram, I use a red light face mask almost every single night. I think the benefits of red light are so astronomical. And as someone who has acne scars, I've seen such a big difference. And I personally love using Boncharge charge bond charge is a holistic wellness brand with a huge range of evidence-based products to optimize your life in every way founded on science and inspired by nature all bond charge products adopt ancestral ways of living in our modern world and my personal favorite product from bond charge is their red light face mask it's amazing for wrinkles and fine lines eczczema, migraines, acne, scar tissue, wound healing, relaxation, and razor burns, plus ingrown facial hair. I personally

love to put my face mask on at night while I'm reading. I just sit there for like 10 minutes and just consistently doing this practice. You can also do it meditating or doing breath work. It's a really great habit stack and it's only going to benefit your skin in so many different ways. Red light therapy has been reviewed in over 4,000 peer-reviewed studies with 400 plus being double blind placebo trials. The studies show amazing health benefits and no negative side effects. You just have to do 10 to 20 minutes a day. It's super easy to use. You can watch TV, cook a meal, boost collagen and elastin production, and it's super lightweight on the face, which is super important because I've used face masks in the past that are super uncomfortable. It can be really difficult to keep up with. The reason I

love Bond Charge is that they removed the circadian and sleep disrupting blue and green light from their red light mask, so it's not going to keep you up at night there's zero emf radiation zero flicker and it's a sleek lightweight design and a one year warranty i feel like using red light has had the biggest benefit on my acne scars by far when i stay consistent i see the biggest difference go to bondcharge.com and use coupon code pursuit to save 15 that's b-o- B-O-N-C-H-A-R-G-E.com and use coupon code PURSUIT to save 15%. Do you feel like podcasts such as your own are improving it though? Because I feel like 2017 was kind of like the

worst era because it was the if it fits your macros rice crispy treats whatever you want as long as it's within these numbers yeah and now I mean I don't know about you but I'm so much more into the ingredients and the quality of everything I'm putting in my body yeah well one thing I like about podcasts is that they're long form. So what it's done is it's made books into popular media. So the reason why books are so valuable is I can read a post or I can see a 15 second ad and I'm not going to get the full picture at all. I'm going to get like, what's going to get my emotion, what's going to piss me off or whatever. But when you read a book, like there's lots of nuance and explanation and understanding. And when you're a podcast, like we do five

episodes a week, you're going to hear us. I could tell you in 15 seconds, do this to lose fat, but it's not, it's not this, not even close to the whole story. I know this. I trained people for years. It's a conversation. It's a continued conversation. It's one that requires guidance. It's a journey. And podcasts are long form. You and I talking like this for however long, an hour, two hours, three hours, this type of discussion and communication allows us to get in deeper, discuss the nuances, and the listener is able to understand that versus Instagram picture. Here's how good I look. Here's five steps to getting ripped or whatever.

Like you're not getting anywhere near the full picture or what you need to get in order to create this kind of sustainable lifestyle. It just doesn't work that way. A hundred percent. And I think it allows people to also listen and take from it what they need and leave what they don't. That's right. So on your personal journey,

when you began to shift to wellness, what was the initial step you took to healing your gut and getting back on track with the hormones? The first thing I had to do was I did a food sensitivity test. Now, keep in mind, and this is what's funny, whenever I hear people debate the wellness space, it makes me laugh because back then, so we're talking 14 years ago, maybe 13, 14 years ago, okay? Leaky gut syndrome. By the way, I had a wellness studio and I trained lots of medical doctors, great people, okay? But when I would say the word leaky gut syndrome, oh, they would laugh and scoff and oh, that's some made up, you know, crunchy wellness term or whatever.

You know what they call that now? They call it intestinal wall hyperpermeability because now they've identified it's a real thing. So I did a food sensitivity test and a whole bunch of stuff came back as sensitive. So the person I worked with was like, okay, you've got some leaky gut issues. So for people to understand,'s when your your gut is so inflamed that your gut wall these cells of the wall start to space out and you start to create gaps where you know proteins and fragments of of components of food pass through when they're not supposed to and your body's response to that is to produce an immune response so you essentially

start to develop intolerances right so on my list the foods I couldn't eat were all the foods that I always eat, which makes sense when you have leaky gut syndrome. So she's like, okay, we're dealing with leaky gut. So we need to eliminate these foods out of your diet. I'm going to have you do a SIBO protocol because you probably have some overgrowth. I'm going to have you stop eating eight times a day, which is what I was doing, the old bodybuilder, got to eat every two hours type of deal. And we're going to introduce some gaps,

some fasting, not for weight loss or anything like that. I think that's a terrible approach, but rather give my gut a break. So I started with that. I used, at the time I used cannabinoids to help with the inflammation in my gut. That was more specific to me. My workouts changed dramatically from the six day a week, like beat the crap out of myself to like three full body workouts a week. Was that because of cortisol? My inflammation was so high in my gut, like, you know, exercise is a stress. And when you're dealing with chronic stress, your ability to tolerate and adapt to stress is much lower. Yeah.

So now I can tolerate much more. But at that moment, it was like, we have to scale back. Your body's just overwhelmed. So I did that. And then slowly over time, my body started to get better and started to heal. And then by the end of that year, I just felt so much better. With the leaky gut, do you think it has anything to do with the overeating that comes with bodybuilding? Because my husband has like the same symptoms and he has leaky gut and he has been, I mean, he was eating like 10 eggs a day for 10 years. Like, do you think that has something to do with it? Part of it is the consumption and the consumption when you're stressed.

So what is hammered into us in the muscle building space, right? Post-workout, you got to consume the protein and the carbs to recover or whatever, which by the way, the data now shows that's baloney. That's only valuable in a particular circumstance, like if you're going to work out again and you need energy. But what happens when you work out, for all intents and purposes, if you and I went out right now and got a hard workout and then someone did a blood test, what they would find is inflammation is higher, inflammatory, because it's a stress on

the body. So what are we encouraging people to do? Beat yourself up, which is the bodybuilding way, and then right after, eat a bunch of food. So I'm introducing all this food when I'm also inflamed. It's kind of a perfect storm that encourages, you know, leaky gut. So yeah, I think it definitely plays a role. So now when you're eating, do you kind of have like a mindfulness practice to make sure you're at a good place? Let me tell you a story that's interesting around that. So do you know who Paul Cech is?

No. Okay. So, oh God, you should. I thought you were going to say Paul Saladino. No, Paul Cech is like the godfather of wellness. Okay. So he's been around for a while. He can be a bit out there. Very entertaining. Okay. But this guy was talking about,

you know, gut dysbiosis, leaky gut. I mean, he was using the physio ball to train people in the eighties. Okay. So he's like, uh, he's, he's, I refer to him as a godfather of wellness. We had him on the podcast. He's very interesting guest guest, to say the least. And afterwards, we invited him for dinner. So we're having dinner at my co-host Adam's house. And they bring the food out. And when they put the food in front of him, he puts his hands like this. And then he puts his head down. And he, for like 30 seconds.

And then he comes up and starts eating. So I'm like, oh, okay. I didn't know Paul was religious. So I said, Paul, I didn't know you were religious. I saw you praying before you ate. And he's like, no, I'm not praying. I said, well, what are you doing? He goes, well, I'm asking my body if this is the food that it wanted to nourish itself. And I listened to what my body said. And so he does this whole process. I can't remember all the details, but it dawned on me that if you look across spiritual practices, you know, Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Buddhism, you know, all the Eastern religions, they all have a,

some kind of a mindfulness prayer practice before eating. I said, oh, there's some truth there. And so it's what you said. I think it has a lot to do with what you said is that calming the autonomic system. Obviously, there's a relationship you develop around food as well where you value it. And I'm not just shoving this in my face or eating, you know, out of self-hate or whatever. So, yes, I do. Now I pray personally. But I think there's a lot of value in pausing.

How do I feel? Is this good for me? Is this what I need right now? And then eat and then don't be distracted when you eat. The pause is so important. I think when people ask about intuitive eating, like how do I know when I'm full or when I'm hungry or what's going on? The pause is really helpful. I had a similar situation. I went on a girl date with a new friend and she prayed before we ate. And initially I was like, whoa. You know, I was really taken aback because it's kind of crazy.

But I don't think she was praying. I think it was more of a like spiritual slow down moment. But I need to get better at that because I'm like a food shover. I just had steak and I just ate a bunch of meat for lunch. I'm like a big meat person at the moment. And I just went in on it because I get hungry. Yeah. You know, when you look at the spiritual practices, they've been around for thousands and thousands of years. So there's,

whether you believe in the esoteric metaphysical aspect of it or not, there's obviously, especially if you look across them, there's spiritual truths. Yeah. And that's one of them. And so looking, you know, you can, we can dive into what the value of it is, but you mentioned things like something like intuitive eating and you mentioned shoveling food, right? So here's an indication that you don't have the optimal or best relationship with food, okay? When you're eating in that way, which we've all done, you'll find that you are not savoring the bite that's in your mouth.

You're thinking about the one that's on the fork or the one that's in your hand. It's not this, it's the wanting. It's not even the having. So a good practice with food is, first of all, be present. In fact, studies will show, by the way, here's an easy way to cut 10% of your calories.

Anybody watching right now, you wanna cut your calories. Don't cut your calories. Just do this. Don't eat with your phone or TV or any other distraction. And studies will show you'll eat 10% less naturally, just because without even trying, you're more in tune to your body's signals. But that pausing, how do I feel, whatever, that's going to allow you to make less or help create the space at least to not be so impulsive with your decisions and also to help you self-reflect. Now, the interesting thing about this is a lot of people will hear this, they'll try it, and then they'll avoid it because we often don't want to be present. Oh, yeah. We often, oh, you want me to pause? We want to run away. I'm going to run away and I'm going to distract myself with this food.

So it's not easy, but if you do it, this is what I used to do with clients all the time. So I'd have them keep a journal because I was, I, you know, I, intuitive eating, I think the term has been, you know, it's, it's, it's been manipulated and been manipulated and people don't understand it fully. But this is how I would coach my clients. And one of the things I would do is I would say, okay, before you eat, write down how you feel, why you want the food. Then eat. Don't drink water while you eat. Not because there's some weird thing about water and food, but rather it slows you down.

You just end up chewing your food more and slowing down. Don't be distracted. And then after you're done, write down one or two sentences about how you feel. And there's no magic in it. It's not like the magic was literally making them present. And what we would find is when they would do this, the food choices would start to change just naturally. And it was a very effective tool and one that develops the sustainable habits that lead to sustainable success versus count my calories, count my macros, don't eat this, I can't eat that, whatever.

That's not a very sustainable approach. I think we should talk about weightlifting. Okay. I personally think weightlifting in terms of mental health and physical health is so empowering. For me personally, as a woman, as you said, we've been marketed to be as small as possible. With weightlifting, I felt like I had this opportunity to celebrate growth and it made me feel really strong. I've always been a huge advocate for weightlifting. What are your thoughts on women weightlifting?

Well, first off, in a time per time spent comparison, okay, it's the most effective. We have the data to support this now, finally, but good coaches and trainers have known this for years. It's the most effective way to get lean. It's the most effective way to change the shape of your body because you can sculpt it. Also will balance your hormones out

better than any other form of exercise. Now let's back up for a second. Let's cover those for a bit. Why is it so effective at burning body fat? Trying to lose body fat by manually burning calories is a losing strategy, okay? The body is very effective at adapting its ability to burn calories because it's always trying to maintain homeostasis. It's not going to make you leaner unless it thinks it's in its best interest.

And so just manually burning calories actually is quite ineffective and I'll go into a little bit more why. Your body, we need to stop thinking of exercise as just a way to burn calories and think of it more accurately, which is exercise tells our bodies to adapt in a particular way. Lots of cardiovascular activity, to use an example, is telling my body to build endurance. That's the main adaptation. Side effect is I burn

some calories, but I'm really just trying to build endurance. The endurance process doesn't require a lot of muscle or strength. And because I'm burning so many calories, my body's trying to become a more calorie efficient burning machine. So it literally pairs muscle down. This is why long distance runners who have incredible endurance and run like crazy have very little muscle on their body.

Their bodies have become very efficient. This was highlighted by this groundbreaking study. Now they've done other studies to support this, where researchers went and studied the Hadza tribe in Northern Tanzania. This is a modern hunter-gatherer tribe. So they literally live the way that we all probably lived

thousands and thousands of years ago. They have no electronics. They don't even farm. They hunt and they gather. And on average, these hunter-gatherers will walk or run close to 20 miles a day, okay? Whereas the average person is more like two miles a day. So very active in comparison.

And the studies, excuse me, the scientists studied their metabolism. How many calories are they burning every single day? And when they got the results, and this was really good, sophisticated testing, they were burning roughly the same amount of calories as the average Western couch potato. Okay. So you think to yourself, how's that possible? They're moving so much. Why are they burning like the same calories as my uncle John that watches TV all day long? What's going on here? From an evolutionary standpoint, it makes perfect sense. If our bodies allowed us to burn 10,000 calories a day by running and walking, we wouldn't be here.

Food is very hard to come by in a hunter-gatherer society. It's very scarce. It wasn't until the agricultural revolution and so on were we able to really pack on the calories. So our bodies adapt to that form of activity by becoming more efficient. It's really no different than like, imagine if you had an AI, super advanced AI car that modeled itself after your driving habits. Now imagine if you drove that car every single day, 300 miles going 20 miles an hour.

What would that car look like? Would it look like a V10, you know, six liter engine? Or would it become a one cylinder engine, you know, hybrid or whatever? That's what happens to your body. So trying to move and burn your way out of a body fat is a losing strategy. Your body actually pairs muscle down

because muscle is very metabolically active. Muscle's expensive tissue. And since your body's like, we don't need to be strong and we need to conserve calories, let's pair this muscle down. So when you look at the studies on lots of cardio plus diet for weight loss, what you see is a significant amount of weight loss comes from muscle. Many studies show as much as half. Now, here's why that's a bad thing. If you were to lose 10 pounds, but five of it was fat, five of it was muscle, you're smaller, same body fat percentage

version of yourself. You're essentially weaker, same flabbiness. And here's the worst part. Your metabolism is slower. This is why when people go on that journey, which is what everybody does, right? I want to lose weight. I'm going to cut my calories and I'm going to just run. What they find is they lose some weight, but then they plateau. So what's the next step? Cut my calories more, run some more. Uh-oh, plateau again. And then they're in this unsustainable place. I'm eating 1,000 calories a day. I'm doing 60 minutes of cardio five days a week. I can't maintain this.

This is crazy. In contrast, when you look at strength training, the main adaptation signal that strength training is sending is strength. We need to get stronger. So what does that do? Well, it builds some muscle. Muscle is metabolically active. Metabolically active tissue burns more calories. You actually speed up the metabolism, but it's not just that. The process of building muscle shifts your

metabolism to becoming less efficient because people may say, well, I saw a study that says that one pound of muscle only burns 12 calories. The mammalian metabolism is the second most complex thing we've identified in the universe besides the human brain. It's super, super complex. And what we found is with the same lean body mass, your body become less efficient or can become more efficient with calories. In other words, you can make your metabolism faster

or slower by adjusting lifestyle and by shifting what direction you're telling your body to go and telling your body to build muscle does it. So you may be watching this as a female, you gain four pounds of muscle with good strength training. And what you'll find if you do it right is your metabolism went up five or 600 calories a day. Okay. That is 600 calories. You would have to do two hours of cardio to do that. But now you're burning that all the time. But there's more. Muscle is dense.

If everybody watching right now were to lose 10 pounds of body fat and gain 10 pounds of muscle, you would weigh the same on the scale. You would look very different though. You would be smaller. Muscle takes up roughly three-fourths of the space that body fat does. So you're smaller, tighter, more sculpted, and you have a faster metabolism. Why do you want a faster metabolism?

Look around. We're surrounded by food. Would you like to be able to eat more and stay lean or have to eat a lot less to stay lean, right? So it's also very sustainable. My favorite part about it is this though. You mentioned growth. Okay. It's also very sustainable. My favorite part about it is this though. You mentioned growth. Okay.

It's proactive tissue. So strength training and feeding myself, which we can get to because you have to do that properly. If I strength train, I am shifting my body towards proactive tissue growth. What hormone profile is required for my body to build muscle balance? As a man,

I need more testosterone. I need healthy levels of growth hormone. I need cortisol that's natural and healthy, right? Goes up in the morning, comes down towards the end of the day. For women, you have a balance of estrogen and progesterone. What you're essentially creating is that youthful hormone profile everybody's after by telling your body to build muscle. So it feels different. It feels better. It feels very healthy. We have studies now to support this.

There was a study that just came out that compared strength training to cardio to strength training plus cardio. Guess which one burned the most body fat and got the best results? Strength training alone. Alone. It even outperformed slightly strength training plus cardio. Guess which one burned the most body fat and got the best results? Strength training alone. Alone. It even outperformed slightly strength training plus cardio. Now, I don't want people to take the message that I'm saying, don't do cardio, don't do other forms of exercise. But if you're going to exercise a few days a week and you want it to be effective,

strength training by far is the most effective way to do it. And then the empowering part, this was something that blew me away as an early trainer. When I would train my female clients and they would get stronger, they would all say that. I feel so much more secure in my body. I feel so much more empowered. Now, as a man, that was hard for me to understand, but that's because I'm a man. And that's not something that I think we don't necessarily grapple with. But I had a female client illustrate it to me very well. She came back from a business trip. She was very petite, CFO of a tech company, very successful woman. She goes through travel often. I started training her and about three months into it, she had to go to China. She came back and the first thing she said to me was, she goes, Sal, I got on the plane and I picked up my luggage and I put it in the overhead compartment by myself.

Wow. And I said, oh, okay. And she goes, no, no, no, you don't understand. She goes, every time I do that, I have to ask a guy to help me. Yeah. I did that by myself. She was tiny. She was like 105 pounds.

She's like, I did that myself. She goes, you know how empowering that is? And that's when it struck me like, okay, I get it now. Like you're able bodied, you know, that feels really, really good. So it looks good. It feels good. It's pro-growth. It's the best way.

It is, when it comes to the modern world, it's the best form of exercise to combat the stresses and the ills that we all encounter. And for women, and this is the part that makes me sad, women have been advertised to so incorrectly and so improperly that they're the most afraid of strength training because they feel like they're going to work out and then wake up tomorrow and look like their husbands or something. It's not going to happen. I promise you, it's not going to happen.

Train as hard as you want. Train like a bodybuilder. You won't look like one. To me, that is the craziest comment that I see because if they knew how long and how much food that would take and how much, I mean, you'd have to dedicate your life to getting bulky if you wanted to get bulky. But I don't know how much you know about my story, but you just so eloquently put the reason I lost my weight the way I did. So I lost 90 pounds in 2017. And from the beginning, I think I had

somewhat of a lucky start in the fitness industry because I had my boyfriend now husband, Greg, who's been bodybuilding since like 14, maybe even younger. And to me, he looked amazing. And because of him, I was exposed to the world of bodybuilding. So I saw, you know, Angelica, who had won Miss Bikini Olympia that year. And I always felt like muscle looked really feminine. I feel like when you can build your shoulders and your glutes, I loved the look of muscle. And I also felt like it's to me the best representation of hard work, especially on a woman because it is difficult to build muscle. So I was intrigued by that from the start. And I ended up losing 90 pounds pretty much solely weightlifting. I barely did be very clear here. First off, the genetics required to build

the amount of muscle that you see when you look in Instagram and you see a woman and you go, whoa, that's way too much muscle. And possibly drugs. Well, yes, that's part of it. But even with drugs, okay, so I can take the average female, put her on a bunch of steroids and have her work out and she'll just, she'll start growing facial hair and stuff like that. And she'll build muscle, but she still won't look like Miss Olympia. There is a genetic range of muscle building ability that's really no different than the genetic range for height. So let me ask you this, walking around in the everyday world,

how many times in the real world have you ever run into someone that's seven foot tall? Almost never. Almost never. You don't, in fact, if you see it, it's like, what is, it's like a UFO. Like, what am I looking at? Okay. That's because it's rare.

The genetics to build muscle, like you see on these bodybuilders where it's like scary looking, that's how rare those genetics are. So like I could take all the drugs in the world and I train very hard and I would never look like Mr. Olympia. In fact, I would never look like Mr. Olympia. In fact, I wouldn't look like Mr. Olympia when he was 18 and he just started working out. So ladies train, you could train like a bodybuilder. You could eat like a bodybuilder. And what you'll end up getting is the body that you want. You'll never going to look like a body. So don't worry about that. And if you did have those genetics, okay, lucky you, it means you could do way less work

and get the body you want side tangent did you see chris bumstead and courtney king are having a baby yeah i did is that not going to be the most genetically best baby you've ever seen i know they're gonna have some serious oh my gosh i ran i was like greg they're having a baby it's gonna be amazing did you guys go to the olympia event no okay i wish did you. You know, what's interesting about it is obviously that space is fascinating to me. And I, you know, I was very interested in that space early on. Yeah. But when you walk around and you see that there's a lot of body image and just dysphoria. It's so true. I mean, when you were talking about it before, the leaner I got on my fitness journey,

the more insecure I got and the more ab checks I did and the more obsessive I mean I never had a bad relationship with food particularly and I feel lucky to have said that but the worst my relationship ever was with food was at the peak of my fitness journey when I had a six-pack and I felt really good about myself quote-unquote I couldn't even go on a vacation because I was so obsessed with everything. Have you seen the data on when people are the most, when they have the best body acceptance or satisfaction? What age? Ooh, 25.

When they're in their 60s. No. That just goes to show you how much of it is how you actually look versus how you actually think about yourself and care about yourself. When people have the greatest body acceptance is right around then. It's not. That's actually the worst. In the 20s is when people have the worst body acceptance.

You know what's crazy? I just had Mark and Carrie Sisson on from Primal Kitchen. Okay. 68 and 70. Yeah. Like glowing, feeling themselves. They were like, we're having the best sex we've ever had. Whoa. Okay. But like, that's pretty cool. And that adds some perspective. I feel like it does. And I, you know, what we've done in, um, in our

marketing spaces and our media is we've taken signs of vitality and attractiveness and we've amplified them so much and distorted them so much that we believe those to be like the be all end all. And so for example, you know, you can look at like, like a muscular body. Okay. Let's talk about a man, right? So wide shoulders, small waist, muscular body that shows healthy testosterone. It shows mobility. It shows functionality, but then we take it to the extreme and you can be a 280 pound shredded bodybuilder, which most women would look at and go, oh, that's a little, that's a little excessive, right? What's attractive is health. Healthy is attractive. By the way, media, when I'm looking at a picture, I don't see the person's personality.

I don't feel their vibe. I don't see anything else about how they look. I don't need to say this, but you've, we've all met people and you meet them and they're attractive. Why are they attractive? It's not just how they look, they have vitality, their personality, their energy, their mind. And we don't talk about this enough. And it affects a lot, especially young girls. I have a 14 year old daughter and it affects her too. And to the point where i can see it now she's at the age right where she's over emphasizing her appearance because she thinks this is the most important thing and i'm trying to tell her like this is not yeah and it's fleeting anyway i can't imagine being a 14 year old girl with tiktok now because it makes me feel bad about myself i can't even

imagine yeah that's a that's a um a health practice actually actually is I try to communicate to people to change the algorithm on their social media because just by you have to consciously like and comment on stuff that you know is going to be good for you because your brain doesn't know that you're looking at people on social media. It thinks this is what you're surrounded by. So we naturally compare ourselves to what we see around us. So if you're looking at edited, photoshopped, orthorexic, body-obsessed people, you'll develop this without realizing it. Like, oh, man, I am nowhere near all these people, and I look terrible, and I am way down the ranks on this type of thing, you know, on appearance or attractiveness when it's not actually true. I said it earlier,

there's more people who are millionaires than there are people with six packs. I manage gyms for a living. So that's already a self-selection bias. There were not very many people with six packs, very rare. And that's a gym. So what you see on social media

is walk around the real world and then you'll see for yourself, like literally just walk around and you'll see. Even in the health industry, Greg and I are on phone calls with people all day long in this space. None of them are in shape. Yeah. It's pretty wild.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's health that's attractive. And if you chase the aesthetics, you'll lose your health and you'll lose your aesthetics. You're not going to have them when you lose your health. If you chase the health, you'll get a great deal of both. And it's that vitality and health that's attractive. And it's much more than just your appearance. So for someone listening, by the way, my audience is like 99.9% women. Awesome. Obviously high to the 0.1% of men,

if you're listening, actually, maybe because of you, they will be listening. But for anyone listening who wants to start weightlifting, gaining muscle, but wants to stay lean and maybe even lose weight, what would you recommend taking as the first step? Okay, so the building muscle process does require that you feed yourself to fuel the process. So think of it this way. Earlier I said what people typically do is they'll cut their calories, add cardio, lose some weight, plateau. Then they have to do it again, plateau. And then they end up in this unsustainable place, which I'm sure everybody can identify with. We've all done that. Here's how it looks if you do it the right way. Okay. If you

start out and your goal is to build strength and build muscle, actually even forget the build muscle part, get stronger. I like that better because it's not so tied to aesthetics. And if you're getting stronger, you're moving in the right direction. So it's like, I need to get stronger. So I have to feed myself appropriately to do that as well. So aim for your target body weight in grams of protein. So wherever you feel your target body weight is, let's say it's 120 pounds, 150 pounds, whatever. That's how many grams of protein I'm going to aim for and prioritize. In other words, in my meals, I'm going to eat that first, and then I'll eat everything else. Now, the reason why we're going to do that is there's

two main reasons. One, protein fuels the muscle, which is going to speed up your metabolism, which is going to make it much easier for you to get lean. That's number one. Number two, protein is very, very satiety producing in comparison to carbohydrates and fats. If you eat your, and you'll find this, people watching, it is very tough from whole foods. Eat your target body weight and protein, you will find, oh my God, I don't think I can eat anymore. Because it just really kicks in those satiety signals, okay?

So naturally what'll happen, if it's all whole food, you'll naturally eat an appropriate amount of calories. So protein, strength train. The strength training should look like, first of all, it should be appropriate for your current fitness level. For beginners, you're probably going to start twice a week. You're going to do maybe three or four compound exercises. These are kind of full body exercises like squat, deadlift, press, row, that type of thing, and treat the workout appropriately, meaning exercises, the goal of the exercise isn't to make you sore or sweat.

Shift your mindset. The goal of the exercise is to learn the skill of the exercise. So I'm not going into the gym to do squats so I can feel my legs shake. I'm gonna try and get good at the skill of squatting. That is gonna pay you back so much more because it is a skill and the better you get at it,

the more you get out of it. Like if you could squat with really good technique and form, you'll get 10 times the results than if you just squat hard with terrible technique and terrible form. So go to the gym, practice the skills of these exercises. So do them to get better at doing them. And that will also help dictate the right intensity. Add a lighter weight. How do we know when we're lifting enough? If your technique is, if you're trying to perfect the skill, you will

pick the right weight. So people are like, well, that's going to be too light. No. When you first get started, it's appropriate. Believe me. As you get stronger, you're going to want to add a little weight to challenge yourself a little more, but don't compromise the fact that you're getting better at the skill. Getting better, by the way, also means you can lift more. It also means you can go a little deeper. It means you have better control. So a good rule of thumb with that is I'm going to do this. It's going to feel challenging, but I'm going to perfect the skill of it. Now, when you become more advanced and you have a little bit of a better grasp of intensity, the ideal intensity is about two or three repetitions short of failure. So failure, the way that we talk about it or define it is you lift until you know that you can't do

another rep with good form. So, you know, if I do another rep, my form's going to break. Okay. Don't go that hard. Stop two reps before that. That intensity is going to give you the best results in the long term. Just end of story. It's going to give you the best results. So if you start like that, hit those protein targets, and then just try to get stronger. Just try to get stronger. And then what'll happen is the scale will look like this. It's going to start off slow, but then you're going to get a faster metabolism and it starts to snowball. Okay. You start to get this snowball effect. So rather than initial weight loss happening and then plateauing, and then it's

like, what the heck? It's like, okay, nothing's happening. I kind of feel better. Oh, I look leaner, but the scale isn't moving. And then all of a sudden things start to speed up. And then what you'll find if you do this right is you should be able to eat as much or more after you lose 30 pounds than you did when you first started. What a great place that is, right? That you could eat more, but be leaner. Very sustainable, much more sustainable.

Do you recommend people track on like a MyFitnessPal from the beginning? That's what I did. And I feel like I learned a lot and then I let go of it. One thing that you said, which I would have asked you if you had asked me, Sal, should I track? I would have asked you, do you have any challenges or issues with your relationship to food? You said you didn't, in which case tracking is fine. If you're listening to this right now and you've had challenges with food,

you've had dysfunctional eating patterns, maybe you've dabbled in anorexia or you've restricted yourself or whatever, tracking can be a really bad trigger because it can seem very controlling and it can cause a lot of stress and it can cause a lot of problems, okay? So if that's you, don't track.

Now, if you eat whole natural foods and you avoid heavily processed foods, let's get into that for a second. Why do we want to avoid heavily processed foods? Well, generally they're not as healthy, but that's not really the main reason why, because they could process foods to have all the nutrients and stuff from other foods. And we can argue about whether or not that's healthy or not. But really what it is is that ultra-processed foods are engineered to make you overeat. And they're very effective at doing so. The best nutrition studies we have, hands down, are these controlled studies where they take groups of people, they put them in a lab, and they say, you can eat as much as

you want of these foods, and you can eat as much as you want of these foods. And the difference is these are heavily processed foods and these are whole natural foods. And they leave them alone. And then they take those groups and they switch rooms. And they've repeated this study. And what they found is on average, you'll eat about 600 more calories a day

with the heavily processed foods because they engineered them to make you overeat. This is what they do. It's to make them irresistible. This is why if you put a family size bag of laced potato chips in front of me and you told me to eat it in 30 minutes and you'd give me 10 grand to do so, I could do it. But if you gave me five plain boiled potatoes, I wouldn't. It's the same potatoes. It's the same amount, but the plain one, I'm going to gag after eating the third one, right? The processed ones, they've been engineered.

And I can get through that. So if you avoid heavily processed foods, eat whole natural foods, hit your protein targets, here's what will happen. You'll eat the right amount. Now, will you get shredded? No. You're not going to get to 17% as a female doing that. But you'll get down to the low 20s.

The average woman will get down to a nice, healthy, lean body fat percentage doing that because that's where your body wants to sit. There's this terrible myth out there that humans are eating machines. And if you just put food in front of us, we'll just eat like crazy. No, that's only the case because we've introduced incredible variety and processed foods and we've hacked our systems of satiety. But if you put, you know, you go hunt and you kill an animal and you're like, all right, everybody eat as much as you want. People would eat the appropriate amount because it's a whole natural food.

If you do this, then you won't need to track. But that being said, is there value in tracking? Yes, because it is an awareness tool. Tracking teaches people what's in food, how many grams of proteins, how many grams of carbs, how do I feel when I eat more carbs? How do I feel when I eat more fats? How do I feel when I eat this kind of thing

or that kind of thing? And when my calories are higher in the day versus lower in the day, it is an awareness tool. But if it's a trigger for you, I'd say, don't go for it. Do what I said earlier and you'll be just fine. If you wanna get really lean, tracking becomes more appropriate because now you're asking yourself to get leaner

than what would be considered optimal for health. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I know for me, when I first started, I had such little knowledge around nutrition. I didn't even understand what a fat carb or protein was. So for me, it was kind of essential. And once I had it figured out,

I said, okay, I roughly know what I'm consuming in a day and I can move forward. And it still is helpful for me to have that knowledge. Yes. So that's why it's valuable. It's just, there's that subset of the population where if you have them track it, it's not good. They jump off and like, I can't do this or it puts them down kind of this dark path. Because it's a lot of numbers and it becomes a little bit analytical, I think. Yes. And, you know, look, all right, let's talk about how, what it looks like to have

a good, healthy relationship with food. So any skill that you learn, you have to go through four stages of learning. They go like this. There's unconscious incompetence. There's conscious incompetence. There's conscious competence. And then there's unconscious competence. So what does this look like? Okay, there's conscious incompetence, there's conscious competence, and then there's unconscious competence. So what does this look like? Okay, let's start with the

first one, which is unconscious incompetence. You don't know that you don't know. This is like, I don't know what's going on. I don't know anything. Conscious incompetence is when you're aware of what you don't know. Like, oh, food has macros and calories. Okay, like I don't know any of this stuff, right? Then you move to the third stage, which is conscious know. Like, oh, food has macros and calories. Okay, like I don't know any of this stuff, right? Then you move to the third stage, which is conscious competence. I'm tracking, I'm counting, I'm paying attention. You don't wanna live there though,

because that can become very hyper-focused and stressful. You wanna move to the fourth stage, which is unconscious competence, where I eat healthy, feels very natural, it's not stressful. So think of it like a child learning how to walk. A kid doesn't know how to walk. They're probably not even aware of what that is. Then they try to start walking. Then they figure out real quick, they don't know how to walk. Then they're consciously competent. You watch a toddler walk. I have two young kids and one of

my youngest is one year old, right? So soon we're going to get to the process of her trying to walk you watch a toddler walk they have to think about every step because they have to consciously be competent well at some point you know do you think about every step when you walk or every breath you take like that would be very stressful right yeah hopefully i didn't make your audience all of a sudden aware of their breathing now i'm overthinking everything yeah but but that's so that's what happens that's how tracking should be used, right? So tracking is that competent stage where you're competently, you know, conscious of it

or conscious of your competence. But then you should move into this kind of, it's natural. Like I eat healthy because I'm caring for myself. This feels good. I need more of this or I'm enjoying myself so now I can enjoy these foods. And it's this harmonious, like not stressful state of being. How do you recommend people figure out their maintenance calories and where to move from there?

The only accurate way to do it that I know of is to track. So the way I would have clients do is I'd say track your calories. Now, don't change your eating. Don't change any of your eating habits. Just track. Write them down and track them. After two weeks, get your average. And unless you were gaining or losing a lot of weight in that period of time, which you shouldn't have if you were just eating like you normally would, then that's roughly what your maintenance is at. And then you can move from there. The calorie estimating websites are very general and they could be very, very off.

Especially if you have like a strength training female. I mean, I've had female clients that were tiny strength training. They did a lot of strength training. They were eating like 2,800 calories a day, but the calorie counters would tell them to do, you know, something closer to like 1,600 or 1,700 calories. So it could be very off. You could also have through repeated cycles of extreme dieting and cardio, you could have really hammered

your metabolism to the point where you're not burning very many calories at all, in which case you would want to reverse diet. What I did, I've done a reverse diet. It was a little bit of a mental struggle, but it was helpful. At the beginning of my fitness journey, I tracked, figured out my maintenance. I cut back very slowly, which is what I've always recommended. I've always said, you know, cut back as little as possible so you have room. Is that what you recommend as well? Totally. Because mostly, there's other reasons too, but mostly for the, we have to remember that we're not machines. We're behavior-based creatures. Okay. So

too much of a change all at once, the likelihood of it being sustainable is far less. So, and food is a part of who we are. So we don't just eat for fuel. I know people in my space like to say that, but that's such so stupid. We eat for a lot of different reasons. We eat to celebrate. We eat because we're stressed or we're sad. We eat for enjoyment. So all of a sudden cutting your calories drastically, like you're changing a big part of your life. And if you think that that drastic tough change is going to stick around, like you're fooling yourself. So small changes are just much more effective for sustainability. What would you say is like a reasonable amount of weight to be losing per week?

Well, they're going to say that the most, in terms of pure body fat, that if you're doing everything right and you're doing it in a sustainable way, by the way, I want to say this, it's not fast or slow. People think what I'm saying is the slow way. There's a faster way, but it's the wrong way. No, no, no. It's not fast or slow. It's yes or no. The fast way you will not get where you want and you won't stay where you want. The data is a hundred percent clear on this. 90% of people who lose weight gain it back. We don't have a weight loss problem. We have a keep the weight off problem. Okay. So what I'm saying isn't the slow way. It's the only way. Okay.

Okay. So if you do everything right, you can expect about one to two pounds of body fat a week if you do everything right. Now, do most people experience that? No, because there's a lot more than just weight loss that's happening. There's learning about how I feel and this is important to pay attention to. How's my energy? How's my skin? How's my mood? How's my sleep? Am I stronger? Do I feel, is my libido healthy? Like pay attention to all those things because those are all signal you that you're doing the right thing. And then the fat loss will happen. Yeah. There's so many other factors than the scale when it comes to weight loss.

You know, it's funny. So I trained people for years. This used to shock me, but people would come in and they'd be working out and I'd tell them, look, we're not going to try for any weight loss for the first couple of months. I'm going to speed up your metabolism, get you stronger. And so they'd come in and they'd be like, okay, I want to lose weight. I want to lose weight. I'm not losing any yet, but I understand you said that. And I'd say, well, you know, how's your sleep been? And they'll say, oh, that's weird. It's funny you say that. I've been sleeping so good. Like, okay, that's great. And how's your energy been? That's interesting. You know, I'm drinking one cup of coffee less a day than I normally do. You know, how's your mood? Oh, I feel so much more

upbeat. They're not even paying attention to those things. So it doesn't even register because they're so hyper-focused on the scale. So it's very important to take note of all the other positive effects that improving your health will bring. And improving your health will improve every aspect of your life, everything. There isn't a single thing that it won't touch. So pay attention to those things because when the scale isn't moving, it's going to help you stay on the right track. And it'll also paint a much fuller, complete picture of what's going on. Also, weight loss doesn't keep happening. At some point, you're going to stop losing weight. And if that's all you're focused on, you'll find yourself in a place where you're like, why do I keep doing this? So pay attention to everything. Yeah.

My audience listening knows what an impact health and fitness had on my life. I wouldn't have a podcast, a business. It taught me everything I know about work ethic. Like it truly, truly changed everything for me. I went into it, you know, pretty much being controlled by a mood disorder and that it helped so much. Food and exercise have completely changed my life. So for anyone listening who's embarking on their journey, there's so much benefit that can come from this. Do you know what it is?

What fitness is or health, this pursuit of health is? It's one of the most powerful vehicles for personal growth. Part of it is because it's unassuming. When you started working out, you want to just lose weight. You weren't like, I'm going to get on a personal growth journey. You're like, I'm just going to lose weight. If you stick to it long enough, here's what you end up getting out of it. You end up developing a different relationship with struggle and pain.

Okay? So when you first start working out, the hurt hurts differently than when you've been doing it for a long time. Trust me, my workouts hurt as much or more than somebody who's never done it before who just started. But I have a different relationship with that pain. Do you think there's carryover to the rest of my life with that? Absolutely. So that? Absolutely. So that's one. Two, body acceptance.

So someone listening might be like, what do you mean body acceptance? I'm trying to change my body. Do this long enough and you're going to be like, I'm not going to look like that person on Instagram. But you know what? I like the way I look. I like the way I feel.

I'm going to keep doing this anyway. Body acceptance starts to kick in. Discipline. You develop the skill of discipline. Well, what's discipline? Well, discipline is doing the things that are good for you or doing things that you should do when you don't feel like it. Motivation comes and goes. For you to be consistent with fitness over time, it means you're going to work out when motivation goes away because motivation goes away. I never had to encourage a motivated client to work out. I never had to encourage a motivated client to eat right. They were motivated. It's when they weren't motivated that it was a challenge. So fitness helps to teach you that as well. Here's what else fitness does.

And you're probably experiencing this yourself. It's a gateway to other personal growth because you start to master exercise, you master diet, you feel good. You're like, huh, what's the spirituality thing? Huh? What's this meditation thing? Maybe I should look at sleep. What about relationship health? Or what about, and it starts to bleed into all these other things. So it's just, it's just this incredible. And of course it changes your physiology, how you think, changes your mental state. It's the most powerful antidepressant and anti-anxiety method that we've identified. If it wasn't a pill, it would be a blockbuster. Yeah. I felt like I had this secret after I went through my fitness journey. I was like, oh my gosh, like, why aren't we all doing this? And I became obsessed with optimizing everything, productivity, mindset, other health and fitness, you know, it's really ignited something in me that I didn't even know was there prior, which is amazing.

What would you say to anyone listening who's maybe intimidated to step into the gym? And I think this is important if anyone has like a New Year's resolution or something. What if they're nervous about the judgment they might get at the gym? Boy. Okay. I understand the intimidation because you're walking into a space. You're not familiar. You're not proficient. And you're seeing these other people who seem to know what they're doing.

So I've experienced that many times. I'll walk into space and it's like, oh my God, everybody knows what they're doing. I don't know what I'm doing. So it makes you self-conscious. But here's. I'll walk into space and it's like, oh my God, everybody knows what they're doing. I don't know what I'm doing. So it makes you self-conscious. But here's what I'll say about that. The most, and I'll stand by this all day long. By the way, anybody who's worked in gyms or worked out for a long time will stand by this.

The most accepting place on earth is the gym. People talk about inclusivity and whatever. The most accepting place you'll ever be is in a gym. And the most accepting gyms are the most hardcore gyms. This is a fact. Everybody, if you go in there, you could be 500 pounds. You could be, you have the worst health. You could have no understanding of exercise. You could walk in there and you just try and you'll feel and see what I'm talking about because everybody's been there. Everybody in there is pursuing the same thing. My friend, I have a good friend, Father Steve,

he's a priest and he runs Bishop Barron's Media. He's a Catholic bishop with this big media channel. Father Steve also works out, right? So he told me, this was literally his quote. He said, the church has a lot to learn from the gym with that. He says it's the most, because he's like, you walk in,

nobody cares who you vote for, what you look like, none of that stuff. because he's like, you walk in, nobody cares who you vote for, what you look like, none of that stuff. You're in here, you're trying, and everybody's like, yes, let's do this. And test this out. Go to a hardcore gym, go tap on the scariest person that you see in there and say, hey, it's my first time, I don't know how to do this. And watch what happens. They'll automatically become your free trainer. It's such an incredible environment. Now, I get the whole intimidation because of the, you know, you don't know what you're doing or whatever. That's why I say go in there and practice these exercises like skills. There's lots of resources.

I sell fitness programs that outline out what you do. I have a YouTube channel that where we demonstrate exercises. It's free, so you can watch those. But you'll see. And once you figure that out, it's like, oh my gosh, this is the best place. I was just telling a story about,

you know, I go to Gold's Gym Venice and I had a girlfriend start coming with me and she was like, I don't know. It's pretty intimidating. Like there's huge guys in there. And I was like, I promise you, the biggest guys are the nicest. And now they hype us up.

They're like, is that a new PR? Oh my gosh, I saw you benching the other day. It really is such an encouraging place. And I've been there too when I first started. I was super insecure to walk into a gym because I felt like I was overweight. I didn't fit in. I didn't know what was going on. But slowly but surely, if you just keep showing up and even if you don't have the best workout ever, even if you're just there for 30 minutes and you get comfortable in the space, that confidence really does build. Play your favorite music, wear a hat if you need to. That really helped me stay in the zone and stop looking at other people, kind of like blinders. And yeah, it's a great place to make friends too, like-minded individuals.

Totally. It's all growth-minded. And if you have the ability, hiring a coach or trainer who's really good is worth their weight in gold. Like in, in really, obviously they know exercise, they know technique, they know how to apply it, but what they are is they're a guide and they're going to guide you on this journey. And a really good coach or trainer's goal is to get you to the point where you could do this on your own for the rest of your life. And so, so if you find one that that's good. Here's some, here's some, some telltale signs that you're working with someone good. Um, they don't beat the crap out of you in your workouts. You leave feeling better than you did when you walked in. They train you appropriately. They assess you.

They don't just take you in a workout. They assess you. They answer a lot of questions with the answer. It depends because it's very nuanced. Is this the best diet? It depends. Is this the best exercise? Well, it depends. That's how you know you probably have a good trainer. They're worth their weight in gold, if you can find one. Even if you work with them once a week or once every other week, they will really help you. And there's online coaches that are less expensive. They're not going to be able to train you in person, but really, really good ones will help you so much. But yeah, go in there. It's funny. You know, when I, when I first started, I started in the gym business in 90, 1997. So it's a long time ago.

And in the, in the first gym I worked in, they had a women's only area. And I remember, you know, after the gym closed one night, I went in there, and it was hilarious because it was the same equipment. It was just pink, and I remember thinking, like, how silly is this or whatever? Anyway, you know, in that gym, eventually they remodeled it, had this big weight area, and at that time, you know, you're talking the late 90s, women were not in the free weight area, almost never. I mean, it was rare. And I remember there was this woman, I signed her up. I talked to her about this.

She was in her mid forties. She was super intimidated. But I said, no. And she didn't have the money to afford a trainer. So I said, here's a few exercises. I said, just go in the corner, do your thing. So she was like one of the only women in there. She worked out.

And she quickly, like all the big like bros in there, whatever, she was like, they were like protecting her, showing her what to do, helping her out. And she's like, I did not expect this at all. I'm like, I'm telling you, it's the best place. Wow, that's so cute. I love that. And now I think it's awesome seeing the spike in women who are interested in weightlifting. It's incredible.

Huge. In fact, gyms now are taking space away from other, like from cardio equipment and things and putting it towards. Hip thrust machines. By the way, we're really in this revolution of strength training because, and women are driving this. Women are very powerful consumers. So now that women are starting to adopt it, the fitness industry is really starting to pay attention. But now we have really good data to show that it's benefits on fat loss, on sculpting, on hormone balancing.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, I don't know if you've had her on. I need to. She just wrote a great book about this and how the obesity epidemic really is about the being under-muscled epidemic. So I think we're starting to see this wonderful swing that I couldn't be happier to see. Sal, where are you at now in your fitness journey?

What's your focus? I mean, I have four kids and a business and I love it. I love it. Okay. So here's, this is, this is cool. So I always work out in the morning first thing because otherwise it's going to be very difficult. I have two teenage kids, two kids under the age of three. And so it's like in the business. So if I wait till later in the day, it's just something's going to happen. I'm not going to be able to do it. So I wake up early. I would work out. And I did that for a long time. Well, my wife now, she's been kind of doing some stuff on her own in the garage. She's at the point now, my daughter's one. She's like, I'm feeling good. Let's start working out together. So I'm like, okay. So I wake up even earlier. So we wake up at five, we work out in the garage. I'd say 60% of the time, one of the little ones interrupts us and

we got to go get them. It's a super early workout. I'm not like the most energized or whatever, but I'm hanging out with my wife. And then when I leave and I'll send you a picture of this, so you can, if you want to post it, when I it when I leave I see my kids and my wife and they're saying bye to me on my way to work like like that's where I'm at right now like it's the most it's so awesome it's the best I start the day off that way I go off and it just feels great you know where I'm at now with it is just it's just this it I use it as a way to improve the quality of my life and what's most important to me what's important most important to me is is my family so if it gives me more energy, it makes me feel good,

then I'm going to do it. That's so special. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Where can everyone find you online? Where can they listen to the podcast? The best place is on the podcast. So Mind Pump, you can find us on Spotify, YouTube. So we do film it as well. iTunes, anywhere you'll find a podcast, you'll find us. If you want free guides, so we have a lot of fitness guides that can outline certain things, you can go to mindpumpfree.com. And then we also sell fitness programs. But I'll tell you this, if you listen to my podcast and you go on our, we have two YouTube channels. One of them is with does exercise technique. The other one's a podcast. You go on the Mind Pump TV channel.

That's with the exercise. And you listen to the podcast. You won't even need to buy a program. We'll tell you what you need to do. But if you want it all put together for you and organized, then we have what are called the MAPS programs. And those are all the workouts.

Amazing. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thanks for joining us on the Pursuit of Wellness podcast. To support this show, please rate and review

and share with your loved ones. If you want to be reminded of new episodes, click the subscribe button on your preferred podcast or video player. You can sign up for my newsletter to receive my favorites at marilowelland.com. It will be linked in the show notes. This is a Wellness Out Loud production produced by Drake Peterson, Fiona Attucks, and Kelly Kyle. This show is edited by Mike Fry, and our video is recorded by Luis Vargas. You can also watch the full video of each episode on our YouTube channel at Mari Fitness. Love you, Power Girls and Power Boys. See you next time. The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a

substitute for individual medical and mental health advice and does not constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your doctor or health team.