How I Gained Almost 7 Pounds of Muscle and Lost Fat at the Same Time: 92
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In this episode, Cheryl McColgan shares her journey of strength training and body composition changes over the course of a year. She emphasizes the importance of tracking body composition, not just scale weight, and highlights the benefits of consistent strength training. She discusses her approach to strength training, including progressive overload and full-body workouts.
She also mentions the use of supplements like creatine and the importance of proper nutrition. Throughout the year, Cheryl gained 6.5 pounds of lean mass and lost 2 pounds of fat, demonstrating the effectiveness of her approach.
Takeaways:
- Consistency is key in strength training and body composition changes.
- Tracking body composition, not just scale weight, is important to understand progress.
- Progressive overload and full-body workouts can be effective in building muscle and losing fat.
- Proper nutrition, including adequate protein intake, is crucial for muscle growth.
- Supplements like creatine can support muscle growth.
- Gains in lean mass and fat loss can occur simultaneously with the right approach.
- Addressing foot health can improve overall strength training performance and reduce pain.
Foot health tools from Dr. Emily
Body Pod at home body composition, 98% Correlated to DEXA
Study on full body workout vs split training for fat loss
Disclaimer: Links may contain affiliate links, which means we may get paid a commission at no additional cost to you if you purchase through this page. Read our full disclosure here.
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Show Transcript
Cheryl McColgan (00:00.748)
Well, hello friends, welcome back. It has been a little bit, but I am excited to be back on the mic and have several interviews scheduled coming up over the next.
few weeks, so it should be back to a more regular schedule going here into fall. I promise if I'm ever going to peace out for an extended amount of time again, I will definitely let you know. So don't worry if occasionally there's a week skipped or something like that. I used to put this out religiously every single week on Wednesday and it was a lot easier when I had some interns helping me produce the podcast. But now it's just little me again, all by myself.
So and a few things have been going on in not only my life, but in the business. And so that has made things not as regular. But anyway, I have no intention of going away at least not right now. So I will let you know if that ever happens. But anyway, for today's solo episode, I have something to update you on that I've wanting to share for a while. And I've mentioned this before in the past. And that is my Dexa body scan.
that I was keeping track of since I started lifting again. And so I've talked about this a little bit in the past, but I might as well share the history again with you before I get into what I've been doing over the last year to increase my strength.
and how that's been going and what I've been doing and some lessons that you may want to take away from that process. But anyway, how it all started is that I've been active pretty much my whole life, was a runner for 17 years, played sports in both high school and college. so my first experience with weightlifting was way back in the eighth grade basketball, which at my age is kind of shocking that it
Cheryl McColgan (01:58.306)
even in my mind to lift some weights to have better sports performance because it definitely, especially in high schools then, you maybe the boys were in the weight room, but it was definitely not a thing for the girls teams. And I think the only reason that I had it in my head was just because I've always had such this personal interest in health and wellness and because I had watched my dad my whole life. He was a runner and he had always lifted weights. He's basically like Jack LaLanne. If you don't know that name at the younger people listening here, go Google Jack LaLanne, but he's very
inspirational, was very ahead of his time in terms of being into health and wellness and lifting weights and being very fit. So anyway, I think it was basically just my exposure to all that and my own personal interest that made it so that even at that young of an age and a time where it was definitely not as known as it is today, think girls teams in high school today do get in the weight room and I think it is, you know, all over social media and more normal for women to be lifting. But anyway, way back in the eighth grade, that was my first thing.
pretty consistent there for a while while I was playing.
And somehow got off of that. And then when I had my first big girl job in downtown Cincinnati, I belonged to Gold's Gym and I would lift weights there. I was mostly cardio because I was a runner then and that is what at the time I believed was the very best thing to do for fitness and for health. And so it was primarily cardio, but I did do some lifting. And then all over the many years since then, I have been involved or joined a gym.
I was a yoga instructor for a very long time, have been practicing yoga for, my God, embarrassing to say, but like 30 years now. On and off with the asana, it's always like part of my paradigm to follow kind of the yoga principles of living. But the asana part, which is the poses that that kind of has come and gone over the years, but I definitely always have stints with it where I'm super consistent and then go away. So that was a very power based yoga. So I did get a lot of body weight exercise.
Cheryl McColgan (04:01.204)
in through that. So strength training, like I said, basically on and off my whole life. And what has generally happened in the past is that whenever I get injured, I just quit going to the gym for that amount of time, quit lifting weights, I'll still always do my walks and my hikes to the extent I'm able depending on what the injury is. But something would happen, and I would just quit because I ended up having in the past, I've had surgery on each one of my shoulders.
Long story, I a genetic anomaly with the shape of my bone and because I did a lot of repetitive motion with golf over the years and also the times I probably lifted weights repetitively that that hurt my rotator cuff, so I had a lot of pain. So I had a surgery on each one of the shoulders. And so obviously I did my rehab at the time, which involved…
certain types of movements and some weights. So that was also mixed in there. So I've certainly had plenty of experience doing it. I've just never been long -term consistent. And so now as I turned 50 in 2023, it's definitely been in my mind. And it's also something that's talked a lot about on social media nowadays is just the importance of muscle as we get older. It is really highly related to strong functioning in older age.
quality of life and the ability to live independently and to you know do simple things like lift your grandkids or go to the grocery store or and be able to hang bring in groceries and go upstairs. So it's a lot of things like I think younger people don't always think of it they just think they're always going to be young and healthy and not have to worry too much about that stuff but the more muscle that you can build early on in life the better and this is something that I wish I had taken more to heart way back then in eighth grade and if I just
only been consistent with it this whole time because now they're discovering that muscle is actually an endocrine system. It is an organ of longevity. There's so many people out there that really push this idea forward and have made it much more popular. It's Dr. Peter Atiyah and Dr. Gabrielle Lyon, her book, Forever Strong. I've mentioned that in a previous podcast, but just really the importance of having muscle and especially as a woman. But basically,
Cheryl McColgan (06:17.75)
you just continue to lose muscle over your life. And what was really interesting that I heard Peter Atiyah talk about one time was that it's not, doesn't, muscle loss as you age is not inevitable if you keep it up, but it mostly happens in these chunks, which can be really devastating to your health. So for example, if you go through a period of time where you're very sick and bedridden, that is a time where people lose a lot of muscle mass. And I certainly saw this when my dad was battling cancer, even though
between every treatment and whenever he was, you know, healthy in between the treatments, he would go back to weightlifting immediately and really try to maintain that muscle mass. And honestly, I think that is a huge part of the reason that he did well for so long and was able to keep, you know, doing these treatments and doing these things was because outside of that, he kept building himself back up. And so these times that he would go into the hospital and lose a little muscle mass because he was bedridden for an amount of time, it didn't affect him long term.
because he still had that reserve of muscle if that makes sense and then he would build it back up and then he'd be able to you know do another treatment down the road. So that's that's not anything that's necessarily fact it's just my opinion of probably why he continued to do so well with so many treatments over the years. So you want to have that muscle and reserve in the case that
you know, you ever have a major surgery or an issue where you're bedridden or you're just really sick for a couple weeks, you have the ability to bounce back from that. Also, there is this kind of idea of muscle memory so that if and you'll notice it like in football players and people that were young that did a lot of strength training, even if they take an extended amount of time off or they get a little fluffy for a while, if they go back to training, they can build their muscle back a lot more quickly. So these are all reasons to get started sooner than later. And it doesn't matter. It's never too late.
There's actually some really amazing studies where they there's this one that had women who had never strength train that were in their 60s or 70s start strength training and in like 12 weeks they built muscle and got stronger and So it's never too late is the message there and I am going to do my best this time To have this stick and so far now it has stuck since I started in June of 2023 so it's been over a year now and I'm
Cheryl McColgan (08:38.032)
super excited about that and I just want to share like some of my tips around that and consistency and what I've actually been doing and then what my results have been. So I had the foresight, I was lucky because I was in Utah during this time when I started this and I've always been aware of the DEXA scan. So I've talked to you guys about this before. DEXA is about the best that we have.
Right now, as far in terms of a body composition measure, you know, there's a lot of other tools out there like the Bod Pod, the InBodyScan, but Dexa at this point is kind of the gold standard. There's also hydrostatic weighing, but you don't really see that used very often. And that's another thing that Dr. Lyon talks about. It's really sad that we don't have a really great way to easily measure body fat and lean mass in people. That's something that hopefully will get better at in the future. But for now, these are the tools that we have.
And, you know, there's definitely I've talked before in the past, the with things scale that I have does do body composition to some extent, but it's not nearly as accurate and it's really only good for trends. What I'm hoping is I just became aware of a new tool and I'm really excited to try it out and let you know what how it compares and what I find with it. I haven't gotten it yet. It's on the way. But since we're since I just mentioned it, I'll go ahead and tell you about it. It's basically it's called the body pod, which is separate from the bod pod, which is the other thing.
But it's an at -home scale that basically replaces the in -body scan. And it's supposed to correlate 98 % with the DEXA. So very accurate, something that you can use in your home every single day so that when you're working on losing fat or building muscle or both, you can actually track that at home and have the ability to see those changes over time, which is really useful. And I'll explain why when I share with you my results and what would have probably been going on in my head if I hadn't had these DEXA scans. But anyway, that is by Hume Health.
So and I got you a discount 15 % off. it's heelnourishgrow .com slash Hume, H -U -E health. And you go to that link and then when you get there, put the, put it in your cart, put in code heelnourishgrow. That will get you an additional.
Cheryl McColgan (10:44.91)
15 % off and right now it is already on sale. So that's pretty cool. You get the 15 % on top of that. And like I said, I have not tried it yet. So I'm excited about it. I can't speak to how accurate or effective or useful it is on a day -to -day basis yet, but once I get it, I'll be using it every single day and I'll be sure to share an update.
about that with you in the future. you know, I'm always an early adopter of these kinds of things because I think it's part of my job, right? So it's one of my things that I do to be able to share with you guys like, does this work? Does this not work? What I feel are useful tools? What are some things that aren't that useful? I have another one actually that I'm really excited that I'm testing out as well that hasn't even shipped yet because it's a brand new technology. But that code and right now you can get this. It's amazing.
pre -sale deal, it's like hundreds of dollars off and you get, think, maybe a little additional. But if you want to read about that, it's all for sleep. And you know how excited I get about sleep and improving sleep and how important sleep is to your health overall, but also for fat loss. And so that one is Heal Nourish Growth slash BIA, B -I -A. So you can go check that out, read about the technology. I'm actually interviewing someone from their company here soon to talk about that technology. So that'll be one of the upcoming interviews that I mentioned.
And again, I'm really excited to test that out for like 30 days in a row and then I'll give you based on my aura ring, I can see like, did I get more deep sleep? Did I get more REM sleep? Kind of how things are progressing as I use that tool. So anyway, but all that's to say, I love gadgets. I always try to get ahold of them early so that I can test them out for you guys and give you a report. So that's what's coming. Okay, now that I shared all about how my history with
bodybuilding and or bodybuilding with weightlifting, strength training, whatever you want to call it. Now I want to go into what I've been doing for the last just over a year and how it has changed my body composition. So for this period of time, let's just go back into another little history lesson right now, shall we? So back in January of 2023, I got a DEXA body scan because it was my intention at that time to start
Cheryl McColgan (12:58.99)
strength training then. And what happened was I was snowboarding and in first time in my 10 years of snowboarding, I got injured. Somebody ran into me and I sprained my knee pretty badly. It blew up huge. was a mess. And so for months, it was a miracle. I did get to snowboard a couple of more times after that. It would be like enough that I could
do that and then have to rehab it for a few days, ice it and stuff. whenever I was trying to hike or anything like that, my knee kept giving out all the time. And so I had to take a few months off and really let that heal. So I was just glad that I could still finish out the snowboard season, do it without too much pain. I only went out when there was powder. didn't go out every day or anything. So it was just several more days in that season. So that was January of 2023. So I got that DEXA scan. Obviously, that's not going to be relevant to this because I did not start.
strength training then until about six months later. But what is relevant to that conversation is from January to June, having to take that time off from really any kind of significant activity. I think I finally started hiking again about March, April, but didn't, you know, couldn't do anything as much as I was doing before I was getting started again very slowly.
between the time I had that DEXA scan in June of 2023, which is kind of where we're gonna start this journey when I started lifting, is that I had lost two pounds of lean mass and gained, let's see, I wrote this all out so I would have it right here. I had lost two pounds of lean mass and put on five pounds of fat in that six months where I was not able to be active. So this just goes to show you how quickly…
Things can go awry if you get injured or if you have to be restricted for a while. And looking back on that, what I should have been doing, and which is what has happened since, and I'll go into that a little bit too, but usually when you're injured, you can still find something to do. So I should have been biking, or I should have been trying to do something that worked for my knee during that time, and it doesn't have to be hiking or anything strenuous, but just doing something. Maybe it could have been rowing, would be a great cardio.
Cheryl McColgan (15:13.514)
activity that's still a lot of knee bending so that may or may not have worked but I could have still been doing upper body strength training and back strength training and working on pull -ups there are a number of things that I could have been doing during that six months but I hadn't made the jump to that mindset yet because I think as I mentioned before that's what would always happen to me in the past I'd be going to the gym for a while I'd get injured and then I just quit going altogether well the truth is you still can always do something and during that time
you can be doing exercises to rehab your knees. So like I could have been doing side laying hip strengthening exercises. There's any number of things that I could have done, but I didn't. And hopefully you can learn from my mistakes or laziness or whatever we're wanting to call it. But so then in June, 2023, I got that Dexa again so that I would have a base. And what's interesting about that is the weight I started in January, that first Dexa scan to
the one that I had in June, I only gained on the scale two and a half pounds. But as I told you, I lost two pounds of critical lean mass and gained four pounds of fat mass in that time. So this is where really having some kind of tool that can show you your body composition, not just scale weight is so, so important. That's why I'm really excited about the Hume Health product. So again, that's heelnourishgrow .com slash Hume Health. You can go read about it.
And like I said, there is like a sale and an extra discount on top of it right now. But again, it has been, it remains to be seen how effective it is. And I'm excited to try that because my body scale that I've had for years, my withings, like I said, it doesn't like day to day what it says on lean mass or fat loss or fat gain or whatever it is on a day to day basis is not that accurate when I've compared it to Dux and this stuff in the past. But what it is good at showing is trends. So over time,
and we're talking years now, it's better on a big macro scale, not on a, even a month to month is very iffy with that one. But I do like it, so that, I have a link for that too with things. But anyway, over time it has shown my lean mass has gone up over the last four years since I started working on prioritizing protein, and particularly since I've started strength training.
Cheryl McColgan (17:32.962)
So it's good for trends, but I haven't found an at -home tool up to this point that is very effective for true body composition assessment. So that's what I'm hoping that the body pod is going forward. But that just shows you that that amount on the scale is not always meaningful. So even if you're staying the same weight over time, but you're not strength training,
you might be losing muscle and gaining fat over time. So you might start out you're 30 years old, you weigh 150 pounds, and maybe at that time you're 25 % body fat, let's say. Well, by the time 10 years later, when you haven't been strength training or doing these things to work on your body composition, you might see that same number on the scale 150, but you might have gained 5 % fat over the time. And that is typically what they've shown happens is that you just lose lean mass as you
get older so that's not unusual for that to happen. So that's why having something even if it's a very even if it's a tool like the withings that is not perfect but at least it shows you some trends over the years I think that is very helpful and it does have a couple of other good features it it measures your pulse
Rate Velocity, I believe is what it's called, which has something to do with your heart health. So it can show you trends there too, like are your vessels staying flexible and getting good blood flow. So again, it's a good tool. It's just, I'm hoping that this new one is going to be so much better. And like I said, it's supposed to be 98 % correlated with DEXA. So that's pretty amazing if that turns out to be the case. So anyway, go to June. What am I gonna do at the gym? Okay, so my history in it, like I said, I've been in the gym before.
I've never been a serious weightlifter. I just was going to Planet Fitness, which is nationwide and it's nice for when I was going back and forth between Cincinnati and Utah, I would always have a place that I could easily work out. So that is one consideration if you travel a lot and you're thinking about joining a gym, maybe get on something that has a national presence just so that you can always easily have somewhere to work out because even though I did work out in plenty of hotel gyms during this time,
Cheryl McColgan (19:47.352)
They're generally not nearly as well equipped, but you can still always get in a good workout. So that's just something to take into consideration if you start to go down this road. And of course, working out at home is amazing. You can do that anywhere. You can use resistance bands. There's lots of things that you can do without a gym membership. can do body weight. So don't feel like if you can't afford a gym or don't like going to the gym that you can't work out because you absolutely can. There's just no excuse really for not doing something.
And that's just the way to start. This is just do something. And so that's how I approached it with going to the gym. Like I said, I was already used to being active every single day, always hike, walk, pretty much every single day. So my thought with the gym is, okay, my body is old and has a lot of aches and pains. And so I didn't want to go too overboard. So I decided on a three day a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday kind of schedule. And just for me, I figured every time I go,
these whole split things about do the back and then do the legs and do, I'm like, no, I'm only gonna go three days. I'm just gonna do full body every time, keep it simple. And then I primarily just use the machines. I mean, they're pretty, and if you do go to gym, first of all, they'll show you how to use every machine, but they're pretty self -explanatory. Like you just get on the machine, you do the movement and that's it. And the idea is to, you you wanna lift an amount of weight where you can lift it eight to 12 times.
and that's a set. So if you're brand new, I mean, don't, you know, I know there's got to be some people have never done this out here that are listening. So this is going to be very basic. But you also want this idea of progressive overload. So you can't just go to the gym and lift 10 pounds, say you're doing bicep curls, lift 10 pounds, 10 reps, and just keep doing that. You have to consistently add more weight to stimulate your muscle to grow more muscle. So that's called progressive overload. So you always want to be aiming
for that rep somewhere in the six, eight, 10, 12 reps when you do it, that amount of weight that you can lift in that last rep that you're doing should either be to failure. That's one way to approach it. If you have, you know, joints that are, get unhappy really easy, you might just want to go till you feel like you have two to three reps in reserve. So this is like, I don't want to go into too much detail about that because there's all these different theories and paradigms in weight training.
Cheryl McColgan (22:11.566)
But basically if you're in that range of, you know, eight to 12 reps, three sets, I had to look this up because this part was new to me. If you're looking to build muscle, how many reps per week do you want to do on each body part for building? It's like somewhere around 20. So that three days a week schedule, you can totally easily get that into build muscle over time. And there's actually a brand new study out. I'll link it in the show notes.
about what's more effective. They did, I believe, 12 weeks and they had people do these either split exercises that I described. So like one day you do back, one day you do legs, one day you do this and that, or full body. And they actually found that for the purposes of fat loss, that the group that did full body lost more fat. So I'm like, I accidentally happened into that category and that the strength gains were…
very, very similar. So if you're pressed for time, the full body workout is a great way to go. Bodybuilders have a very different goal when they're doing their like, they're trying to, you know, sometimes get specific body parts to look a certain way in proportion to others. And so they might do a back day or arm day or whatever it is, they're doing something much more specific, but just for overall strength training, fat loss, whatever, full body workout is totally fine. And again, I'll link that.
in the show notes. So this is how it went for me for there. So I had the starting one in June and then I said that I had already lost muscle and put on fat during the time that I was injured. And then, so we go to November. So that's about five months later. After five months of going to the gym three days a week, and I'm telling you guys, I wasn't doing anything crazy. I was always, you know, challenging my muscles and stuff and starting out.
it's more your joints that will be the issue. And because I already have osteoarthritis pretty bad in both my knees and, you know, have a tendency, I think, for my joints to be achy, I did less weight than maybe my muscles could take at the time and just like slowly built up. But by the end of that five months, my, you know, my body's like, okay, we're doing this. I'm more used to it now. And so I was, you know, kept doing the progressive overload that I described.
Cheryl McColgan (24:27.47)
And so in that five months, I went back for another Dexa in November of 2023. And at that point, I was up three and a half pounds of lean mass and down four pounds of fat, which is, I think pretty dang amazing in five months. And here's another point to that. If you just had a scale, you would have weighed the same weight. So literally when I went for the Dexa in June and I went for the Dexa in November, my weight,
was the same scale weight. Yet, my body composition during that time had vastly shifted. And if I wouldn't have done the DEXA, I might have just been looking at the scale and been thinking, now I know it's getting stronger. So I knew that I was getting stronger and lifting more weights, all of that. But I would have looked at the scale and I might have been depressed because I would have just seen the same weight and thought, God, I'm doing all this stuff for five months and nothing's happening. So that's one reason.
to try to find a dexa if you can or a bod pod or try this new scale that I was mentioning so that you have some idea that even if the weight on the scale isn't moving that the composition is changing photos are another great free way to do this. Just take photos of yourself and you can see that your body looks different or looks less fat even though the weight is the same. Also taking measurements with an old school tape measure that's another great and free way to track some of this stuff. So
This is important for me to mention at this point too. So at that point when I got the scan in November, I had re -injured myself pretty badly in October. We had gone to the U2 concert at the Sphere, which was really, really cool, but we had floor tickets and so we walked to brunch that day. And if you've ever been to Vegas, it's just like so many steps in a day just because of the every, even just in your hotel, it's so huge to get around this kind of steps.
But we walked to and from brunch, which was about five miles around tripped, walked all around town, walked through their casinos, walked to the concert, and then we were standing on a concrete floor for the three hour concert or whatever it was. By the end of the night, I mean, my knee was just so swollen. And then the next morning I could hardly move. It was really difficult to accomplish walking to breakfast that next morning. And I can't remember, I think I didn't have my knee brace with me. If I had had it with me, I would have worn it, but re -injured myself again.
Cheryl McColgan (26:50.126)
pretty bad in October. so I made most of those gains probably in that Dexa during the time that I was not injured. But here is where we did something different. When I say we, I mean me. I did something different from what I'd done before. I still kept going to the gym three days a week during this time. And I was doing what my knee would allow me to do. So I wasn't doing as many squats and those kind of things. I lessened the weight up a whole bunch.
I still did upper body. I did whatever my lower body would allow me to do, but I kept going. And so here we are again. This was November when I did the scan had gotten injured in October and I was moving into snowboard season again. So all I was trying to do is like keep healthy and get myself, get my knee not irritated so that I could snowboard. That was the most important thing, but did keep going to the gym. So kept doing upper body. So here we make it to March. So during snowboard season,
while I was still in Utah and still going to the gym, what I would typically do is if I had been on the mountain for the day snowboarding, again, we only went if there's powder, we're such snobs living there because we could be. So we didn't take a day off work or take the morning off work, we'd usually just get up, we went to the place where the lifts opened at eight o ‘clock, go hard in the powder, which is really super tiring for a couple hours and then.
get home and back to work. In those days that I did that, if it was a gym day, I'd still go. I would typically do less on the lower body after I'd snowboarded that day. And then there were some weeks where if there's a lot of snow and we were like riding a lot, maybe I only went to the gym two days that week, but I kept going, kept it consistent. If you take nothing else away from this conversation, it's you've got to be consistent and you've just convinced yourself to go even on the days that you don't want to.
Do something, even if it's less, even if your body's tired, just still go, don't do as much, but keep up that habit and over time, it's going to reward you. So again, by March, 2024, during that whole time since November, I only gained one pound of lean mass and I was up one pound of fat. So I was fine with that. I basically stayed consistent through the snowboarding season, didn't make any huge gains, but I did still get lean mass. I got a little fat on there. Who knows what that was from.
Cheryl McColgan (29:12.258)
Probably too much good eating in the Alps when I was eating some cheese fondue or something like that, but it's all good. So then May, which was only about two and a half months later, these last ones are compressed because we're in the process of moving back. So we had actually bought a house in Cincinnati in December. So during this whole time, that was a lot of stress also going on.
moving back in December, moving all of our stuff to Cincinnati. So there's a lot going on. So staying consistent during that time was a pretty big win. And like I said, still gaining a pound of lean mass, that's amazing. The fact that I gained a pound of fat, let's like chalk it up holidays, moving, tons of stress, all these things going on, that's totally fine. So then we're back to do some things with the house in May.
And I wanted to keep going back. I don't have easy access to a DEXA scan in Cincinnati, unfortunately. There is one kind of up by Dayton, which I might go do that. And maybe just do it twice a year, and especially because I'd like to have something to compare to the body pod when I get it. It's just a little bit more.
like a little bit more, an hour drive, which is not great. But for whatever reason in this area, we just don't have access to that easily, which is kind of annoying because we have plenty of scan centers, but I don't think any of do body composition. This one was just so easy in Utah. So I was back in May to Utah. So I did another scan. And not surprisingly, that was only like two months later. I was up like a quarter pound of lean mass, but I was down a pound of fat.
So that also just goes to show you that all these numbers that I'm sharing with you at times, especially the one where I went from June to November when I first started, I mean a huge amount of lean mass gained, three and a half pounds and down four pounds of fat at the same time. So you can do them both at the same time. And I should address my diet during this period, right? I haven't talked about like, am I dieting? Am I doing anything different?
Cheryl McColgan (31:20.974)
During this whole period of time, starting weight training and being injured, my primary goal was to fuel myself well, eat healthy. I did not restrict. I was obviously eating somewhat at maintenance level, maybe even a slight surplus because of what I was able to do with my body composition, but I was not restricting calories in any way. Trying to get my level of protein every day. I shoot for between 120 to 150 grams of protein a day.
That's about one, you know, you're trying to get, now that I actually know my lean mass, so, Bidexa, my lean tissue, as of the last one, is about 109 pounds. So that would be a way that you could go a gram per pound of lean body mass is one of the things, but if you don't know your lean body mass, you're going for like a gram per pound of ideal weight, and eating more protein is not going to hurt anything. There's, you know, up to 2 .2 for a lot of,
people that are doing a lot of resistance training is still totally fine. But your basic thing that you want to shoot for is a gram per pound of ideal body weight. So for me, in my head, I'm always shooting for between 120 and 150 grams of protein every day. I tried to do that during the whole period. I'm not always perfect. When I'm tracking, I do much better. I'm actually tracking right now. So if you don't know, if you think you are, you're probably not getting enough. Because when I don't track and I really look back at my day and I think, I didn't quite
I didn't quite get there. I'm generally always over 100, but to get to that 120 to 150 is a lot more challenging, especially when I mostly only eat twice a day. So I've had to add in a little bit of either a snack or trying to eat more like, at least some kind of like more traditional breakfast where I'm getting more like three meals a day some days. But generally it's two meals a day and then maybe a protein shake if I realize that I'm not gonna make it. So that's kind of what I was doing with my food, but I wasn't.
restricting calories at all. I know I was definitely in a surplus at times, which is probably how I gained some of fat. But again, my goal was to heal these injuries really well and to build muscle. And so to build muscle, you need to eat properly and not be restricting yourself. Now, you can still definitely maintain your muscle mass and lose fat if you start going into a calorie deficit, but you
Cheryl McColgan (33:43.138)
There's a reason. Bodybuilders haven't figured out, They have been doing this stuff for years on how to most effectively build muscle and then lose fat for competitions. And it's easiest when you're trying to build muscle to eat in a surplus. That means gaining a little fat. That's why they typically look larger while they're in a building phase. And then when it's time to go into a show or to cut back down to show your muscles,
then you focus on fat loss. So it's a lot easier if you're focusing on either building muscle or fat loss separately. That's the most effective and the way that you can do it the quickest and the easiest, but you can do it at the same time. It's just not going to be as big a gains, for example, if you're restricting calories while you're trying to build muscle. So they do know what they're doing and you can learn a lot of lessons from now. I'm not gonna say everything they do is great, obviously.
But there's definitely some lessons to be learned there. Okay, so now we're finally, we went back to close on the house and I was there to finish things up. So that was in July of 2024. So again, even though it was only two months later, I still had this.
you know, it was my last chance basically to get a dexa there before I left. So even though it was two months later, I'm like, I'll just get one again so I can like wrap this thing up. It's about a year later after I started lifting. So then I'll have what my whole result was over the year, which is another lesson to learn from this because if you look at each one of these individual things, you'll see that there was two times where I got measured where I barely gained any lean mass yet over the whole year, what I'm about to tell you. So this final one from May to July,
I gained a pound and a half of lean mass. That's pretty amazing. The only thing that I changed in this last few months is that I added creatine, which, you know, again, with the bodybuilders, they've known this. It is the most studied supplement. It is very, very safe. There's actually data out now that is amazing for cognition as well, but it's like one of the most studied supplements. It's cheap. It's effective.
Cheryl McColgan (35:57.51)
And here we go, like that's three quarters of a pound of lean mass per month. I mean, I'm feeling like pretty good about that, especially because there's this thing newbie gains. It's like, basically you're going to max out the quickest gains of muscle in the first year. I don't know that applies, like if you're kind of training, you know, not as hard like I've been doing. But basically to wrap it all up in a year of strength training consistently, only three to
two to three days a week with injuries. So backing off when I needed to, taking care of my body, all that kind of stuff. And like I did progressive overload. I did to failure. I did principles. Like I'm doing enough when I'm at the gym to, to build muscle, but I'm not, I don't feel like I'm doing anything crazy. I'm not, you know, like the doing one rep lift maximum reps or anything like that. I'm not doing anything crazy. I'm just doing basically the bare minimum in my mind. I mean, maybe a little more.
bare minimum, but not much. It's like not too crazy. So during a year, I gained six and a half pounds of lean mass and down two pounds of fat. So again, if you look at that, there's periods of times, there might've been times where you got depressed, there might've been times where you thought you should have gained more or lost more, but on the whole, I would say as a 51 year old woman who is
basically new to strength training. Let's be real, like I've never been this consistent. I've never done it for this long before, even though I've had little bouts with strength training in the past. I'm going to call that a huge win. Here's the other thing to remember about this. So what that means with that gain and loss of fat, gain of lean mass and loss of fat on the scale, since I started this, I am up four and a half pounds. Again, had I not done the DEX's, had I not whatever, I just think I'm gaining weight.
when in reality I'm gaining really valuable lean mass and I lost fat at the same time. So all this is to say, this is the reason why you want to have some kind of way of tracking your body composition, not just the scale weight. So yeah, I'm really hoping that this new tool is going to be useful. I'll give you a full report on that later after I get it and I start using it, but…
Cheryl McColgan (38:18.092)
If you want to be an early adopter like me, like I said, now's a great time because it is on sale and you can get an additional discount using Heal Nourish Grow. But yeah, so that is how the last year has been going. I've actually been struggling with another little injury, well, a few things in the last three months. But again, I've still been going. I've just been modifying some things. What I'm…
really missing right now is my daily walk because one of my problems is my foot and when you listen to the next podcast that comes out I have this amazing foot doctor that came on and she talks about how to improve your foot health, how it's connected, all these other things like probably this IT band pain that I've been having on the outside of my knee when I'm doing squats is probably related to how my feet are working and stuff so that's something that I personally am going to be working on for the next
Forever basically, she basically said her top tip is to release your feet every day. So whether it's using like a golf ball or a tennis ball or something like that, but like working the bottom of your feet every day. said that that's the kind of tip that's like basically an apple a day keeps the doctor away from a foot doc. That's like the major thing you should be doing. And what I'm personally gonna be working on is improving my base when I'm lifting, especially when I'm doing heavy lifting, like on the squats and the deadlifts, really focusing on setting my foundation on my feet.
activating my arch, doing the things that she described in the interview. So I'm really excited to share that with you up next. And I think if you've been having ongoing like little knee or hip pain or anything like that, think addressing this stuff with your feet can be a huge help. And it's something that, like I said, something I'm going to be working on over the next several months. So anyway, I hope that was very long winded like usual when I tell my own little stories, but I really wanted to give you the sense of
You can't look at things month to month like change is a little slower than we'd like it to be. But again, I think the number one thing to take away from this is to just be consistent and also find a way to track what you're doing that shows you the true result, not just what's happening on your scale, because as you know, that is not the full story. So until next time, I hope you have a wonderful rest of your day. If you're watching this on YouTube,
Cheryl McColgan (40:40.622)
Please let me know in the comments below what you're working on right now, what your experiences with weight training. I'd love to hear any tips or tricks that you have to share with me as a somewhat newer person to this. I will share with you the link of that study, because I think that's super interesting about doing the full body workout. If you are listening to this on your favorite podcast player, please pop over and leave a five star review. If you love the show, share it with a friend. That's the best way people can find us. The podcast world.
is exploding, which is amazing and I love, especially because I probably shared this before, but I had a podcast with my old business, like way back in 2005, which is absolutely crazy to me. But nowadays there's just so, so, so many podcasts in the world that it is very difficult for people to find what they're looking for. So if the content here resonates with you and you know somebody in your life that you think could benefit from this information.
please just share it with them because that's one of the best ways for people to learn about the Heal Nourish Grow podcast and the second best way is to leave a review, tell us your true thoughts, your feelings, what you'd like to hear about in the future. yeah, appreciate that little thumbs up or likes or wherever you're listening to this. Every little bit of help that we can get is very much appreciated. So have a wonderful rest of your day and I will talk to you again soon.
