The metabolic comeback is a combination of whole effort exercise and whole food nutrition. And we hear just all the time about just this overall sense of well-being.

This is something that they can make into a lifestyle that will serve them and continue to pay dividends years from today. Welcome to the Strength Changes Everything podcast, where we introduce you to the information, latest research, and tools that will enable you to live a strong, healthy life. On this podcast, we will also answer your questions about strength, health, and well-being.

I’m Amy Hudson. I own and operate three exercise coach studios. My co-hosts are Brian Saigon, co-founder and CEO of The Exercise Coach, and Dr. James Fisher, leading researcher in evidence-based strength training. And now for today’s episode. Today we’ve got a very special episode.

On an episode recently, we talked about an issue with Dr. Wayne Westcott called sarcopenia and the phenomenon that’s happening to many adults starting in their 30s on average where we’re losing muscle About 10% of our muscle mass every decade which is accompanied by a fat gain of up to 15 pounds per decade This is something that a lot of adults start noticing. They start to see themselves Weakening they start to notice changes in their body and then they start to see themselves weakening, they start to notice changes in their body, and then they start to see a fat gain accompanied along with that, which we can understand is going on, and this is backed up by obesity statistics as well. We can see that this loss of muscle accompanied by a fat gain is turning into a real issue. And so to address this issue, what a lot of people do is go into dieting, right? And we’ve talked a little bit in the past about yo-yo diets, where people go on a calorie restrictive diet of some kind just to lose weight, right? Making that their goal. But in the process, they’re losing muscle mass. And so today, we’ve got a guest on with us today on our podcast, which is Gerri Ann Seigin.

She is the co-founder of The Exercise Coach, along with her husband, Brian. She’s here to talk with us about something we call the metabolic comeback. This is what The Exercise Coach has designed, a program that The Exercise Coach has designed to help clients address this issue and more when it comes to their metabolic health and overall health. And so first of all, welcome Darianne to the podcast. Hi Amy. So Darianne, first let’s just describe a little bit more about yo-yo effect and this yo-yo diet that a lot of people get caught up in. Can you describe what we mean by that? Yeah, it’s pretty simple if you think about a yo-yo goes up and down and up and down, right? So what happens is people are overweight and they decide, hey, I need to lose some weight and that is a good thing. And so let’s say you’re 20 pounds overweight, you lose that 20 pounds, but while you’re doing that, you’re strictly focusing on maybe caloric deficit or maybe you’re even doing a special little diet that you found and you lose that 20 pounds. But in the meantime, you’ve not done any form of strength training. So you’ve not kept up with any kind of muscle tissue, muscle mass, even maintaining it, let alone growing it. So what happens is, let’s say you lose that 20 pounds. You’ve now lost 20 pounds of not only fat, you certainly have lost some fluids in there, but you’ve definitely lost some muscle tissue. So the problem is, just for simple math, let’s say it’s 20 pounds, let’s say 5 pounds of what you lost was muscle and 15 pounds of what you lost was fat. Well now what happens is, unfortunately, like a lot of people, you gain that 20 pounds back. Well you haven’t been at the gym working out to gain 20 pounds of muscle. What happens is you’re gaining that back in fat. So now you lost 15 pounds of fat, but now you’ve gained 20 pounds of fat. And then the yo-yo keeps going, so the next time you lose another 20 pounds, you just gain it back. And it’s just more fat every single time. So when you’re yo-yoing, it’s really kind of detrimental because you’re losing muscle and you’re gaining, you’re yo-yoing, it’s really kind of detrimental because you’re losing muscle and you’re gaining, you’re becoming essentially more fat.

Right.

And in the episode with Dr. Wayne Westcott, the stat he gave on this is that about 95% of people who go on a diet regain all of the weight within the first year. And what you’re saying is true is that you’re regaining mostly fat. You’re basically accelerating your aging process, is how he put it, by losing more muscle more quickly in the process. And this is obviously clearly not what we want, right? It’s not the way for overall metabolic well-being and metabolic health or sustained weight loss. And so at our exercise coach studios, one of the main parts of education that we provide people that come in, we meet many people every day with the goal of weight loss. They come to our studio and saying, I’m looking to lose weight. We educate them that what we really want is fat loss. We don’t want to lose just weight and lose our muscle mass along with it.

We’re looking for fat loss and muscle maintenance or even gaining muscle, right, for overall health.

And so the program that we have that we offer people with this goal is called the Metabolic Comeback available at Exercise Coach Studios. And the goal of the – we’re going to talk a little bit more about this program now. So the goal of the Metabolic Comeback is really designed to address three major health troublemakers out there.

So, Gerri-Ann, can you share what are these three troublemakers? Sure. The three troublemakers in our list is systemic inflammation, high blood sugar levels, and poor digestive health. And I can break those down just a little bit so we get a general understanding of what are we trying to tackle through the metabolic comeback. So the first one is systemic inflammation. So this is not the inflammation that when you sprain your ankle and your body creates a short-term inflammatory response to help you heal and then that goes away. This is not what we’re talking about. Systemic inflammation is at the level of your stells. It’s chronic, which means it goes on and on, and so it’s not due to any particular injury and it’s not a healing process. It’s actually inflammation that’s responsible for so many of the diseases we see today like heart disease, diabetes, cancer, dementia, migraines, autoimmune diseases, digestive diseases, and accelerated aging.

It’s a very serious condition and over 70% of today’s healthcare is taking care of this chronic, systemic, cellular inflammation. The next troublemaker is high blood sugar levels. According to the CDC’s website, 38% of Americans over the age of 18 have prediabetes and a whopping 48.8% over 65 have prediabetes. So this is a condition where your blood glucose levels are higher than normal and they’re potentially on their way to what we call a full-blown type 2 diabetes. It’s where you’re very insulin resistant, which means that when you consume sugars, if our body is unable to bring those sugars down to healthy levels, it’s a troublemaker and it causes us also then to have high triglycerides, which are blood fats, which lead ultimately to a cellular disease and ultimately again to a full-blown diabetes, which about 15% of those in the USA currently have, which I was just looking at statistics from a few years ago. It’s just increasing so rapidly. USA loves their sugar. And finally, the third troublemaker in our list is digestive distress. There’s a wide variety of digestive issues that people face, such as heartburn, reflux, ulcers, constipation, diarrhea, gas, bloating, and then a variety of other kinds of intestinal or bowel disorders. This makes life a quite unenjoyable experience for many people that suffer from any of these. And in some cases, it leads to a need for lifelong medications and in some cases, even surgeries.

So we have found that it’s not unusual to find these three, all three, troublemakers present in the health of many people, our clients, but most have at least one of them and any and all of them are indicators of poor metabolic health and the underlying cause of so much of the chronic disease that you see in people today. But the good news is that these can be addressed and even some of them can be stopped before they happen or they also in many cases can be reversed once they have happened. In fact, they all have the same primary solution that we at The Exercise Coach like to call the metabolic comeback. The metabolic comeback is a combination of whole effort exercise and whole food nutrition. So it’s as simple as that.

Combining whole effort exercise with whole food nutrition. That is the path through which these big troublemakers are being addressed. So let’s dive in a little bit more to the concept of whole food nutrition. Of course, on this podcast, we’ve spoken quite a bit about our approach to whole effort exercise and why we focus on strength training and the high effort that we’re asking our clients to give and why that’s so beneficial for them to build up their muscle.

But let’s talk a little bit about what does whole food nutrition look like? Sure. You know, whole food nutrition is just simply eating foods that are in or close to their primary form. So, to give an example, an apple. An apple is a whole food.

Or a chicken breast is not processed into something else. It’s the breast of a chicken. Yes, it has to be removed from the bird, but that’s about it. It doesn’t have to be processed into something else. So, we say minimally processed foods. So whole foods fall basically into three macro categories.

You’ve got your good proteins, you’ve got your healthy fats, and your nutrient-dense carbs like fruits and vegetables. And a whole food diet should also always consist of plenty of fresh, clean, pure water. At The Exercise Coach, whole food nutrition maximizes all forms of whole foods while minimizing what we like to call our food villains – sugars of any kind, starches, processed grains, dairy, alcohol, legumes, non-fermented soy, and artificial sweeteners and flavorings. Okay, so maximizing whole real food while minimizing those super villains that really do not help us out metabolically, the ones that you just mentioned. And at The Exercise Coach, we actually have a guide, a very helpful reference that we provide clients called The Nutrition Playbook, which Darianne is the author of. And this is a guidebook, an easy-to-read tool that we pass out to people that goes a little bit more into depth about each of these food supervillains and categories, why we are trying to maximize certain ones, what that’s going to do in our body, and then what impact that the food supervillains may be having that we may not want and why that’s the case. And sometimes when clients realize what the impact of various foods are, they realize that this may not be helping me out. I don’t really want this in my body. And they are motivated to take action on it.

And within the nutrition playbook, there is a section in there where we call the reader to action. And really the action is to make a focused effort to implement these nutritional changes in conjunction with their exercise.

And we call that the 30-Day Metabolic Comeback Challenge.

So Gerri-Ann, can you share with us what a 30-Day Metabolic Comeback Challenge is?

Sure. Yes. The 30-Day Metabolic Comeback Challenge is a 30-day time period where you make a commitment to eating only whole foods while eliminating those food villains completely. The purpose is to take out any food that typically might cause inflammation, as well as foods with a high likelihood to cause a food allergy or even a food sensitivity, and all processed and fake foods, and all sugars in all forms are eliminated during those 30 days. We have, in the Exercise Coach Nutrition Playbook, we have an entire section that talks about and walks you through really beautifully the 30-day challenge, and we provide a lot of resources to help any challenger complete that 30 days successfully along with social media groups, along with plenty of recipes to just help you really be able to have a turnkey system for just 30 days to really change your metabolism around. And while many challengers have weight loss as their major goal, you know, we at The Exercise Coach have some goals too. And we’re hoping that you simply feel much better at the end of those 30 days. And perhaps as a result of that, we hope that it will spur on a desire to keep going or perhaps adjust to what we then call in our playbook, we call it the 80-20 lifestyle, where you incorporate some of the foods that we left out, you’re able to have them again, and ultimately though achieve the goal of better health. We also love seeing people start to enjoy cooking, people who’ve never really cooked a whole lot before. We see people enjoy the taste of real food because our taste really becomes skewed once we eat a lot of this processed food. We think that’s what food is supposed to taste like and so we don’t like real food for a while and then once we get that fake food out we start to realize, wow, an apple actually does taste pretty good. And in fact, it’s pretty sweet because now you’ve eliminated all those sugars, and this once bland apple actually tastes sometimes too sweet to even eat it.

Yes, that is a very profound. And as clients go through the journey of these 30 days with us, oftentimes they are highly impacted by the entire experience. They’re learning about their own body. They’re learning better habits. They’re realizing sometimes for the first time that they can do this, that this is something that they can make into a lifestyle that will serve them and continue to pay dividends years from today, which is what our goal is, right? I would love for you to share too, you know, what are some results that clients have seen that you’ve seen clients achieve during a 30-day period like this or ongoing as a result of taking the Metabolic Comeback Challenge?

Sure.

I can absolutely tell you that challengengers have reported that they’ve adopted healthier eating habits, and maybe it’s not all of it at once, and we have people who go through challenges. We do them at the studios on a group basis twice a year, which is really fun because it gets people very involved. But you can do an individual challenge anytime you want.

And so we have people who do these multiple times. And so maybe the first time they’ve adopted, oh, I’ve now increased my water intake, I stopped drinking diet soda, maybe it’s that. And then maybe next time it’s, oh, I’m finally starting to cook my meals instead of this or that. So it’s just little things that change along the way. So they report those kinds of things and eating healthier. And in fact, they’re reporting that they feel so much better when they do this.

And then we often do hear about weight loss, of course, during that 30 days. I would see the average that we see, depending upon your size to begin with, is going to be between five and even up to 15 pounds. We do hear about better abilities to fall asleep at night. Sleep is a big issue for people and it’s a very important issue and so they’re falling asleep faster, they’re staying asleep longer, they’re not waking up in the middle of the night and unable to go back to sleep and this is happening in these first 30 days. We hear about like big increases in energy during their day. Many people say, gosh I used to have to take a nap every day after lunch and I don’t have to do that anymore. You know they’re not getting that sugar crash anymore so there’s no need to feel like they’re having to take a nap. Many people are reporting that they can do their daily tasks without pain. They’ve eliminated a majority of their joint pain and they have increased mobility.

We’ve heard about people’s skin clearing up, people who have eczema, people who have rashes, and other types of skin conditions have cleared up because they’ve removed some of those foods that are causing those allergies or sensitivities to be causing that for them, and their digestion is processing so much better, so their skin clears up. Your skin is so related to your gut. We also get to see doctor reports, which we love, and it shows how their cholesterol levels are in much healthier ranges.

They’ve lowered their blood pressure. They’ve lowered their A1c. We hear all the time about less bloating, less gas, better bowel movements. We get to hear it all. And less stomach aches. And we hear just all the time about just this, you know, they say,

I just have this sense, this overall sense of well-being. And that’s just exciting for us to hear. Absolutely. this, you know, they say, I just have this sense, this overall sense of well-being, and that’s just exciting for us to hear.

Absolutely. It sounds like there’s very few downsides, right? I mean, those are benefits that everybody wants. And I do want to reiterate, many times that weight loss that you mentioned, you know, depending on somebody’s starting place, between 5 or 15 pounds, whatever it may be based on the person starting. Many times that’s nearly all fat and that is such a positive metabolic adaptation to combining whole food nutrition with whole effort exercise. This really does help our clients stay healthy for years to come, not just in a 30-day period but learning the habits which means combining nutrition and exercise as an ongoing healthy habit like brushing your teeth helps them to stay on a positive metabolic trajectory that will continue years and years from today right we don’t want to let ourselves decline over time. And these two behaviors alone make so much of the difference. So I appreciate you sharing that with us.

And if you are listening to this podcast and you are a person who does have the goal to become healthier in 2025 or have been overwhelmed in the past about the idea of making dietary changes because it seems too complicated or it seems overwhelming or unattainable. I do want you to know that it is doable and that you can do this.

If you need guidance and you need support, the exercise coach is here to help you. I would love to end today’s episode by playing a couple of testimonials of clients that have participated in a metabolic comeback and I hope that you enjoy listening to these stories. We will see you next time on the podcast. I hope you remember strength changes everything. By the time I completed the 30-day challenge, I had lost over 17 pounds. The results I noticed were my clothes are looser, I lost puffiness in my face, well a little extra spring in my step. I don’t know, I had chronic back pain and my back feels better. Overall I just feel better and I think it was worthwhile to do the challenge and I plan to continue.

The results I saw from my 30 days working with the exercise coach was that I feel better, I’m stronger, I lost body fat, I gained more muscle, I lost a little over 9 pounds, and I’m feeling very strong and I’m sleeping very, very well.

So I was glad I did it. Thanks for listening to today’s episode. If you enjoyed this episode, please share it with a friend. Make sure you follow the show on Apple Podcasts, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts so that you never miss another episode. You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strengthchangeseverything.com. Join us next week for another episode. You can find out more information about this episode or connect with the show at strength changes everything.com. Join us next week for another episode. Here’s to you and your best next week for another episode. Here’s to you and your best health.