ARCHIVED EPISODE FROM SEASON 1 (2023)
Big Girl Brain
#4 My Fitness Journey (part 1)
Okay, we're gonna record. We are gonna have a good time. We are going to not have any interruptions. And I'm manifesting right now so that this happens. Good morning friends. It is Monday, May 1st. It's May 1st. Happy May 1st. So excited. Oh my gosh, my little brother's gonna be 15 in like four days. That's so sad. I feel really good today. I have a lot of energy. I had a weird day yesterday and I did not like it so we're making up for it today. Okay, I decided to talk about my fitness journey today and also just talk about fitness journeys and nutrition in general because I have so much energy and my mind is so alert and awake. So this is probably the best day for this episode. I wanted to let you guys know before I dive into the topic that I will be discussing body dysmorphia and eating issues in this episode. So if that's not something that you feel comfortable listening to, feel free to click off. All right, we have a lot to cover in this episode, but first I wanted to start out by taking you guys through my kind of history of working out and where I started in my fitness journey versus where I'm at now. Okay, flashback to June of 2021. I had just graduated high school. I was not in the healthiest state of mind. Throughout my senior year of high school, I was very, very insecure, very self-conscious of my body. I had very bad body image issues and little by little, it started to affect my relationship with food. I'm sure you can already see how this would negatively affect somebody who wants to work out six days a week all of a sudden. So in 2021, when I first started out in the gym, my goal was to shrink myself. It was to make myself as small as possible. I wanted to fit in with people at the gym, obviously. I didn't want to look like this little weak, scrawny thing, but I wanted to be able to build muscle without having literally any fat on my body. That was how my head was. That was my mindset. In the beginning, the first six months of me working out, I didn't really know a lot about fitness. I didn't know a lot about body building, powerlifting, different training styles. I pretty much just had a basic six-day workout split. I hit legs twice a week. I would do upper body the rest of the week, and I would do a lot of cardio because I was trying to burn all my fat off. Unfortunately, this lasted for about another year and a half. So for the first year and a half that I was in the gym, I was working full time every day and then going to the gym six days a week with absolutely no fuel in my body. Now this took a major, major toll on my mental health as well as my physical health because I was miserable 24/7, obviously. But on top of that, I could barely function anymore. Obviously, I would not suggest anyone starting a fitness journey if that's the mindset that they're currently stuck in. But unfortunately, that's just the point in my life when I started. So the road to healing, disordered eating is very long, very messy, very difficult, but I don't want to focus on that side of my fitness journey in this episode. I just kind of wanted to share that part with you so that you understood, you know, kind of where I started in my mind in the gym versus where I've ended up. So around August of 2022, it had pretty much been a full year of me starving myself and working out. And I was very, very small, very lean. I had muscle on me, but I was just so tiny that it was like, it was basically like when dudes in elementary school would have like a six pack, just because they had no body fat. So they would call them skinny abs. I just had skinny abs, skinny biceps. In my mind, I couldn't see how small I was at the time. And only recently, looking back at photos, have I realized, wow, like I was tiny, tiny, you know, although I couldn't see it, it had become such a topic of conversation for my family that it was unavoidable at that point. I knew deep down that everything that my family and friends were telling me was true, and that they were only trying to help me and literally save my life. Eventually, thanks to my younger sister, I was able to start turning around my relationship with food and create a more positive experience for myself in the gym as well. Now jump to January of this year, 2023, I'm eating properly and I'm healthy. And now the fun begins. The key to believing that I can get to my goals in a healthy way versus trying to do them in an unhealthy way was one thing, and it was being patient with myself. I am aware that I can accomplish anything that I put my mind to. But in the past, I have always felt the need to rush to get everything done as quickly as possible and to be an overachiever, basically. I feel like my eating disorder stemmed from me wanting to look the way I wanted to look, but as fast as I possibly could. If I took the mindset that I have right now and put it in my head as a 17 year old in 2021, when I first started out, I would have insane results by now. The thing that I didn't understand that I want all of you to understand is that results and progress will only come with consistency, discipline, and patience. Going to the gym in 2021 and 2022 looked a little bit like this. I would have an occasional day where I felt super great in the gym and I enjoyed my workout and I had a good time while doing it. That would maybe be 5% of the time. The other 95% of the time, I was extremely insecure in the gym because of the way I looked, because I was hyper focused on what my body looked like every single day, I would rush through my workouts because I was so anxious and I couldn't clear my mind and stay focused on my workout and I would have a miserable time because I couldn't lift anything because I was weak. I had no food in my system. It's funny now, honestly. Why would I expect myself to be able to shoulder press two 30 pound dumbbells when I barely ate food? I wish I could go back and just hold my little 18 year old self's face in my hands now and be like, girl, you have no idea what you're missing out on. So now my days in the gym look a little bit like this, so we pull up. It's either me or me and my sister. We're bumping music, we're drinking our pre-workout, get knowledgey. We go in, scan in, stop at the restroom, probably have to pee. Then head over the hit section so we can warm up. Then we're starting the main workout. Our main workout is weight training, so we'll lift for about an hour and a half give or take. Then we'll do our 20 minutes of cardio after. Depending on if we have to hit abs that day or not, we will hit abs after cardio. Then pack up our stuff, hop back in the car, head home, and make some food. I think that sounds a lot more fun than the experience I was having in the past in the gym. I want to discuss kind of the key adjustments I made in order to take my experience in the gym to the next level. The first and most important change that I made was my goals. My goal originally in the gym was to make myself tiny and to shrink myself as much as possible. My goal now is to enjoy my workouts, to lift as much as I can, and to leave the gym with my muscles burning. I definitely have a physique goal still. I don't want to necessarily look super bulky, but I know how to reach my physique goals in healthy ways. The second thing I had to change was obviously how I was eating. I'm going to give you a little example of kind of like a day in my life of eating right now. I usually wake up around 6.37 a.m. and I usually eat my first meal around 8 a.m. 8 a.m. I'll make some breakfast. I'll either make some like scrambled eggs with like bell peppers, onions, mushrooms, spinach, or I'll make some protein oatmeal such as like Quaker Oats with protein powder and water, and then I'll put like peanut butter almonds fruit on top of it. Those are usually like my breakfast options. A couple hours later is usually when I tend to go to the gym. So that's going to be my lunch/pre-workout meal. Sometimes I'll have a snack in between that. Like I'll have like an apple or like a protein bar or something, but my pre-workout meal is not too big, not too small. You want your biggest meal of the day to be your breakfast, and then your pre-workout meal, you want it to be a good amount of food, but not to the point that you're going to hurl. For lunch/pre-workout meal, I'll usually make something like ground turkey, veggies, brown rice, potatoes, something like that. And then with that, I have my pre-workout or just like an energy drink. After the gym, I don't have a super huge meal, but I make sure that I have like some sort of protein after the gym so that I can have big muscles. Protein shakes are really good for that because they don't require a lot of work or ingredients. Dinner time, I might have exactly what I had for lunch or sometimes I'll make like a pasta, a fun pasta. I have a problem with spaghetti. I really like spaghetti to like an unhealthy point, so I make that a lot too. So what have I learned from eating and fueling my body versus draining my body in the past? Aside from being overall happier and having a much better experience in the gym and having a lot more energy, the best part is I'm actually progressing now. I went from like only being able to adjust, you know, how much weight I'm lifting every couple of months to now being able to move up and weight every week. So fuel your body before and after the gym and also it's very important to keep in mind what you're eating as well because if you're going home after your workouts and eating a bunch of like sugar and crap, your workouts are going to waste because being in shape and being fit is 90% about what you're eating and only 10% about what you do in the gym. So if you enjoy lifting, if you enjoy working out, that's great. Keep doing it, but if you're doing it to look a certain way or to reach a certain goal, then you need to work out in the kitchen first. If your goal is to, you know, build muscle and lose fat, you want to be eating high volume but low calorie foods and you want to be eating a lot of protein. Some examples of high volume low calorie foods are salmon, avocado, eggs, spinach, other kinds of fish, broccoli, watermelon, cauliflower, berries, lettuce, whole grain, yogurt, you know, things like that. Fruit, you know, those are things that are going to keep you full and energized longer but without bumping up your calories. To lose weight in a healthy way, you want to eat in a calorie deficit and eating in a calorie deficit means that you have to burn more calories than you consume in the day. But that doesn't mean you have to eat less food. The problem with like diet culture these days and, you know, people trying to lose weight in ridiculous ways is they give you like this short-term plan to follow, which is probably full of a lot of restrictions and it doesn't teach you anything about healthy habits or long-term habits. And then when you're done following their like short-term plan, you might have gotten the results you want but they're not going to stay there because you're not going to be able to follow their plan for the rest of your life. It's a lot smarter to educate yourself in all things, nutrition, learn about your macros, learn about what foods are best for your body, get your blood work done, things like that, like things that are personal to you that you can keep up with long-term and that will benefit your life in the long run. I am so, so blessed and so grateful that I was able to properly recover and educate myself and learn about how to take care of myself properly and feed myself properly and look at food in a way that is healthy. If you are wanting to get into the gym and jumpstart your fitness journey, I strongly suggest starting in the kitchen first. If you want to see any progress in your lifting, you need to understand how much protein you need to be eating to build muscle. You need to understand how much food in general you need to be eating. You need to understand which foods are going to make you feel the best as well as get you to your physical goal and really just have a, you know, well thought out structured plan of how you will hit your calorie goal and protein goal each day and what you'll need to do in order to maintain this structure. Okay, that's going to be a wrap on our food conversation for now. So you've established your food plan. Now you need to know what you need to be doing while you're in the gym. Okay, so I determined a while ago that I do not enjoy powerlifting workout style. I like to work out like a bodybuilder, so that's kind of the styles of workouts I'm going to be talking about today. The first thing we're going to discuss is hypertrophy training. Hypertrophy training focuses on developing your muscles and basically like increasing the sizes of your muscle fibers and developing large muscles and areas that you work out the most. So hypertrophy workout would look like basically three to six sets of about six to 12 reps of your basically 75 to 85% of your one rep max. Your one rep max is the highest amount of weight that you can lift for one repetition. For example, for bench press, my one rep max is 105 pounds. So if I wanted to do a hypertrophy set on bench and I wanted to do like 85% of my one rep max, then I would need to do about three sets of 89.25 pounds. And I would probably do like seven or eight reps each set. The other important part of hypertrophy training is how long you rest for. So you do not want to be resting for longer than 60 seconds. So depending on the workout I'm doing, I will rest for 30 to 60 seconds and then hit my next set. The reason I love training this way is because of the intensity. After a full hypertrophy training of any body part, whether I'm doing legs that day, shoulders back, whatever it may be, I am absolutely dead. If I'm going to the gym and I'm not like army crawling out after my workout, my workout was not intense enough. The reason I care so much about intensity and I want you guys to understand it is because the more energy and power you're putting into your workouts, the more you're going to get out of them, both physically and mentally, I have become so much more confident, not only in the gym, but in every other aspect of my life. Because when I'm in the gym, I proved to myself for the two hour period that I'm there that I can do hard things. I don't know, I don't know what it is, but the feeling you get when you're a little girl and you can lift heavy things is a really nice feeling. I think this helps a lot with being consistent as well and keeping up with the gym because when you lift with more intensity, it's more exciting and it's more fun. This is going to sound so pick me, but I have to give an example because I'm being so serious. So this week I'm actually starting a brand new split that I'm going to do for the next like four to six months and it's intense. Last week during my last week of my previous split, I was not feeling good, feeling demotivated, feeling tired, feeling like trash, and then I challenged myself. On Wednesday of last week, my legs were so sore. I didn't even do her full workout. I did part of my sister's bodybuilding leg workout that she's doing right now for competition. Bro, I was dead. I was so dead. Anyway, Monday, two days before Wednesday, I do that leg workout. So I'm dead on Wednesday, but I got to a gym. It was a different gym than I normally go to and they had equipment that I don't normally have at my gym, like a hack squat. And I was like, oh my gosh, this is my moment. Before going into that gym, I came up with a completely new quad workout. This was the hardest quad workout I've ever given myself. I did that whole thing. And yes, I was aching. During the last three sets of my last workout, my legs kept giving out like I just kept falling to the floor because my legs were so dead, I actually could not do anymore. What that two-hour period of an intense quad workout did for my brain mentally was insane. I think the best part about staying consistent in the gym, even when you really don't want to, is the like reawakening moments. You'll hit like a plateau point where you kind of don't feel as motivated for like two, three weeks. And then when you come out of it, it hits you like a truck every single time. Right now, even after being in the gym for almost two years, I feel like right now in this moment, the last two weeks, I have felt more excitement towards the gym than I ever have before. I'm saying this to kind of give some of you hope as well because I think a lot of people are afraid to get started in the gym because they don't know how long they're going to be able to keep up with it. I want you to know that even in times when you feel like quitting and stopping, there's always a way for you to rekindle the fire inside of yourself or even for something just to happen that, you know, makes you wake up again and makes you realize, wait a minute, I actually do really love doing this. One thing I feel like all human beings have in common is we all feel super good about ourselves when we complete something challenging. I think fitness can be the perfect segue going from maybe a more lazy, unproductive life to a more accomplished, fulfilling life. If you are someone who doesn't do a whole lot throughout the day, maybe you don't have a job right now, you're not going to school, you kind of just mosey around, having something challenging for you to do every day can be your first big step into having a more disciplined life. When you realize how capable you are of accomplishing one hard thing, it makes you wonder how many more hard things you could accomplish as well. I totally understand too that this is not for everybody. Some people just simply don't want to have that super active lifestyle. Some people don't feel the need or desire to get in the gym or have or start a fitness journey, and that's totally fine too. The reason I wanted to do this episode and share my experience with you guys is because I know there are people out there who do want to get into this and just don't really know how or have not felt motivated or inspired yet to do so, or maybe even are just afraid and have questions that they need answered. That's what I wanted to be for you guys. To wrap up this episode I wanted to take you guys through the workout split that I just created for myself that I will be following for the next six months. So first I always write down at the top of my split what my goals are so that I can see them every day and remind myself why I'm doing this. The goals I wrote down for this split were number one, grow my confidence by proving to myself that I can do hard things. Number two, perfecting my form and number three, prioritize how working out makes me feel and not how it makes me look. Real quick, I actually want to briefly discuss that last goal I wrote down. When you start going to the gym, no matter what the reason for it is, you will most likely experience body dysmorphia. I've seen this in guys, girls, young, old, everybody I've talked to has experienced some sort of body dysmorphia while being in the gym. When you're working out every day, you're standing in front of these mirrors or in the mirror in your bathroom, you're seeing your body every day, your body starts to look completely different, like every single day. Some days you feel like you look super big, super strong, some days you look super small, super weak, it just constantly changes, it feels like you're never satisfied. Number one is to take progress photos so that you can prove to yourself that you are progressing. Number two would be doing workouts that make you feel good. For example, me training a hypertrophy, it makes me very worn out, it's very intense, and when I leave the gym, I'm not focused on, oh, I look a little flabby today, no, I'm like, wow, I'm exhausted, I just put my body through hell, and I feel great. The reason this is so important is because in order to be consistent, you want to have your mind excited, you want to have your mind looking forward to the gym, and you're not going to be looking forward to the gym if you know that you're just going to go there to pick yourself apart. I know in my mind that with the way I'm eating and the way I'm training, if I'm consistent, I will get my results. And when I feel good in the gym, when I have these good workouts time and time again, it makes me stay consistent and it brings the results to me without me having to hyper focus on them every single day. Anyway, just something important to keep in mind. Now on to the actual workout split itself. Mondays, I'm doing glutes and hamstrings, mostly glute focus because my hamstrings are my dominant leg muscle, and it makes my butt look small, damn it. Tuesday is arm day. This is shoulders biceps and triceps, mostly shoulder focused. Wednesday is my cardio slash core day. So I start on the treadmill. I do a 30 minute treadmill split of sprinting, running and jogging intervals. And then I do a 20 minute workout after that or a 20 minute core focused exercise of some sort Thursday is upper body day. So once again, it's a shoulder focused day with a little bit of triceps. And then I also bench this day. I do not work out my chest because I don't want to look like a man, but I do want to be able to bench a plate. So I'm working up to that. And so I bench once a week, Friday is quad day. I don't need to say anything else about that. Saturday we finish off strong with back day, best day of the week. As far as cardio and ab exercises, I do cardio four times a week. So I have my full day of cardio. And then I have three other days throughout the week where I do like some sort of either like 30 minute incline walk or sitting on the bike or the elliptical, whatever it may be, ab exercises I do three times a week just to maintain a strong core. I used to think that abs came from doing ab workouts and not from what you eat. So if you are someone who is currently training abs every single day, trying to get a six pack and you're not getting there, consider going into a calorie deficit, because that is the only way you will have visible abs. So that is what my current split looks like. And that is what it will look like for the next few months. And who knows, maybe I'll let you guys know when I have a new split. How exciting. If any of you are currently getting into the gym or trying to and you need a little bit more of in depth assistance and guidance, I am happy to help any of you. You guys can always message me on the Instagram at big girl brain. You can DM me if you have me on Snapchat or my personal phone number, you can text me. I'm always happy to answer questions or even come up with a workout split with you. I'm happy to do that as well. I've been doing it for a while, so it won't take too much time. Also, if you ever want to come to the gym with me, do not hesitate to ask because I will take you to the gym and I will work you out. I am so glad that I got to sit and chat with you guys about my fitness journey today. I hope that I answered some of your questions. I hope that this inspires some of you to start your own fitness journey if you desire. Always remember, especially when you're first starting out in the gym, first of all, that everybody starts somewhere and every single person around you that you see in your gym had to go for the first time at some point in their life. Second of all, nobody is looking at you as much as you think they are and nobody is thinking about you or cares enough to care about what you're doing in the gym as much as you think. Do not let the fear of what other people think of you hold you back from reaching your fitness goals. I have seen some characters in the gym, like people doing the most out-of-pocket exercises. I don't think they're actually exercises even. And listen, if those people are confident enough to do that, then I think you're good doing some squats, you know? Anyway, thank you guys for listening to this episode. You guys can follow me on Instagram and on TikTok @biggirlbrain. Ask me questions, make video suggestions, whatever you feel like. This was a super fun episode and I'm super excited to make more episodes about fitness in the future. Once again, never hesitate to reach out and ask me questions about fitness. I'm happy to help you anytime. Share this episode with your Jim Bro or your mom or your neighbor, whoever. Okay, I'm done. I'm out of here. I'm out of here. Bye. Love you. Bye.