The Importance of Strength and Carbohydrates: Building Strength, Balancing Metabolism & Thriving as a Woman with My Personal Trainer Janis Blums

When I think of summer, I think of the color yellow, it is bright, it is vibrant, it is happy. We have just launched our original gratitude journal in this beautiful yellow color and I am so excited to share it with you. Our first 100 orders will receive a limited edition macadamia loco love, which are currently sold out everywhere. So make sure you head to selfdom.au, spoil yourself or someone you love today with the gift of gratitude. So if you're only starting your weight program at the age of 50 after menopause, you've got to spend 10 years building up how do I lift weights, how's my form, make some muscle before I can even lift heavy enough to keep the muscle that I'm losing and to stop it from losing. So start as young as possible. Welcome back into another episode of Selfdom Beautiful Humans, a safe place to learn and get inspired to live your healthiest and most fulfilling life. I am Dom your host and I feel so grateful to be living my passion by getting to interview inspiring and knowledgeable guests. On today's pod, I have my PT Yanis Bloom. He is joining me again. It is his third time on selfdom. This is the first time a guest has ever come back three times. You adored his episodes and I actually put some questions out to the community and we were flooded. That was the most questions I had ever received for a guest. So super excited. That will be on our Thursday episode. But today we are really going to be deep diving into the importance of muscle, carbohydrates and weight training for women. We are seeing such a trend online with rapid weight loss due to ozempic and crash diets. And we really want to break down the stigma and talk about the implications of this for women specifically. And there really isn't anyone better I could speak to than you. So thank you so much for coming back on the mic. You're welcome Dom and I'm so happy to be here. It's been maybe a year since your first few cents. Yeah definitely been a year. So it's a long time coming for you to come back because everyone loved you. So let's dive straight into it. Why is strength training so important? Yeah well especially for women. So if we look back into I guess evolution and we go back to men and women and how we're designed, women were foraging and doing a lot more activities I guess that were based on endurance. So they have a lot more what we call slow twitch muscle fibers and these muscle fibers generally use fat. They don't have as many powerful fast twitch muscle fibers which essentially use glucose or sugar or carbohydrates. If I use sugar glucose it's the same thing as carbohydrates it's just the molecular form. Whereas men were more sprinting, chasing, hunting, throwing, fighting those sorts of things. So men have got a lot more of these fast twitch muscle fibers naturally and also testosterone as well which helps with the production of those. So if you look at the I guess the muscle profile of a man and a woman, men are quite big strong muscly. That's because the fast to the sorry the fast twitch muscle fibers generally have more protein density. It gives them that structure and that strength and women have less of that and more of the slow twitch. So longer leaner more endurance based muscle fibers. So that's a really important thing to understand and that may have served women well back in the day when they were foraging and things. But in today's society I feel like with the amount of carbohydrates that are entering our food system and then I guess the work that women are doing as well. We want them to be able to be strong and resilient for life because the amount of stress that we're under today compared to back then is a lot and muscle is basically something that's going to prevent you from aging. It's going to increase your resilience and your ability to cope with stress. And so we need to be able to be as resilient as possible in today's society and building or doing strength training to build more fast to fast twitch muscle fibers or type two muscle fibers is going to help build that resilience in the woman. What I want to touch on though is when we look at the fast twitch muscle fibers and the fact that they do store more glucose more sugar more carbohydrates it basically means that when we look at the profile of the man or the woman a man has more ability to store more carbohydrates purely because they've got more muscle mass and more of these fast to keep saying that fast twitch muscle fibers. The woman doesn't have as many so basically just if we look at eating carbohydrates alone I can eat more than you can and I'm going to use it better and I'm going to be able to store it better. So there's some advantages in that particularly in today's society. So when we do strength training it's like a buffering system for your carbohydrate intake. What does that mean? Carbohydrates are really important for a woman in terms of let's say fertility. It will if you have low energy through carbohydrates you're going to reduce a hormone called leptin which is our satiety hormone which is produced from fat mass. Can you define satiety? Basically the feeling of being full. Like satiated. And so if you are low on carbohydrates and your leptin is low that hormone signals to a part of the brain the hypothalamus to basically release other hormones which starts the cascade towards ovulation. So if you're low on carbohydrates you're going to that's the first thing it's going to stunt that ovulatory process because your leptin is going to be low and the best way to think about this is that we have two things as a woman is existence or survival and evolution reproduction. It's obviously essential and critical that you survive before you evolve and have a baby right. So if the energy coming into your system is quite low the brain is smart and it's going to basically say well I don't have enough energy for survival at this stage so I'm definitely not going to have enough energy for reproduction. Remembering that having a baby and breastfeeding are the two most costly things that we can do as a human in terms of energy expenditure right. I think it's like 180,000 kilocalories a year for breastfeeding and around 88 to 100,000 or something for having a baby. I think that's why so many women who breastfeed lose their baby like their weight they gain when they were pregnant so quickly and they say they can't eat enough food no matter what they they just feeling hungry. Well I mean they were they were first creating a human and now they're creating all this milk to feed the human. It's wild. It's wild what you guys do right. Thank you for acknowledging that yes. Oh very much so and so energy plays a huge role in why you're here you know and so and carbohydrates plays a huge role in letting the brain know that there's enough energy in the environment to not only exist but to also evolve and reproduce. So the funny thing is though is that so if someone's not eating carbohydrates and say they're quite underweight we can turn off the obliterary process which we understand when through amenorrhea so they lose their period if you're underweight because it's simply not enough energy coming in but you can also be very much overweight and also not have your period. Wow. Yeah remembering that fat mass makes this molecule called leptin but what happens is that the hypothalamus can become resistant to that leptin if there's an overproduction which can shut down again the cascade that relates to ovulation. So that's basically hypothalamus will release a hormon code kinetic trophon releasing factor that then stimulates your lutealizing hormone and follicular stimulating hormone which then produce the estrogen progesterone and then from there you have the ovulatory process right. So I went through that quickly but remember I said about the production of estrogen progesterone. So if your carbohydrates is low and that reproductive process is down what else is going to be your estrogen and estrogen is really important for so many things it's like basically the the number one hormone that helps run everything as a woman. So yeah so being overweight is you can create that leptin resistance and that can shut down the process as well so you can lose your period when you're heavily overweight but you can also lose it when you're quite underweight. So the importance of carbohydrates in just the reproduction process alone is so important and then there's obviously how well your brain functions because that uses carbohydrates as its primary source obviously if you're going to do high intensity exercise that's going to use carbohydrates as an energy source. So when we go back to muscle and strength training what does strength training do? Well you're building more muscle fibers that are really good at using carbohydrates so you'll store some more carbohydrates you'll be able to use carbohydrates better and that means you can dispose of the carbohydrates because if you have excess carbohydrates that's when we get into this thing about metabolic dysfunction. What that means is that you've got too many carbohydrates for your muscle to really store and use and it spills over and creates this excess energy and that can then lead to conversion of carbohydrates into fat molecules or triglycerides which then goes into storage of fat. So I think where people can get a little bit shunned off carbohydrates is that they're a bit fearful of them because they think oh if I eat too many carbs I might put on weight and that's why we want you to do strength training so you have the capacity to eat your carbohydrates and you use it as energy and dispose of it as energy instead of perhaps staying away from the strength training keeping your muscle mass low you're naturally going to eat carbohydrates because it's everywhere in our society and then wondering why your body's not tolerating it. Women are much better thanks to estrogen at fat oxidation so using fat as your molecule of energy which is fair but then you go into the gym and the people that are still doing those high intensity or what Stacey Sims calls those moderate intensity workouts five days a week the boxing classes the hit sessions and stuff constantly constantly constantly doing it but you're better at burning fat than you are at sugar and you haven't eaten before you've worked out so that's increasing your stress hormone cortisol because you need to have sugar to do anything that's high intensity because fat just doesn't burn fast enough to support the muscle so if you don't eat before you train that cortisol goes up to release and make sugar go into your bloodstream to support the muscle mass of the workout that you're just doing and that's where that stress inducement comes into for women when they do training fasted so we don't want that and I think we've spoken about that before men with that muscle mass and the sugar already in the muscle can sort of get going without having to eat glucose before or sugar before they start exercising so I've gone a bit off track there but there's so much involved yeah there's so much involved there so the muscle mass again is basically let's do some figures on this if I if you go you're the lady if you go to the gym and you have you're untrained you might have the ability to store maybe 10 to 16 grams of carbohydrates in your body but you don't have as much muscle as me so you might be able to store 300 grams of carbohydrates in your body I can probably store maybe five to 600 grams that means I can eat 300 grams more which is almost like it's a thousand calories more of carbohydrates it's not going to affect me because it will just get sucked up into my muscles it will get used when I go and do some exercise and my function of my cells is going to be really good but if I gave you that extra thousand calories of carbohydrates your body can't tolerate that so let's say you now are trained as you are you train with me and you've been training for several years you got that muscle mass we have now got your muscles can now instead of instead of storing say 10 to 16 grams per kilogram of muscle you can now store 25 to 40 grams of carbohydrate per kilogram you've now gone up from being able to store let's say 250 to maybe 400 500 grams of carbohydrates you've just allowed yourself every day to be able to manage an extra thousand calories through your strength training those numbers are insane so you can double the amount of carbohydrate intake that you can manage and you're doing it in a really good way by storing it and using it okay and this is where toning comes into it because then all of a sudden you've now got a little bit more muscle mass that muscle mass is volumized by the carbohydrate remembering like the carbohydrate molecule will hold on to three grams of water for every gram of carbohydrate which gives you that nice toned look if you go on a bit of a carb deplete um I'll say you do a big run but you don't refuel the carbohydrates you can look quite flat you've sweated out the three grams of water you've lost the the gram of some grams of carbohydrate and your muscles look a bit flatter but then when you eat a nice glucose carbohydrate meal with some protein and volumize again you've got that nice look about and shape about in that curve again which is what we try to achieve so those numbers are incredible right so people come into the gym and say oh so-and-so can eat whatever she wants and looks great all the time and yet if I eat some carbohydrates I feel puffy bloated or I feel like I'm putting on weight straight away well it's probably got a lot to do with the composition of the muscle how much muscle mass does she have how well trained is that muscle but then also how well does that muscle utilize carbohydrates and switch between the utilization of fat and carbohydrates so the strength training again will teach your muscle how to use carbohydrates and how to use fat and bounce between the two when required to do so and that's why you can rock up as a trained person and you'll jump straight into the high intensity and the strength and then you can recover pretty quickly and you'll go and use more fat during your high inner intensities because you just better at it but when you need the carbohydrates it's there and it's not stressing you out and this is why when the girls bring their boyfriend to the sessions right the guys are dying because the way I train you girls is strength training but you don't have to rest as much as a male because at the same intensity if you and I are working at the same intensity so we're working at a level of six or seven out of ten intensity you will be able to use fat at that intensity more than I will I'll be using more carbohydrate and when we use carbohydrate we release more lactic acid so I burn up a lot quicker than you do and I can't keep up with you doing the same thing at the same intensity and this is why the guys are struggling because they're not training like we do they'll often do the heavy sets rest for three four minutes they're trying to gain a lot of bulk and stuff it's not that they're unfit because they are fit it's just that they're burning up more than you are but that's also a really good thing for the male because that lactate has so many profound positive effects on the human muscle especially on the human brain it can really create this stuff called BDNF it's brain derived neurotropic factor it's like a fertilizer for your brain so just sprays all your little neurons in your brain with extra grow kind of molecules and it helps with your cognition your mood your memory everything like that it's very neuro protective so the fact that we burn the carbohydrates in that state is helping our body become more resilient and we want the girls to get into that high burn state but if you don't have much fast twitch muscle fiber you don't have much carbohydrate your body's going to struggle to burn carbohydrate well enough to create the lactic acid to then promote the lactate that goes through the bloodstream to give you all the good benefits that it has so can you see how complex but how like beautiful having muscle and carbohydrate in the in the body can be for our strength our resilience our function our reproductive system our injury risk our disease prevention our longevity our anti-aging these are all the things that muscle trained muscle and good carbohydrate intake do for the human body especially for the woman wow okay there's a lot taking guys I hope you're taking notes yes you got little self journal out there writing absolutely I thought of something here I think about the girls who do that moderate intensity every day and then the women who complain about being skinny fat is that kind of where that happens because you were saying how you know someone who is obese could also lose their period someone who's underweight could lose their period but then some women are this skinny fat and they were talking a lot about this at wanderlust because we're seeing more and more of it what does skinny fat even mean okay so skinny fat is basically bone and fat with no muscle and the reason why the overtraining can do that with the underfueling is because the human body still needs at that intensity sugar and if you don't put sugar into the body it has to break down things like muscle to find the resources of sugar to support maybe not the muscle but the heart and the lungs and the liver and everything else and the brain that's going through this stress response that moderate intensity is so that sort of training first of all without the fueling is upping your cortisol okay so and if you do it five times or you're just sitting in high cortisol so that's our chronic stress which is going to lead to chronic inflammation and that's going to lead to that puffiness um then you're also like breaking down muscle to find glucose because we can use amino acids which is basically the fundamentals of protein which is the fundamental of muscle right so we can use the the amino acid to create sugar molecules to help fuel the body because they're not fueling enough again why eating your cup of tire jates before and after is so critical as well as your protein and so over time the stress hormone cortisol is going to dump more fat around your organs what we call visceral fat because it puts it there so it's nearby to the organs because if you're in you're in chronic stress your whole body's in flight or flight all the time it's just thinking i need fuel nearby my organs because they're all trying to run around and manage what's going on you're breaking down your muscle uh so that's giving you that skinny fat look um so that just leaves you with bone which is probably depleted and osteoporotic because or osteopenic which is on the way to osteoporosis because the muscle needs to be stressing the bone to be creating the strength in it um and then you're building more fat on top of that um which is giving you that fat look but the problem with going down that road and this is this is also what scares me a little bit about the isempic thing um but the problem about losing your muscle and getting to that skinny fat is that muscle takes years to develop fat doesn't so if you've now gone and lost all your muscle mass and you're sitting there going i don't feel so great about myself i don't feel toned i'm just like why am i putting on excess fat what you've done is create a hardship for the next year or two because you're then going to realize you need to eat more carbohydrates and then you're going to have to do your strength training because then you're going to have to build your muscle back to strengthen your bones to regulate your energy to regulate your hormones to increase your metabolic function again but what's going to come on first fat why because muscle takes years to develop how quickly does fat take to develop not very long at all so you've gone backwards by thinking you were trying to do the right thing and this is why podcasts like this are so critical to get this information out to understand that muscle and carbohydrates is what what's going to get you to where you need to get to taking away muscle and stripping back carbohydrates is only making you go in reverse and then you've got a longer hill to climb and it's it it's sad when you think about it because even no matter where you're starting it's it's already a mountain and we were born with more muscle than we're going to have if we go backwards in that state so going down and losing muscle and not eating carbohydrates it you're sliding further and further down and you're going to have to get back and the problem is is that you've probably also created a bit of a mental state where you're now fearing the carbohydrates and and you have to get over that fear first to go and eat them and then you have to understand that okay I have to accept that I'm going to put some more fat on now before I can build muscle purely because muscle is going to take me a while if you are a trained person like if you had 10 years of training you're probably not going to take a year or two to develop that muscle it will come back pretty quickly because that's the memory cell of the muscle but you're still going to have to work hard for a few months to get that back but if you're an untrained like say you've just finished high school or something you never did any strength training and the first thing you went to do was the high intensity classes and the moderate intensity and stuff and you started to develop that sort of profile that we talked about the skinny fat you don't have the 10 years of strength training behind you so that's where you've really slowed it down you've and you've also caused your body so much stress you've shut down your ovulatory system your reproductive system therefore your estrogens low and like I said therefore everything in your body is going to start having issues from your hair your skin your nails you know and I think the critical one about that is let's not forget that the heart the human heart is a muscle if your muscle has decayed on your body your heart has decayed your heart has gotten smaller it's about energy efficiency the human brain will look after you to survive today it doesn't care so much about tomorrow or the next week or the next week it cares about today and if you're not supplying enough energy for the human body the first thing to go is the muscle because it's the most metabolically expensive thing that we have it costs a lot of energy and food to run your muscle if you're not doing anything to push that muscle and you don't have the food coming it's just going to break it down it's only going to have enough muscle that it needs to support you for movement on that topic let's push forward a few decades as a woman even more than that let's go to when you're 70 or 80 and you are becoming quite frail and you you never did your strength training and if you ever I'm a like a clinical observer of the human so when I'm walking around Bondi I just look at people and observe movement and shape and things like that and when you're looking at someone that maybe in their 70 or 80 or 90 walking around they don't walk very fluidly they're not very dynamic they're quite stiff and rigid but they're able to move through life just they're generally quite small and frail people aren't they they don't have much muscle on them muscle is our dynamic stabilizer it is our power propeller so when we get older and we lose that we still need a locomotive to get to the shops and to do things don't we but without the muscle the connective tissue is the last thing that's holding our bones in place so we're kind of moving rigidly because connective tissue is quite stiff and brittle and rigid so when we can build muscle at a young age and keep that strength training up throughout life and maintain that muscle support we are going to be able to be a functional human until the very end and move and have that injury risk deplete and and muscle is so important and when we when we go back a few years now into that sort of 40s and 50s range with the menopause thing where estrogen drops so low that there's a huge decay in in muscle atrophy so our muscles are basically breaking down and this is why osteoporosis becomes so much more prevalent in women after menopause because it's your muscle that pulls the strings on the bone to keep them strong so we need to make sure that we're lifting heavy before we get to menopause so we've got that good base so you know we'll do like 15 reps three sets when we start and then sometimes if we want to go heavier we'll do like you know six to eight reps have a bit more rest and really hit that remember I make you do like heavy heavy deadlifts I can't make you do that if you're just starting it's dangerous right so if you're only starting your weight program at the age of 50 after menopause you've got to spend 10 years building up how do I lift weights how's my form make some muscle before I can even lift heavy enough to keep the muscle that I'm losing and to stop it from losing so start as young as possible particularly between your 20 to 35 year old that's when you're at your peak ability to grow muscle anyway make yourself as strong as possible as educated as possible know how to move your body with lifting weights so that when you get through menopause you already have the foundation and all you need to do is keep lifting and you're going to be able to defy the gravity of menopause and that basically starts to wind you down sooner than you need to be um and going back to the the carbohydrate thing when you go through menopause and the estering gets low well when you're a 20 year old and you cut the carbohydrates remember I said you shut down your reproductive system and your low your estering gets low it's like you've just forced yourself into menopause the destruction of that the destruction of that as a 20 year old and it's it's purely because you weren't aware all the internet's feeding us fake stuff yeah the social media yeah I feel like growing up I was always so scared of carbs but I also think it comes down generationally like I remember my mom she'd always get the salad you know what I mean and then you grow up seeing that and then online and you don't see many carbs and people's down to plates and people are cutting carbs and showing their results and maybe you do get short term results but we're talking about longevity here we're talking about from now until you're a hundred how are you going to get there muscle mass and you said the short term results and they obviously there because we get to that skinny fat yeah but they don't show you like the biggest loser that's been filmed for many many years in America they don't tell you that every single one of those people rebounded and went back to their weight or even beyond that because they destroy the metabolic function that the muscle has with the carbohydrate so yes you can make a short term little small person but long term you're going to pay the price for that biology always has a cost and we have to accept that biological cost and be aware and try to get in and prevent these younger women getting into that stage before they learn the cost of it I think that's fair right I think that's what we're here for is to try and help the young women prevent putting themselves in a situation that's going to cost them so much more in the future with these sort of conversations so yeah no one wants to have low carbohydrate low estrogen and then lose their period and basically put themselves in menopause 20 years before do they because imagine then how hard menopause will be when you've built your way back up but you still might be suffering some of the consequences of what you put yourself through and it's not just you you put yourself through it's the people around you as well your family and everyone else right they everyone's concerned and that's that makes life hard for everyone because we all just want to be healthy beautiful humans but I also think for me when I used to cut carbs and be really strict my energy was so low I had no energy to give you've got no libido everything isn't working because you're focusing on a one goal which was to be skinny and I was saying to Tom the other day I've never felt more energized in my life and the things that have changed is I'm pretty much just doing strength training two or three times a week that's like the main crux of my training I don't need to go to Pilates every single day as long as I've got that in my schedule I'm having carbohydrates at every meal I've up my cholesterol which I thought was the devil no no I hate this because I've always had high cholesterol I have studied it for years and you need healthy amounts of cholesterol in fact people with higher cholesterol in some studies actually live longer because that's where all our sex and stress hormones are derived from yes and that's why my progesterone slow my estrogen slow so now increasing my cholesterol and I feel incredible and it's I'm going against all the things that I grew up thinking were not good for you yeah yeah doing less eating more eggs and bacon and yeah upping my carbs but it's incredible and having energy is your superpower what you can achieve in your day yeah when you have energy the love you can give to the people in your life yeah I think I'd like to just from that point segue to kind of like what I discussed with my clients is like building a plate I want to talk about how many carbs we need because I think that is the question so what I'll do we're all worried we're all asking what I'll do is I'll go through the four I'll go through the protein the carbs the fats and the fiber great very simply okay so that you guys I'm not going to be talking about what is carbohydrates or how they've got episodes on that exactly I'm going to be telling you exactly what it is for your body so let's start with protein now every single cell even our DNA everything is made up of amino acid chains proteins protein is the scaffolding the structure of the human body every cell in your body has a lifespan your bones last about seven years that's the longest cell life that you have but every seven years every single cell that is made up of udon has never existed before it breaks down recycles or you create new ones this is why protein is so important because of your cells breaking down all the time and the protein's breaking down you need to get protein from the environment to provide the lego pieces to reconstruct and rebuild the things that are breaking down because that's what they're naturally doing so protein is super essential for male and female because it is who we are it is the structure it is the bone the connective tissue the muscle the brain the heart the liver every single thing about you is made up of proteins so protein is the essential ingredient that we need to make sure that we're not decaying basically it's not really a fuel source i want you to understand that i want you to understand it's the lego pieces of the human body so it's the most prioritized ingredient on your plate now how much do you need a protein well i suggest that on three to four main or servings of protein a day are spread out evenly throughout the day and you should be having around 30 grams okay maybe for someone like me i'll have more uh throughout the day and someone that's like you maybe slightly less but but around 30 grams per plate is plenty now what is that going to do well let's look at your 30 30 grams for your age is about right if you are five years old you could probably have five grams of protein all of that protein will get used to build your body why because as a five-year-old all you're doing is growing yeah you're running around and stuff but that uses energy that's something different but the growing of you is protein so you can have five grams and you're going to stimulate what we call protein muscle synthesis it's going to go straight there and build muscle and build build who you are but after our growth stage so when you get to say 15 16 maybe 20 years old as a male you stop growing and then there's this sort of decay process happening so that's when we need protein to replenish things now that replenishment at a younger age say you're 20 you probably need 20 grams to hit the threshold of protein muscle synthesis to create that turnover but as you get older your threshold for protein muscle synthesis gets higher so when you're a woman say in your 40s or 50s particularly going through menopause and everything so decaying you actually need to be hitting around 40 maybe even 50 grams of protein per meal to have enough protein ingested into your body to hit protein muscle synthesis to keep your muscles from decaying look i'm not a big fan of these protein waters but that's actually where they could come in handy because i would feel so full like i feel like from 30 i'm full yeah that's why i say the the most essential thing on the plate is the protein and the first thing you should probably eat is the protein i know but how boring you've got to mix it all together and have a nice little plate you can't mix it all together but the problem with that is that you're basically disrupting the absorption rate of the protein 80 20 guys yes it's you're just you're slowing it down okay so if you have 30 grams and you can probably get it like you'll probably hit protein muscle synthesis at 20 to 30 grams and if you're mixing up with some of the carbohydrates and fiber and stuff you're slowing it down a little bit but in that hour of digestion you're probably going to get enough and hit that threshold that will stimulate the muscles to stay around right so that's protein carbohydrates carbohydrates is the fuel source for your brain and the fuel source for your muscles particularly those fast twitch muscles so how do we know how much we have well there's two parts of it let's look at the brain first you're never dictating to your brain whether you're taking it for a stroll or a high intensity work it's just working it's operating all the time so your brain since it uses carbohydrates needs a certain amount just to function that day before you become stubborn and moody and irritated right how much is that it's about how many girls come into the gym without having enough carbohydrates and a moody yeah right a lot yeah and and they don't know why well it's the carbohydrates you need about 130 grams of carbohydrates per day just to fuel your brain needs now if you're a student or a office work or you're using your brain a lot to learn and to memorize you're going to need a little bit more maybe about 150 160 180 grams just for your brain of carbohydrates now can you imagine that i don't know what does that look like i think i don't even know what's 150 grams of carbs look like look at that's kind of hard to say like how much is in a sweet potato off the top of my head yeah i'd have to go to my notes that i give everyone but i would be saying like a cup of rice you know in 100 grams of say a vegetable let's say you can have anywhere between 10 to 50 grams of carbohydrates depending on the density of the carbohydrates and look you can get these charts off the off the internet pretty quickly on like look up 100 grams of carbohydrates in fruit and vegetables and you'll give you a list and then you can sort of play with that what about like a my naturopath you always have a fistful yeah um just as a guide no that's usually a fistful of protein palm full of carbohydrates and a thumb and a thumb of that yeah thumb of that so yeah i mean i mean yeah i don't think that's enough um but it's a minimum and i've got a lot bigger humans as it's like managed right so remember i can take probably twice as much carbohydrate as you um if i want to stay in the shape that i am and feel energized and i notice when i wake up the next morning if i have a big training session i i went to bed and maybe had a protein heavy meal without the carbohydrates i wake up and i'm tired really and as soon as i have my carbohydrates yeah i'm good because it gets absorbed pretty quickly um especially pre-workout if i'm feeling tired i'll have my carbohydrates and it peps me up after about 20 minutes just a bit of a warm up and that's the thing i think so many people because of the glucose goddess and and the glucose thing they're scared of carbohydrates i think they're going to make them crash yeah absolutely absolutely but it doesn't no if you have muscle yes but i mean so this is what i'm saying if you're if you're one of those people that's all of a sudden i'm not eating sugar i'm not even carbohydrates good luck being around that person honestly they're and if you're on your period like their brain isn't functioning well you won't be you won't have a period you won't be yeah after a short time right because remember the leptin is the signal and the leptin needs the ant needs to tell the brain that there's enough carbohydrates to do that and it won't um so you're not going to be a great person to be around you're not going to do well at school or with memory or in your office or whatever it is you're doing or even at home with your relationships so you need that carbohydrates 130 grams minimum for your brain that day then you've got your muscle now the muscle one the simplest analogy that i use is that think of your muscle like the car that's sitting in the garage at home if you don't take your car out for a good rev out you don't put fuel in it do you no so your body is the same your muscles the same if you don't take your muscle out for a good bit of a workout that's somewhat intense because if it's just a walk you're not going to be using your glucose anyway but if you do a moderate exercise or a high intensity exercise or strength session or some hill runs or something like that that's burning the glucose you got to go home and refuel it you can't leave it on an empty tank because if you get in an empty tank you take it out the next day you're not going anywhere are you because there's no fuel in it so if you use your car and take it for a drive put some fuel in it that's your carbohydrates it's that easy so let's say i'm having a day at home i'm not doing much i'm going to have 130 grams of carbohydrate from my brain and i'm not going to overeat any more carbohydrates because i'm not taking my car out because i'm probably sitting there doing some work on my laptop all day that might cost my brain a little bit more carbohydrates but i'm not going to eat the amount of carbohydrates i would if i had gone out and done a big workout that day or i'd done 25 000 steps that day because then i know that i need the energy to refuel because i've taken the car out so i need to put the fuel back in there so when it comes to carbohydrates think about it you've got your baseline for your brain and then did i move or not yes no how hard did i move if i moved hard i need more carbohydrates if i did move lightly then i probably don't if i moved lightly for a very long period of time like i went hiking for eight hours definitely going to have used the carbohydrates because you're not always just going to be in fat so look at it on the intensity and the duration of your movement that day really dictates how much more carbohydrate do i need to add on top of the stuff on my brain that's probably the easiest and look in saying that if you do a big workout like i said you might be able to hold 250 to 400 grams of carbohydrates depending on how well trained you are now if you're well trained and you do an hour workout you might have used half of that glucose storage so that's 200 grams of carbohydrates i need to put back in there okay so that means for the day you're looking at 300 350 grams of carbohydrates so that's about 12 1400 calories coming from your carbohydrates to refuel you because you used a lot because you did a pretty damn big workout and you've been using your brain all day to just run your body that's the best way i can kind of talk about carbohydrates and how we refuel baseline for your brain and then refill according to how far you drove your car so every day it is essential essential to have carbohydrates in your plane i think yeah that's the missing piece of the puzzle because maybe some people don't have them at all but maybe some people think i didn't train today i don't need them but we have a base level for the brain yeah absolutely and that's why if you are feeling brain fog headache tired moody stubborn not really paying attention things like that have a think about maybe it's the carbohydrates maybe i didn't really feel my brain enough which is which is the problem and i also want to say that majority of listeners on these sorts of podcasts are intentionally trying to better themselves so we're not talking to the population who are eating processed food and eating do you know what i mean like because a lot of people would get brain fog from processed food yeah i think human optimization is what we're about yeah but we're a group of people who are wanting to optimize ourselves and i think a lot of us have fallen into the bucket of misinformation and we're really trying to educate and yeah and prevent and prolong you know prevent disease prolong longevity and our lifespan and our health span all together and what you do now i think you don't think about your future that far yet but you have to and what like when you cut out the carbohydrates you definitely don't because if you don't have the energy for the brain the prefrontal cortex at the front which is all about logic and reasoning shuts down wow you're not thinking about that at all what part of the brain are you got enough energy to feed the reptilian brain the stuff at the bottom in your brainstem that really just does heart rate temperature you know breath rate survival skills instant reactions amplifies your stress it's like all the stuff that happens instantaneously in the subconscious that's going to take the energy before anything conscious happens so when we're in that state we can be very much in a high alert high stress state and that can be really hard to get out of unfortunately it's a bit of a you kind of lose your freedom when you don't eat your carbohydrates to be able to just do things and think about things so let's go to fat so healthy fats not just any fat but healthy fats um what are we talking here like I think we heard omega threes these are really our more anti-inflammatory um omega sixes are still good for us but we need the right ratio it's about one to one i think at the moment in processed food sort of um society it's like six to one i think if anyone's eating anything in a packet it's not going to be healthy like shop the outskirts of the supermarket correct often building a plate is so basic it actually is but we're gone really far gone but i so i think it's we've made it complex but i'm trying to just break it down to make it as easy as possible so um so i talk about so with healthy fats we want those omega threes we want the avocado we want the fish olive oil olive oil walnuts flax seeds chia seeds um all those kinds of things right so those healthy fats are so important to fat metabolism to our hormones brain health to our hormones and their cholesterol they have so much function um in the human body and i like to have this little analogy where i say to people it's like when you eat fat you burn fat but when you eat sugar you store fat and why is that well it has to do with the hormone insulin so when we eat sugar we raise our insulin now insulin acts on the muscle to tell the muscle to take up that sugar to use it for energy it's protective because we can't have too much sugar in our bloodstream because it's actually quite dangerous for us but insulin also acts on the fat cell and it tells the fat cell hold on to the fat don't release the fat this is so important especially for women that are more fat metabolically kind of active so that insulin spike tells your fat to stay in the fat cell why because if your fat's leaking fat but your preferential energy source is fat your sugar's not getting used up which is a dangerous situation for the human body to have too much sugar in the bloodstream so it's natural that that insulin saying well i'm tell the muscle to absorb the sugar to reduce the sugar tell the fat to stay home so that the sugar is the preferred substrate there for energy so that's where when you eat fat you don't raise insulin so eating fat keeps the insulin down which is the signaling to the insulin tells the fat molecule to stay stored well that's not elevated anymore so what's the fat cell doing releasing fat that's why we're burning fat when we eat fat because there's no sugar in the bloodstream that needs to get disposed of first okay alcohol's the other one right so alcohol's even more toxic than sugar is to the human body so we're going to store our fat because the alcohol needs to go because it's a poison so so eat fat burn fat is basically because it's response on insulin there is none so the fat cell gets to keep leaking out the fat to be used as energy each sugar store fat is because of the insulin telling the fat cell to hold on to the fat so that we can use that sugar to get rid of it because it's not it's not great for us when it gets too high does it make sense yeah yeah so don't be afraid of fats especially the healthy ones I think we have gone away from that I think people eating full fat I think so too yeah they're like really embracing full fat um but then but then the people that are watching their calorie restriction yeah will stay away because they're all fats are high in calories well again we don't want to be in calorie but a calorie is not a calorie anymore no it's not yeah your body uses it differently and we want to be fueling we want to be humanly optimized so we need to build muscle and have lots of fuel so that we can support ourselves and remember that we evolved in a state of more scarcity so we evolved to store fat because there will be lean times out in evolution where we might not have food for a while that's why we're so good at storing fat because it was like when the food comes let's hold on to some of that for the lean times we can then have the energy within us to support us we don't live like that anymore there is so much food abundance in the environment we're almost don't know what to do with it right we don't need to store fat if the environment supplies us with enough food why are we evolving with the world then I well when do you reckon we'll evolve at the same time I think it's I think it's in our instinctive brain still working quicker than our conscious brain so we just like and feed the subconscious physiology but what we have to remember is that if you feed yourself enough food your body is not going to need or want to store fat it has no desire to because it understands the safety of the environment in place to give you enough food to survive it doesn't need to hold on to excess fat I also think if you're struggling with overeating going back to the satiating society I was listening to a podcast and they basically said that eating enough protein is like the original ozempic you will feel full yeah yeah you will not want to eat more if you're hitting 40 grams of protein yeah on a plate let me tell you you're gonna be full to your next meal don't worry about it I've been going to that barbecue place you told me about I went three nights in a row the meat is so good yeah it's amazing yeah it is it is amazing so what was the last fiber five see this fiber hasn't had its moment yet no and I don't think people understand what fiber is they picture prunes so well the way I like to describe it because I do train quite a few younger people as well so I try to get these analogies in place that everyone can understand it but think of fiber is that when you like break a piece of broccoli and it's got the little fibrous strands that's that's fiber it is essentially what makes up plants when we chew on that and eat it it goes into our digestive system we don't actually absorb fiber and microbiome definitely feeds off it so it's really good for our gut health but think of fiber as like a fishing net running through the ocean and catching let's say the plastic waste or the things that aren't there and obviously we don't want them catching the fishing and stuff like that but it's like this this netting going through your intestinal system and picking up things like toxins and bacterias and excess estrogen and things that aren't required to be there and then that makes our stool right so that we then release that from when we go to the bathroom so fiber is so important because it feeds your gut your microbiome to promote good gut health but it also removes the things from our intestines that don't need to be there and we want that to occur because things that sit in our intestinal lining or in our intestines and our colon for longer period of time generally have the higher capacity to breathe other things like cancers and stuff so we want to make sure that we go to the bathroom regularly to keep that clean okay going back to a zempik what is it doing it's slowing down the motility of digestion motility is like the the peristalsis the movement of the muscle with it it's slowing that down so you're not feeling as full as well but the way it works is that you're going to keep food and toxins and bacteria and estrogens and stuff in your digestive system for longer you're not going to go to the toilet regularly so what's that going to do it's going to up your incidence and risk of cancer okay and people don't know about that the thing about a zempik is that all the studies have only been done on overweight obese people and there's no long-term studies because honestly 68 weeks in some of them is that's just barely over a year there's no 5 10 20 year follow-up studies on this just yet there are zero studies on a young woman that has normal amounts of body fat taking ozempik to get small there's no studies on that so any risk is unfoundable because it's only going to get extrapolated from studies from obese people but how accurate and reliable is that it isn't so anyone going out there and just getting ozempik because it's so easy to get now without even seeing a doctor off the web anyone going out there and doing that and reading the labels go yeah i'll be fine that's fine yeah that none of that relates to you if you are not even overweight or obese or struggling with say a metabolic dysfunction so you're really putting yourself at danger you don't know what it's going to do and like gastro paralysis is a really thing like if you lose the ability for your stomach muscles to even move anymore and you can't digest food you will live the rest of your life being fed through a straw you know and that's a horrible way to think of course it's probably pretty rare but these are the sorts of dangers that we may be putting ourselves into because we're uneducated about it we're uneducated about the muscle and the carbohydrates and this is what i hope to send as a message to people out there in in understanding how the human body really works why food is so important why exercise and strength training is so important why dom looks amazing because she has done strength training for 10 years and eats amazing food and plentiful food you know um that's that's what i want to do i want to be preventative in in in helping people not have to go down the wrong paths um and then really paying the biological consequence of that for disrupting so many things in their body through a lack of nutrition and a lack of strength training yeah i want to talk about ozampic because obviously for people who are overweight it is life saving but their risks in their life are far different to someone who is a healthy person just wanting to fit this aesthetic mold that we're seeing online one thing that i saw a lot of at wonderlust which was the biohacking summit was the fear of sarcopenia which is the loss of muscle mass and we've gone from a obesity epidemic obesity crisis to this risk of sarcopenia when women already have high risk of osteoporosis and i just would love to know your thoughts on what you think the future is going to look like and is there a way to actually be on ozampic and keep your muscle mass is it even possible okay so let's go back to why ozampic is there for the obese people when you're overweight your fat cells are also an endocrine organ so they make hormones and they can make too much remember i said about the leptin resistance and the loss of the period because of the amount of leptin that's and the hyperpathylamus becomes resistant to it um the fat is also creating a lot of inflammation in the human body and we know that disease risk goes up a lot because of fat we know that your muscles get full of fat so that the mitochondria can't use the energy inside the muscle very well which creates things like reactive oxidative species which is like a like rust within your body your insulin sensitivity goes completely down so you become insulin resistant so that means that you can't tolerate carbohydrates anymore because your muscles won't accept it and that just turns into more fat so the the problem with having that much fat mass is it so dangerous to the human body ozampic is a a way to reduce your fat mass for those people because the risks of being so overweight are so high it outweighs the risk of ozampic of course okay but for someone that doesn't have that you're just adding risk to your life for no reason whatsoever for beauty or whatever it is that you're trying to achieve but also who created this beauty standard i'm gonna ask you as a man what do you find attractive in a woman well it comes down to i think just biology and evolution and that is someone that looks healthy and is in that reproductive state and that's generally exactly so that that that's like a healthy looking woman with curves and some muscle tone and but but yeah curvy and there's volumptuous and she fills her space like and she's confident that's what i that's what i mean it's like small people when they get to that smallness are shy and timid looking they don't walk into a room and fill the space anymore i know so because they've lost that muscle mass i feel like they're almost hunched over they're not proud posturally you lose it they hold their shoulders correct but then the and then the lack of energy it doesn't shine through their eyes and their personality anymore because they're so drained and tired so it's something to ask yourself if you're someone who is struggling with this yeah where did our perception of what an ideal woman's body comes it definitely comes from what you see on social media um it definitely has changed over the decades as well if you look back it changes all the time it always does so then next year it's going to be ripped as women and it's going to be really hard as jan has said to gain that muscle back yeah and i i think again like forget about society's sort of expectation of you just think about your 10 years ahead of who you are who you want to be um a little bit sit with that and just think about yourself and i just want to feel amazing and energized and confident and strong all the things that i need to get me through life because life is painful and hard and full of suffering and if you don't have that strength and power because you didn't build it because you made yourself small if you get things like cancer and you have to have chemotherapy your chances of surviving chemo are very low and disease and things and i don't mean to go into this topic because i know it can be hard for you um but that's the beauty of it it's it's it's biological reproduction it's biological resistance it's longevity it's anti-aging like oh my god when you get small and you lose your muscle mass you look 10 years older because it's the muscle mass and the fullness that gives us the beauty of youth and makes us look amazing and keeps us strong and our posture and everything like that so so going back to the hisempic thing it's like yeah if you're if you're small and you're taking hisempic you're just adding so much risk to your life unnecessarily the last part i want to touch on in this episode before we dive into community questions is rest that's something that i've learned in my life rest is so valuable it's so important every top athlete focuses on rest yeah what do you see in the gym when it comes to rest and why do you think people can be resistant to it rest is an interesting one it's it's it's hard because i'm not there i can make you crazy though you do so much i can make you know he's a firefighter i'm sure i've always said it on the other two episodes but he firefights and then he's also a full-time no my housemates like how do you have the energy to do what you do day i i love what i do and i do i honestly i don't know how many calories i are gonna eat like six thousand calories a day he's always ordering i'm always eating and and you know i i i do my exercise but i i listen to my body and i try to get my eight hour sleep every night so i do the things that matter the most first and then build from there but rest when you're in the gym with me i can tell you to lift a weight and how hard to go and stuff like that when you leave me you're on your own so if you rest i can tell you what to do to rest but if it's up to you if you do it or not and i got eyes and ears everywhere i know who's resting i know who's at the pilates classes in Bondi there i know who's running on the streets i get told everything so when i but i just also want to say that i've lifted heavier than i could and i haven't been training as much march i've been resting more yeah and well that comes out that's interesting that comes down to nervous system right that says that you're not in a chronic state of stress that says that your phone battery got used up and you chucked it on charge until it was a hundred percent so you could come back in and go and hit it again because it's like we are we're nervous systems electricity so when you think about the power in you if you drain that from a workout and then you don't rest and you come back let's say the next day or 12 hours later and do another workout your phone or your energy system is only a quarter to a half charged so then you've only got a quarter or a half to give and if you're doing like a heavy lifting session you're not going to be able to use all the muscle fibres in say your glutes because the power in your nervous system isn't there to be able to call everyone in to lift that heavy load and you're gonna god things feel heavy today gotta feel tired so yeah you got to eat to recover but you got to rest to actually recover the nervous system and if you don't you're not going to perform as well and if you're not going to perform as well what's a point like you know because you're meant to be hitting your marks and stuff like that so that you can adapt from that stress but if you're always coming in under dark because you haven't rested you're never hitting your marks and your progression and all your adaptations and where your goals are just so much further away from you but I think when it comes to rest it's like well what is rest well obviously getting your eight hours sleep maybe even nine hours but the beauty of exercise is that you sleep fuller you sleep deeper you're gonna that sleep is going to be so much more productive when you are fit and healthy and you do work out in the first place but then there's things like active recovery like walking and maybe yoga if it's not too hard and maybe saunering and having a good conversation with a friend as long as it's not too deep and heavy which can be exhausting as well that was interesting because yesterday went for lunch with my oldest best friend and my ordering was like you've had a more restorative day than you usually have nothing changed I just had lunch with a friend yeah but that's so good for your nervousness feeling yeah you had your food you you you some you know and your fun things exactly so good and so when it comes to rest like when you're younger you're a 15 16 17 year old teenager you're full of beans you can probably afford to do a workout and then maybe a run in the afternoon and you're just your recovery is so fast you get to 25 still pretty good but then when you get to 30 40 50 the amount of time to recover your nervous system takes more time to recover you're not going to train five or six times a week as a 40 50 year old but you can probably get away with it as a 15 year old because you're just like that you there's no time in your life we've got more energy in your life right and you just recover so fast and you're growing and it's like wow right this is where I get a little bit upset with the school system we're sitting down and we're like the most energetic little things and then we're forced to sit for eight hours and we got told we got ADHD no they're just balls of energy wanting to run around and learn through kinesthetics through their movement and their touch and stuff so so yeah rest is dependent on age and also fitness and also lifestyle so like if you work an office job um or maybe you're a shift worker right where your circadian rhythms out of whack that means that your recovery from workouts is going to be harder um you know if you have a good routine like say you do but do Monday Friday in an office you get to work out you go to bed the same time you've probably got a better smoother circadian rhythm it's always aligned because you've got a little bit more profile but nurses firefighters these sorts of people like hats off to them it's like it's you oh yeah I know that you know like it's hard the night shifts are hard they really throw you out and then that changes your hormones and it changes your appetite and it changes your neural strength so um understanding that there's a lot of things that go into recovery but this is what I want to say on recovery and rest is that sometimes people struggle in stillness sometimes people have got a lot going on in their mind and sitting down to rest isn't something they want to do because it could actually be a little bit more terrifying for them right and so before I came in this podcast I thought I've been working with a lot of people lately um and one of the girls I was working with has been journaling we love journaling she's been doing it for several years and it's a really good way to reflect into her specs so basically thinking about your inner self what's what you're feeling and stuff like that it's a good way to set up your day good way to end the day good way to boost your mood or to change your perception but what if you're locked in a state of fight or flight what if your nervous system is locked there that you're always feeling anxious and scared or fearful or you can't change that through a thought process and when I was speaking to this girl and she's like been doing it for a few years but nothing seems to be changing on that level and something came to mind when I was researching breathing many years ago and it's what we call CO2 tolerance CO2 tolerance is basically the build-up of carbon dioxide within us now people think that we breathe to breathe in oxygen but that's that's not right we actually the thing that makes us want to take a breath is the build-up of CO2 it tells the little thing in the brain the chemo receptor breathe because that's kind of stressful CO2 in the body is a liquid called carbonic acid CO2 is what we release when it changes from the liquid through the lungs into a gas so this carbonic acid builds up and the chemistry of it changes the pH in our brain and this is where breath work is so powerful for rest and recovery because perhaps you can't sit still and rest because of your nervous system so wound up so I can't just say to someone can you just not do so much today because for them that's not comfortable so then we can go into a breath work strategy of increasing our carbon dioxide tolerance getting comfortable with the sensation within us and very simple little exercise you can do is there's two things you can make sure that you're walking around and spending your day nasal breathing because when you exhale through your nose it's a hell of a lot slower than your mouth when you and let air out of your mouth so quickly what is that that's the carbon dioxide it's gone you're not holding on to any of that carbon dioxide your tolerance of carbon dioxide is very low so the sensation of that is going to be quite uncomfortable when you have to hold your breath or take a slow exhale for five seconds like if we did this that could be hard for someone it might already make him feel comfortable like I want to breathe I want to breathe because they carbon dioxide tolerance is so low so simply nasal breathing and being aware of that can change your nervous system without even doing any other breath work just mouth closed breathe through your nose because you're forcing yourself to increase your carbon dioxide tolerance because you're forcing yourself to exhale slowly so it has to sit with you a bit longer and it means that you're going to tolerate that sensation and grow with it because stress isn't something that we're trying to be so resilient that it doesn't occur no stress is something we want to be so resilient that when it's occurring we can stay calm under pressure okay and so if you want to do a breath work exercise you can just take a four second inhale and a six second exhale with a short little breath hold of two to three seconds on everyone for 30 seconds to a minute and then just return to normal nasal breathing and doing that little exercise a couple of times a day will just increase your carbon dioxide it will help you sit with that sensation of I need to breathe but I don't need to breathe I'm okay and you can do a little test um we won't do it here but if you wanted to do a test just take a normal breath in and out on the exhale hold your breath can you do it for 30 seconds without feeling like I got it I got it don't do that as soon as you need to breathe that first little urge that's when you'd go oh that was 15 seconds it's probably a good sign that carbon tolerance carbon dioxide tolerance is a bit low if you can do it for 30 seconds it's quite good you can adapt it even more than that but just those little things it's like that will get to your subconscious your physiology that will help calm things down regardless of what thoughts are going through you will just feel safer in your body by your carbon dioxide tolerance and so I've given um this girl some exercises and breathing breath work to do at home over the next few months to see if that changes this tense feeling in her chest that she always has so um so I think when it comes to rest and recovery it's one thing to say hey you know do your three to four strength sessions a day a week sorry a week um you know a little bit of cardio here and there a bit of play pilates and outdoor activities and stuff and then let's take your steps and do your walking and and meditations and journals and everything that's your rest recovery but for those people that are stuck and they feel like sitting in stillness is so stressful for them maybe look into some carbon dioxide tolerance breathing exercises to help them build that physiology so that they're okay with that sensation and so what I like to say the ladies is that like the soft days make strong women okay if you are always trying to have those hard days you poor thing you're breaking yourself down you're not going to be strong you're just overworked and that's not going to be good for you that's not going to be good for your relationships that's not going to be good for your children if you're a parent it's not going to be good for your productivity at work no one performs well when we're overworked rest is the beauty of it all so strength training requires it because you're breaking down muscle fibers and you need a certain amount of time to restore your nervous system and stuff so rest and recover is is probably just as important if not more important than all the other things we spoke about today because from a baseline of rest you're going to be calmer happier softer more polite kinder you're just going to be a really beautiful human and you got to understand that I think stress instantaneously ignites us like a fire engine with its lights on but once the stress goes it takes a long time for that to dampen a few hours so that's why when we drive back to the fire station after a fire call whenever under lights and sirens we're just cruising back okay so it's kind of like that analogy so understand that when we've evolved in Africa we might see a lion once and there's gone and it's like oh yeah we can chill now but like that was a close call we'll talk about it in a few hours later but in this day and age even someone knocking at the door can stress you out then you get the email then you see something on instagram then you get this then you get that and it's like boom boom boom boom boom and we're always alert alert alert alert start to start to desensitize yourself by removing things subtract for satisfaction remove things that are going to be triggers of stress in your daily life especially in the evening so you can sit in calm without the unexpected interruption because it takes hours to downregulate yeah it can take a millisecond to upregulate but it takes hours to downregulate so try to clear space of that yeah honestly you have so much knowledge in your brain how do you fit all of that into your head that is crazy um i learned so much i'm glad you did and i know that the audience is going to love this episode we're going to now record our thursday app so stay tuned for that guys it's going to be your questions but for now thank you so much for tuning into our monday and i will see you guys soon thanks for having me