The Missing links to your Long-Term Body Transformation (Part 1)

# The Missing links to your Long-Term Body Transformation (Part 1)

**Channel:** Ruby Cherie
**Published:** 2025-01-24
**Source:** https://youtube.com/watch?v=hd9TjfK-CGo

Hello and welcome to 100% Real with Ruby. Today we are cutting through the noise and busting myths again with Luke Lehman and his podcast series with me like over a year ago now back in 250, 251, 253, 252. I missed that one. They were listened to probably the most over the periods of months that we did that one. And it's because we, exactly, we challenged a lot of status quo things. And today we're going to be diving into why so many people work harder than ever in the gym and the kitchen, but they don't see the results they deserve. What's missing? Well, you'll hear soon. So grab a coffee because Luke's probably already had a million shots of his. it's time to rethink everything you know anyway you ready luke let's go let's go you and i both like to say we already know your success is inevitable if you follow the plan that we laid we know it's going to get you to where you want to be if you apply yourself consistently over time but people get in their own way so i want to start off with just talking overall health and lifestyle and then we'll start going deeper into training on this series because we didn't last time. But so many people are now missing the training element of what actually builds a physique because food doesn't build muscle. Training builds muscle. So Luke, why do you think so many people fail at getting to their long-term body transformation goal? Real quick, that last statement you said, I think we could actually clarify that even more, Right. Because if it mechanic, mechanicalist, mechanically, mechanically, I'm not even going to try to say that. So I've just made that word up from a mechanical aspect, like training doesn't actually build muscle, but it does create the stimulus to build muscle. Right. So I think because a lot of people that they train, they did a lot of like gym pop people. They go into the weights. They don't really understand what's happening. And while a lot of muscle protein breakdown is not the goal of what we're doing, anytime we apply tension to a muscle and the muscle fibers are pulling, they're going to get somewhat damaged. Right. So it's like when you go into the gym, you can think about it like you hear like a really bad parent say, I'm punishing you for your own good. Like we go to the gym and we we flog ourselves and damage things to create a stimulus to then grow. So then with the food becomes the building blocks of what is fueling not only the training, but also fueling and creating the muscle out of. So like protein building those new building blocks. When we talk about like how hard should we train? How hard should we eat? Like what we should do. That statement of that or that understanding of those two concepts is really important because especially nowadays with social media where you have a lot of different opposing views. Like everybody is saying different things or they may be saying the same thing, but they're saying it in completely opposite ways. So it creates a lot of confusion for people. Does that make sense? So it's like you have, you know, you look back 15 years ago, we thought, you know, muscle protein breakdown was a big part of it. So you needed to damage the muscle. But we now know that's not the case. Like that's still like if you remember the old like Brad Schoenfeld, when he put out the research and it looked at mechanical tension and it looked at, you know, muscle damage. And then it looked at metabolic stress or we could say like byproducts of your metabolism working. And that was the three things that scientists thought was how you build muscle, right? Breaking the muscle down, applying tension to the muscle to give a stimulus, and also all of the substrates and the stress that happened from doing all the work. And then now if you fast forward, we now know that muscle damage, while it's probably still a little bit important, it's not the main one. and the metabolic stress is still important, but it's not the main one. What scientists now think it is, it's just like tension is the big one, but people want to throw the baby out with the bathwater and they want to say that muscle breakdown is not a good thing. They want to say metabolic stress is not a good thing. And neither of those are part of the puzzle, but they really are. There's so much we don't know about building muscle. We know a fraction of what is actually happening and new stuff every year and new stuff comes out. There's a lot of unpublished stuff that's come out. There's a lot of stuff people aren't talking about yet, but this is all stuff that coaches have to know and not really something that their clients need to know. But I actually think it's good to talk to the client about this because they need to understand that if you want to build a physique and you want to build health and you want to lose body fat and you want to build muscle and you want to do and you want to build strength and you want to do all and you want to build endurance Everything in life apply is applied to the Goldilocks principle You don want too much You don't want too little. You want it to be just right. And that just right is different for everybody. So when we think about things like how hard should we train? Like I would tell people, you need to train hard enough, but that's really ambiguous. If I say you need to train hard enough, what does that mean? That's like, that's like going to the doctor and they say, Hey, you have hypertension, you need to exercise and diet. And you go, what the fuck does that mean? Like, that's like, what do I go do body combat? Do I lift weights? Do I go do CrossFit? Do I start doing triathlons? It's very ambiguous, right? So you gotta, you have this big overall thing of, okay, we got to move more, and we have to match our calories. And then we have to alter the calories based on whatever adaptation we're looking for, right? But we have to look at it from a perspective of there's no, depending on the person and the situation, that is going to drive the amplitude of how extreme or not extreme you go. Like I'm doing an incredibly extreme diet right now. It works. It's probably the hardest diet anyone could ever hope to do. And it's like punishment, but it works really super fast. But it's not one that I put, I've not really put very many people on it because they can't handle it. It's just too hard and it's not necessary. So I think a lot of people need to be, they need to step back. Like when you're talking to your coach, step back and go, okay, what do I want to do? And the coach should be doing this too. Like, okay, what do you want to do? If somebody signs up with a coach for say 12 weeks, we need to have a discussion of what needs to happen in the 12 weeks. But that discussion also has to encompass what do you want to do in 24 weeks, 36 weeks, 48 weeks, a year and a half, because what you do in that block of training is going to affect the next block of training and the next four blocks of training. It's all compounding interest, right? And I think if people would treat their exercise, lifestyle, nutrition, stop trying to... A lot of people go into this stuff looking at it like crypto trading, like they're buying a meme coin and trying to get rich. But what we need to do is think about investing in this like a long-term EFT or the S&P, something that's going to have compounding over time and we have delayed gratification, right? So if people had that mindset, they would not go too extreme. They would go to their capacity at the right level and right amount for something that's sustainable for a long time. And I completely already forgot the question. I just started rambling. It's my second podcast today. So I'm like, well, that actually feeds right into it because you kind of alluded to people need to be willing to do the day in, day out things over time for the level of results that they want. But most people aren't willing to do that so then like you said everything we do impacts the next block so fuck it up diet then what's the after after of that too extreme has ripple effects and then that is why people do not get to the place they want to be because then when they go to that other extreme and fuck things up what's what do they want to do they want to go back to restricting calories and the whole cycle continues where the end result is you're softer because you just lost muscle and gain more fat because you're in no man's land. And the thing is you could have, all right, so we can have on this side, we can have, okay, we're going to do it really slowly because maybe you do have a client that, you know, they've been doing all the wrong things for 25 years and they're finally ready to get their shit together and let you know how it is. You, the first session you have with someone, you go, what are you willing to do? I'll do anything. No, you won't. You won't. I can tell you right now, you won't do anything. You won't do everything. let's figure out what you will actually do consistently day to day to day to build some actual right we want to build momentum and not lose that so if i put somebody on a massively extreme thing and go all the way to the other side they might do that for three days and they're gonna go yeah fuck this i can't do this i'm like okay oh this might be might be the right entry point of going slow this is way too fast but this slowness also might be too slow for you So we have to find somewhere between these two points where you can do it. You can be consistent. You can make this not a part of a diet or a training block. This is like what we're doing forever. So we need to find what are the things you could do right now forever and ever and ever, non-negotiable. And that creates the foundation. And then we go, okay, what's the next layer? Now that you kind of have balls deep or ovaries deep into this, what's the next thing we can do, right? And I think probably the best system to learn that is like Precision Nutrition. They're great at this. Like it's all about habits. And you know my talk. I don't like habits. I like turning habits into rituals. But you have to start with a habit. You can't have a ritual until you've done it long enough for it to just be a thing, right? And you have to find that entry point. And then you have to find out okay once they solidified all that stuff they doing they have to move to the next thing which means like from a training perspective how hard do you need to train to get fast results You need to train pretty fucking hard way harder than most gen pop people can even fathom Now that doesn't mean you need to absolutely kill yourself, but you need to understand what failure is and how to get close to failure. You need to understand what's too much and too little. You need to understand that there is a little bit of discomfort that's going to be involved in this. So when you feel your muscles burning, that's not a sign that you're injured. That's where you're getting to the good. That's where you get into the good stuff. That's where the good reps live. So you have to people have to be trained to understand that you it is going to take some hard work. Like what you've done to yourself over the last 20 years is not going to be we can't we can't change this overnight. and you're living in this level of sedentary comfort and impulse desires and eating whatever the fuck you want and doing whatever the fuck you want. And now you're at this position where you don't like the way you look. You don't like the way you feel. You don't like the way other people look at you. You have aches and pains. You sleep like shit. It's like, you're going to have to learn how to unpack that slowly over time, but it is still gonna take some work. You're not just gonna be able to jump into this head first. it's like diving into a pool in the shallow area. You're going to fucking bust your head on the bottom of the pool. I took notes on that training part. We're going to come back and touch on that because it is very true. And that's exactly why training apps, like downloading a group training app, downloading any program isn't going to get you to where you want to be. If you're still wondering why you're not looking tight and tuned and lean, because it's more than just lifting weights. And you mentioned something really powerful there. There's the too slow and too fast in terms of dieting and trying to move the needle. And this is where periodizing nutrition comes in really important because you also mentioned there's that part of building muscle that you need the fuels and essentials there. But if you are in this no man's land where you're kind of dieting, trying to make the results and you don't want to take the diet too extreme because it doesn't work and blah blah blah well you you mentioned this in one of your posts the smaller the deficit the more the less wiggle room the less than state room that you have and most people aren't putting themselves in a place to effectively fat loss which is what my constant theme in my messaging is lately it's diet fatigue if you aren't in a place for effective fat loss you are accumulating diet fatigue you're in no man's land where you're not in a place to effectively build muscle you're not in a place to effectively lose fat. So what's happening? You're just spinning your wheels. So why is it so important to periodize your nutrition? And what exactly does this look like? Yeah. So you fast, slow, if we're talking about fat loss, we're talking mainly about larger or smaller deficits, because that's going to be the main catalyst for losing weight. And that's the thing people don't want to hear. You know, I started going to gyms in the 80s, like when I was just a kid. And it's been the same thing in the 80s and the 90s and the 2000s that people don't want to diet. They would just rather exercise the weight off. And you have two viewpoints here. And I can argue both of them. And I'm going to tell you that they're both right. But it just depends on how you look at the situation. So if my TDEE is 3,200 calories a day, and that 3,200 calories is inclusive of my weight training. So like, we'll break down TDEE, right? You have your basic basal metabolic rate. So for me, it's about 1,900. Then you have about 20% added on for thermic effect and NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis, right? Just kind of subconscious stuff that you do all day. And then if you look at that, that's only gonna be like, for God, my size around 2,200. if I don't exercise and my TDE is 2200 I'm gonna have to die if I if I pull say 500 calories out I'm gonna have to diet on 1700 so and you can lose weight like that the only problem is like you said you're gonna lose muscle that's not a good way to lose muscle how do we how do we save muscle you give muscle a reason to be around which means you need to train a few days a week at least minimal two to three days a week, if not four to five. But that's also going to alter my TDEE. Because if you're training for, say, three or four hours a week, that's going to add another 15, 20% to your TDEE. So let's say I'm going to train five days a week consistently for, say, an hour, each of those sessions with weights. Now my TDEE is 3,200. I have to shift that deficit. I'm no longer in a 500 calorie deficit if I'm still eating 1700. I'm now in a 1500 calorie deficit. So now it that going from like a small deficit to a massive deficit But I doing the right things with the weights but I just not feeding for it So that one side of it where it like all right I have tried to feed for my TDE without exercise Then I'm trying to use exercise to make a bigger deficit. But the problem is, the more I do things, the more I have to drag those calories back up. Now, you can look at it from a different perspective, too. And you can say, well, I'm going to eat at my TDE of 3,200, and I'm going to use the workouts to create my deficit. But see, that's not right either because that 3,200 is inclusive of also the training. So if you're going to train your TDE's 3,200, that's your baseline. Now we have to pull calories from that. Now, in the first scenario where it's like, I'm going to eat a certain amount of calories, I'm going to train, we could possibly say you are using exercise to create the deficit because you've set your nutrition and then you've trained on top of that. Now, the other way is opposite. I'm going to use exercise or I'm going to use nutrition to be my deficit. So I've kind of set my nutrition and pulled back in a deficit and I'm going to add the training. So in both of those situations, it's the same thing. Right. So if I were to eat, let's say the TDE is thirty two hundred and I go, I'm going to train for thirty two hundred a week and then I'm going to pull five hundred calories out. You can look at that and go, well, you're getting that deficit through your nutrition. Okay. But I could also say, well, I'm going to eat 2,700 calories, but I'm going to do enough work for it to be 3,200. So in that situation, it looks the opposite. I'm actually using exercise to create the deficit. But if you think about it and you look at the math, they're both right. Right. Does that make sense? When you're programming, what I recommend people do is look at it from a perspective of what you're doing. If you are going to diet, I always tell people for at least Gen Pop, you're better off doing less work and just eating a little bit less. And the reason is because it's easier to manage from time management. You won't make excuses of missing training sessions. And that's especially important if you're seeing somebody in person. So anytime you're doing fat loss, did I lose you? I got you, but not your face. Oh, there it is. You're back. So it's like, if you're focused on fat loss, set your diet and then train enough, train enough to hold on the muscle tissue, train enough to get the adaptations you're looking for. If you're trying to gain weight, we have a whole different conversation because at this point we need to feed up, not feed down. So in that situation, I would write out my training program and I would match the nutrition. So fat loss, match your training to nutrition. For weight gain, match your nutrition with your training. It realistically, semantically is the same thing, but it's a different way of looking at it. And what a lot of people will do is they'll try to write a training program for fat loss that has too much shit and then they diet too hard on it. Whereas what they need to be doing is just doing enough to get where they need to go and letting diet do its work. And now if you were if it was another coach like people that I train or if I'm talking about an athlete, we've got a different conversation because we're we've got some different things we have to take care of because a coach is wanting to get a lot stronger, like a lot stronger than what most gym pop want to do. They have performance things they're doing with athletes at performance things. So we have a different conversation. But I think a lot of people need to look at the programming aspect of this and the application on the client side from what is the easiest thing for the client to do? What is the easiest? And the easiest thing would be a little bit less work, but also a little bit less calories instead of trying to feed up and train up. Because it's really easy for coaches. And I fell prey to this for a long time because I love to train. I love to train. I don't mind like eating shit tons and just working like a madman. But the reality of most gen pop is they just don't have the time and they don't have the reserves to do a lot of this stuff. So we have to find strategies that work well for them. Yeah. And this is where women also, because you were mentioning like these really high numbers with calories. This is where women need to be a lot more particular with using fat loss phases strategically, because we don't have the same calories as you and a lot of guys. And so many women that I work with, and I'm sure you as well, they are sedentary AF. And this is the thing, you said it yourself, let dieting do its work. Only it hardly does because it's become the default, the go-to. Like people don't know where to look outside of the scale going down or feeling smaller in their clothes as like a dangling carrot as their motivation. And fat loss is easy in that sense because we see the results faster. Like we can see ourselves leaning out and it's like, oh my God, I'm building muscle. I can see it popping. It's like, no, no, no, no, no. You're just leaning out and you're seeing the muscle that's underneath. You keep recycling this. Oh my God. My God. When I changed gyms, not before, this was before I moved up to here in the Gold Coast, but when I changed gyms down in Sydney, there is this trainer there that is like an ambassador for comps on stage. And he

has the same like competitors over and over again and you see them over time and they just look small and stringy because he has them in like this perpetual you're competing now you're dining out he's never given them enough time to just build muscle and that is not going to happen if you're continually staying in a calorie deficit doing the same cycle over and over again and like this is this is the majority of my clients this is the majority of the people who listen to this they of stuff in that cycle and you helped me through this. And like, I was really stressed over the scale. You know that I was stressed over this stuff and it's normal to feel that way, but I would not have been like, I would not be where I am now if I still only use the scale or dieting as my metric of progress or motivation or success. We focused on the performance element. Like you got me excited about my training. I feel like this is the part that is missing from long-term transformation. We need to get people excited about things outside of just the scale or feeling smaller. What do you have to say about this one? Because there's a fear of eating more. There's a fear of your pants. I want you to- Because that's the thing. Everybody, when you look at Gem Pop, you know my gem. It's the most gem pop of gem pop. Their single goal is they want to lose weight. And you try to talk to them about, well, how about we also try to get stronger and let's try to do these other, let's try to, maybe let's try a 5k and see what you do on that. And you, you, there should always be other goals, not just the physique goal, because the physique goal, depending on the situation, some people could get their physique go really quickly. Some people, it's going to be a struggle as much as I, as much as I tell everyone that this stuff is just basic biology and mathematics. It's, it's not really, cause you know, some people don't, If we have a bell curve, like 70% of people are inside that. But what if you're outside the bell curve? So there's a 15% over here where some of the rules don't actually apply. And there's 15% on the other side where the rules are also different. So if you took, say, 100 people and gave them all the same program and then had the diet written similarly but tailored to them, 70 people are going to get really excellent results from that program. But there's going to be 15 on one side and 15 at the other that actually need to have some different tweaks. and you have 15 on one side that actually may be faster than everybody else. So in their goals, you have 15 that are going to be a lot slower and it's going to be struggling for them. And this is just down to things like genetics, like genetics and epigenetics and compliance and things like that. So when you ask the question about like periodizing your nutrition, this is definitely, definitely a, this is a global woman talk because women are different than men. They're different in the way they view food and socially and that type of thing. So it can be, it can be far more difficult for not all women, but the vast, vast majority of women to get the same success as a man, because men have it. We have it pretty easy biologically, as long as we don't treat our bodies like trash as that we have higher muscle mass. We have higher metabolic rates. We have typically most guys, unless they're really big, we have lower levels of body fat. So things are, it's a little bit easier for us when you, when you're a man and you can diet on a thousand calories more than a woman, it's a little bit easier. But if you're a little tiny woman, you know, I have some clients that are 52 kilos and, you know, they want to lose body fat. It's like they may have to eat a thousand calories or less because they just don't have enough size on them. And so a lot of cases you have to try to talk them into, well, we probably should actually just feed up first, but that's really difficult if they have a high body fat percentage and they don't want to feed up because like you said, they don't want their clothes to get tighter. And that's a big hurdle to get over with people is that, look, we could, we could diet now, but it's going to make, it's going to be, it's, it's going to make things longer. It's going to suck more. You're going to have to diet harder. And then you're not really going to have, you're not going to be, you're not going to like what, what you see at the end of it because you don't have enough muscle. So we have to figure out how to feed up a little bit and then go back down. And what, what people don't understand is a lot of times you start feeding up and they don't gain weight. They just keep, you just keep giving them another 125 calories a week. Next thing you know, you've given them 750 extra calories. Then their weight goes up. And I'm like, okay, great. You were eating 1200 calories. Now you're eating 1950. Now your weight's going up consistently. Now we can start pulling calories back down. But you know, there is a bottom. You can't, you can't continue to pull calories and think that you're going to have success. I actually have a few clients I've had to do that with in the last month where they were eating 500 calories under what I had them. I had ex pro Australian football What do you guys call it Australian football league right So she used to be a pro athlete and she feels fine on 1200 calories but she like 7677 kilos really tall And I like look your performance is we working on Olympic weightlifting, we're working on all this performance stuff. And like, you're not really you're kind of spinning your wheels, like you're not getting stronger, you're not getting better, because I just noticed that you you're consistently eating 1200 calories. So if If we really want to move forward, you want to get leaner, and you also want your performance to go up, we need to find out where the top of the threshold is. So I've just been adding 125 calories every four or five days. As long as her weight doesn't go up, we just keep adding. I've added back now 750, 800 calories, and her weight just now, this week, went up like 200 grams. So a lot of women think that if they add a little bit more calories, they're just going to blow out. Like they're going to wake up one day and be like, oh, my God, that was 100 calories too much. Look at all this body fat. It's not going to happen. Like fat gain is really slow. Fat loss is really fast. Right. All anabolic processes are slow. If you put on five kilos of body fat, you can't do that overnight. So it's like if we feed you up and that cranks your metabolism back up and allows you to start building some muscle and getting stronger, you start sleeping better, start performing better. Your neat goes up. Your thermic effect goes up. This is all good things. And we could keep cranking this up until we see your weight start to trend up a number of days. And now we know that we've exceeded your maintenance. But at least now we also have a benchmark and a platform which we can start jumping off of now. it's like now it's like you've been feeding yourself 1200 calories for eight months like no no and now you're eating 1900 2000 calories and now your weight's finally going up now we know that 1200 calories it definitely is not your maintenance like 1900 2000 is and now we can actually pull it down to 1750 and see what happens i love this and wait wait i like that because you said she got leaner when she was eating more you said if you want to get leaner you gotta eat more like wait wait wait what she wasn't getting leaner unless how is she gonna hold up this is the part that i want you to talk about because that's what you told me i didn't say she she got leaner she didn't get leaner yet now well you could say you could say you could say because of people need to understand let's let's clarify what lean tissue is because lean tissue and lean mass is not muscle it's some muscle it's water it's sodium it's stored energy like glycogen that is technically in fat cells you have lean tissue right because fat has water fat has organelles so not everything in a fat cell is fat so you could i'm going to say you're not wrong like you're right but you're But that statement's not as right as it could be because if you look at what body fat percentage is, it's what is the ratio of what's made out of fat and what's not fat. So if she is putting more food in her body, then you could say, technically speaking, she's altering that ratio of what's fat and what's not. So she is getting leaner, but it might not be from muscle tissue because that's a long process. Wait, wait, wait. Sorry. Wait. This part, that part right there. That part that Luke just said is why your pants feel tight and it's why you need to stop letting that trigger you. Because your legs are going to get bigger in the process of getting leaner in the way that we just said it. Because now your legs are these huge muscles. Imagine these huge freaking sponges that went from like to now being soaked up with water. That is what happens when you start to properly fuel your body and then use that to train like a freaking weapon to get to where you want to be. And that is the thing. And what's going to happen then? The scale is going to go up. Yeah. And stop using your clothes. Stop using your clothes as a metric because you if you you do a leg session yesterday, your legs are going to be inflamed, which means they're not holding more fat. They're holding more water. Then you put your pants on. You pull your skinny jeans on and you're like, oh, these are pretty tight. Okay, try those jeans on again in a few days, like three or four days after your leg workout, and you go, oh, they're not tight anymore. Yeah, because your legs have now recovered it and you're not inflamed. So clothes are a terrible way to measure like getting bigger, right? Because of that fact that if you put it on a body part that you've just trained, of course, your muscles are swollen from doing the work. You're inflamed. It's going to make your clothes feel tighter. You could also, what if you washed your clothes a little bit differently? What if you wash your clothes and your jeans shrink a little bit and you got to stretch them back out? You pull your jeans on and you lose your fucking mind because your jeans are your jeans are tighter. I must be getting fatter. No, no, no, no. Go measure your legs. You go oh I just did the tape measure My legs are the same size No you shrunk your jeans Don use your clothes to measure if you gaining weight And then also keep in mind that like I said anabolic processes are slow by design Okay. So let's think about this from an evolutionary perspective, because genetically, we're not that different than we were 15,000 years ago. So let's say we're hunter gatherers. Depending on where you live in the world, well, in most places, you're going to go through, despite what people think, early generations, they might not understand this, these young generations that there didn't used to be a 7-Eleven, a Starbucks, an Uber Eats, a DoorDash. We used to have to actually go out and hunt for our food and we had to go out and find berries and we had to dig up tubers and we had to do all this shit, right? So our bodies are designed to be a bit thrifty because when we are going through a feasting period where we have a lot of available food, it is normal for your body to put body fat on because you are going to eventually get to a fasting stage where or a famine stage where you can't find food. So having body excess body fat is an evolutionary benefit if you can't find food. So that being said, in the first world now, we don't have to worry about that. It can be it can be feasting all the time and we don't go through these periods of famine. So that is part of the problem is that we're genetically designed to eat at a steady level or go through periods of having food abundance and food restrictions. right? And then now we have to think about that. It creates a big problem because if your body is like, ooh, really loves to put on body fat when there's a lot of food available and you never go through a fasting or famine type of situation, you're just going to continuously put body fat on. Now, if we think, let's just say you were in Europe, okay? Part of the year in Europe, there's snow everywhere, it's cold, it's going to be difficult to find food. In the summertime, you have food, food is everywhere. So during the winter, it would be normal to be catabolic and chew away at that fat that you've put on over the summer and also to lose some muscle during that time. Because how do we, how do we lower metabolism, eat some of that expensive muscle tissue away, right? So then during the summer, when you have food abundance, your body puts that muscle back on and starts putting that fat back on. This is the normal ebb and flow of how humans are designed that we're now in a different environment. That being said, like when you try to put muscle on, it is a very slow process unless you throw drugs in the mix. And even then drugs aren't magic. They only do, they help things, but they don't override everything. Right. But people, women need to understand that you're not going to wake up tomorrow and think that you took your upper body workout too far or your lower body workout too far. And you're going to get big and bulk and all this. If you break your diet and you have a piece of cake and you wake up the next day and you're 200 grams heavier, you didn't gain fat. You ate a piece of cake, you got sodium, you got carbs, you got some water, you know, maybe you haven't pooed a little bit. So not every time the weight goes up or down, that's not always attributed to weight gain or weight loss or fat gain or fat loss, right? And if you are dieting, one of the biggest roadblocks I see is that training increases inflammation. That inflammation is going to make you hold water. Poor sleep is going to cause inflammation. It's going to make you hold water. Maybe you ate more sodium yesterday. Maybe you had more carbohydrates. Maybe you had more vegetables. Maybe you had more water, whatever, right? It's hard to tell. Maybe you were more stressed out yesterday. So if you wake up and you go, wow, my weight has gone up like 600 grams, don't have a meltdown because if you think about what happened yesterday, you probably can find a logical solution of that's right. I ate a little closer to bedtime than I normally do or shit. I haven't pooed in two days. Right. So we have to get better at being more constructive and not seeing the looking at the scale and seeing the measurement of Earth's gravitational pull on your body and then having a fucking meltdown because realistically, your weight's going to go up and down. And just like your pants are going to get snugger and looser over time depending on how you wash them this is why i say nearly daily weight loss is so freaking simple and easy building muscle is the hardest most impossible thing these days it's almost like a fantasy because people are more impatient than ever and everyone is shredding for summer or they get scared and then they cut their calories and you said there too that in those winter periods you probably will lose muscle as well and that's the thing muscle is so expensive to even keep it yeah to be more scared of losing muscle than you are of getting bulky and i know you agree with me on this one too most women haven't spent a good year dedicated to building muscle and after 30 you're going to be losing muscle by the year so you're going to want to prioritize building it i think it's gotten way better it's gotten way better with with these i know i i tease these younger generations because now i old enough to go when i was your age and all that stuff but it is getting a lot better Like guys never had a problem Men never had a problem with it Our problem was we did We went too far into eating too much food and then we end up fat And then you know, in your teenage years and your early 20s, you just want to get big. You just want to see that number go up. So you just eat whatever the fuck you want. And then you realize you look like a melted candle and you actually you're bigger, but you don't look any better. And women are the opposite because they use the scale to determine success in fat loss, which is also only part of the part of the equation. But I see a lot of a lot of women now that are okay with putting on some body fat because they know that there is an end. It's a it's a process. If they want to get stronger, if they want to put on muscle, they are going to have to go through a period where, yeah, they might be slightly uncomfortable with how they look, but they have to realize too, that is, that is a part of the process of building a nice gnarly physique. And it depends on what type of physique you want, right? If you want a strong looking feminine physique that has good round muscles and you feel good and you're strong and capable. Yeah. You're, you're going to have to, you're going to have to push yourself to position sometimes where you, you don't not like the way you look, but you know, you look better when you're shredded, but you're not going to, you're not going to progress if you stay shredded all the time. Like with Allie, that's the conversation I have with Allie. When we started, just same story. You know, she's barely eating. We pump up her food. She gains a couple of pounds. She loses her mind. I take her back down. She loses it. I pump her back up. She gains it. She freaks out. I bring her back down. And it took a year and a half, two years of pushing calories up and bringing them back down and proving to her that she could lose it overnight. Bring it back up, taking it back down. And then we just started pushing it higher and higher every time we went up and we would bring it down higher and higher as well. So she might have started at like eleven hundred when she came to me. I put her on eighteen hundred. She has a meltdown. I take her back down to eleven hundred. Take her back to eighteen hundred. I take her back down to twelve hundred. Take her up to nineteen hundred. Bring her down to thirteen hundred. So just over a period of time, taking that range from here of a low and high and shifting the range. because as long as I took the food down, she was happy, but she kind of didn't notice I was bringing it down, but keeping it 100 calories higher every time I moved it up and down. Isn't it insane that she gets happy over less food? And this is the point, like this is still the majority of the people that I speak to and people that talk to me, they're still in this fear mindset because they're in their 30s, their 40s, their 50s. They're like, they're not the 20s. And like, just imagine where Allie would have been. She said this on the podcast that we had recently as well, where she could have been if she didn't waste all of those years doing that up and down bullshit with you she said that and you luckily i didn't have to do that you somehow i don't know what it was but i was just focused on i was focused on performance and engaged that drive outside of just the scale weight and you told me to stop focusing on the dumb shit so i started focusing on the shit that made me feel good and this is what women need to know and you said there as well that like the just because you're eating more doesn't mean you're going to build muscle we'll touch on the training element with that before, but you also said putting on some body fat. To most women, that's the biggest failure there is because of the past years of struggling with their physique before. And that was me because I used to struggle. And then I came to you on 1600 calories and I'm like, but I can't get the scale to go down on this. My carbs are already too high. I was on 160. I don't think I've ever been below 300. I'm like, I'm eating too many carbs already. Like, I don't think I've ever been below 300 in the last god knows how long like to me anything below 300 grams is too low i think a lot a lot for you is like getting ready for for a powerlifting meet like getting ready for what was it was it uh what was it we were getting ready for pro raw or big dogs for raw yeah and i'm like bro if you like if you want to pr like you're already at an elite level you are the elite of the elite here if you want to get stronger you're not going to do it at the weight you're at. We're going to have to push it up to 60 something kilos and then we'll bring it back down. And you were losing your mind. But as we pushed it up, you started getting stronger and you're like, oh, this is actually working. I'm like, we can always bring it back down. Like, it's okay. So that was scary for me because I always struggle to get the weight to go down. So to me, it's like, oh, what if it doesn't work? I'm going to be so broken and you will have to unbreak me. Well, I think, I think a lot of it too, because this is coaches, coaches can be just as crazy as their own clients. So it's like, and that's why a lot of coaches have coaches because sometimes they think, they think, well, I know what works for me and I know what doesn't work and nothing's working right now. And I don't know. And then you pay somebody to come over and go, okay, just do what the fuck I say. Don't change anything. Just do what I say. Don't worry about if it's going to work or not do what I say. And they do it. And then it works. I'm like, holy shit. I'm like, look, you probably internally knew what to do. You just needed somebody like me to be mean to you and call you bad names and make you do it because they were there you had to get

You needed somebody to put on that suit of armor and stand in front of you so that that fear couldn't hit you in the face. Yeah, I knew exactly what to do. And I spoke about this recently, actually. I was like, I knew what to do. I knew all the things. But I didn't want to hear it. I didn't want to trust it because I didn't trust that my body could do the things. And that was exactly like we said. I went over the 60-kilo mark, which meant I gained like five, six kilos. And no, it wasn't all muscle. I gained some body fat, but everyone listening to this podcast knows what I look like. I am now leaner than I was when I started with Luke. And I'm the same body weight that I was when I started with Luke, except I look completely different, completely different. I think I look leaner now than when I started with you. Like that, that's saying something. And this would not have happened if I didn't push it there before. And now I'm like, I'm leaner than I was when I started with Luke. And this was 2018. I started with him and I don't think I've ever been below. I don't remember the last time I've been below 2000 calories in that whole period of time. This is what happens when you learn to trust nutritional periodization. I think that's really important, but I really want you to actually drive home that close thing again, because this part comes. I mean, one thing, you know, I mean, you know, the clients I have, I mean, I was your coach, Dave Shetler. Do you think Dave Shetler knows what he's doing? If you, if you look at the work Dave does. He doesn't. And I was at his house for a couple of weeks, a couple of months ago. And and I told him, I was like, you know what to do. And he was like, I know. I'm like, you just need somebody to make you do it. And that is Ali. Ali could do her own thing. But like the the level of clientele I have, all of them could do it and they could write the program. They just I might. I'm just the catalyst that makes them actually fucking do it. And, you know, I still have tricks and stuff that that, you know, might speed up the process a bit, you know. so you know but all of them could could do could write their own programs and do their nutrition they could all do this right they show it with their clients but again sometimes they need to push something clients need to push somebody it gonna be mean to them because I not a nice coach maybe you know somebody wants to coach with me they just have to understand that they probably gonna be called some bad names and I I don take any shit Like you do your shit or you don I don give a fuck You already paid me I want you to but I not going to baby you and hold your hand You either want it or you don't. So be a fucking adult. I love the fact that you actually mentioned that because coaches like us, we know our shit and we still have someone to get us to do things. And also I reckon it saves so much time, so much stress, so much energy, just having someone tell us what to do and give us the plan there, which is even more of a reason for the general person to have a coach. Like you guys aren't specialized in this stuff. It's okay to have someone to guide you there. And the worst part though, like the biggest reason why I think coaching should be the default, not stupid challenges and shit online is because most people want to see changes yesterday. but body transformations that last take years and they don't follow a straight line and when they don't we flip our shit and i really want to dive deep deep dive on this one before we go into the hormone myths and the training and shit because the fear with clothes is real and the clothes pain is more real than any scales pain because in this process of transforming your physique you're not going to fit the same way in your clothes and that is a hard thing to accept so I want you to just dive deep into that part before I look, if you're scared about your clothes, not fitting, just wear spandex, just wear shit that's stretchy. Right. So like, like all of my, like almost all of my jeans have stretch material in them. And that's because I'll, you know, you build nice legs. You, I wear tight jeans. I wear, and I don't fit in skinny jeans. My, my legs and ass is too big, but I wear jeans that basically I, when I'm, when I'm filled out, if they fill out those fucking jeans, but there's some room in there. So if I get a little bit bigger. Yeah. I know when it's time, I actually know when it's time to start to diet when the waist doesn't fit. Right. But the, the pants themselves, the jeans themselves, they'll, I can still pull them over my thighs and my calves and everything else. But it's when I know that when I can't actually button them, I need to trim up a little bit because that's the one thing that's probably not going to shrink. Whereas the other fabric will, but yeah, clothes are terrible, terrible way to measure that. The best thing, get yourself a good, like some Sika tape, which is I don have any on my desk but get yourself some myotape and that that you can put around hook into each other and hit a button and it goes to the same level of tightness every time And you see like you be like okay my legs were such and such centimeters My my pants don't fit. I must've gotten bigger. Then you measure your legs again. Oh, well, my legs are the same size. Fuck. My husband did my, did the laundry the other day. Must've put my, my pants in on too hot, too hot of a cycle for the dryer. And I just shrank them. Yeah. And this, this is the part, like, this is why sustainable fat loss is the dumbest thing to say, because fat loss is not sustainable. And this is, I kind of don't even like the whole nutritional periodization term. I think it's more so fat loss periodization, because you are either in a fat loss phase, or not in a fat loss phase, because you can build muscle any place outside of the fat loss phase. I think most people aren't in a place where they can get the most out of transforming, like the most gen pop. Like there's the consistency needed. There's pushing your training hard enough, which a lot of people struggle with. There's eating enough protein, which a lot of women struggle with. Like to me, the best thing you can do with your nutrition for building your best physique is to have it in a place where you are primed to push your best performance in the gym. Yeah. Well, and that's where I'm going to I will differ a little bit. It just, man, because I do, I do agree with that. But it's like, you also have to look at people who don't give a shit about performance in the gym because that can be an issue too, right? But so sometimes you have to go through a different angle. You're like, okay, so, because here's, I'll give you a story. Like when, when we first bought our, our gym and we went in and we took it over from the previous owner and like, yeah, like people will come to our gym. They initially, it's weird because now five years later, we're seeing a really big difference and culture, but it took five years to build that momentum. And I came in, I'm like, okay, so we have, we do have group classes because it's like one coach with like five to six people. So they're small group classes. So there's still a lot of like one-on-one stuff. And I wrote all these beautiful, beautiful periodized programs, you know, beautiful, same stuff I would write for people, personal training and online and all that. And people were getting crazy strong. We had one guy when we tested him he pulled he had a 75 kilo deadlift and 12 weeks later He pulled 150 and I like freaking out i high fiving him and he looks at me and he goes i don really care about that shit i like you just put 75 kilos on your deadlift in 12 weeks and you don't care he goes no i just want to lose some weight and i went okay sometimes so if we say like we want to drive performance sometimes we also need to clarify what performance means and so for people like that performance may be well more profit, more, more energy, more, better sleep, better sex, right? Getting up and downstairs easier. So performance can be any number of things. Doesn't, doesn't necessarily have to be like having PRS on your list, which I think you should. But the unfortunate, the unfortunate fact is some people just don't even give a shit about that, which I think is sad. And we should, we should like, because the whole point of lifting weights is to put muscle on or to retain muscle and to get stronger. Like that's the goal. It's not to lose weight. It's to put on more muscle and it's to get stronger. Like that's what you should do. And, and I apologize for anybody gym pop here, but people, the general population out there, they're pathetically weak, pathetically weak. They are pathetically weak. And they, I don't, I think they don't understand, they just don't understand that. Like, I'll go in and guys will go, I don't want to be as strong as you, I don't want to be as big as you. And I'm like, I know, because you won't train as hard as I do. And you won't stay on the diet. Like, I know you don't want to be at the level I'm at. But you're so fucking far away from that. You don't have to worry about it. Like I've been trading for over 35 years, like, you got a long way to go to get to that level. But I'm trying to get you out of this level of like, being incredibly incapable of doing anything strong, and try to make you somewhat capable, right? So that was the end of part one with Luke Lehman. Stay tuned for part two, which we will go a lot more into training before we go into part three, which is a little bit more on training and doing a diet for someone who has more weight to lose, as well as busting some myths, talking about cortisol, hormones, and the whole scheme of things. I would not miss a single podcast in this series because Luke just spits it all.