Changing your body is not easy. It is not supposed to be. That is how our bodies protect us. But after thirty years of coaching, I can tell you the underdog often wins. Even if you think you are too far gone or you have never been lean and athletic, you can turn it around.
If you are working hard for weight loss but still not seeing the results you want, this episode is for you.
Here is a wake-up call. Around 40 percent of women over 50 will experience an osteoporotic fracture in their lifetime, and hip fractures can be devastating. Your best defense is strong bones, and the most powerful way to build them is strength training.
I see plenty of women eating well and lifting weights, yet their DEXA scans still show muscle loss. Not ideal. In this episode, you will discover the surprising shifts that happen in your 40s and 50s, why your workouts and nutrition might be working against you, the biggest mistakes midlife women make during weight loss.
When I was younger, I rolled my eyes at the idea that menopause made fitness harder. Cringe. But here is the truth: as estrogen drops, inflammation rises. This is not just about hot flashes or a slower metabolism. It is about a fundamental shift in your biology. Regardless of the diagnosis, inflammation is often the common enemy, and strength training is one of the most powerful tools we have to calm it down.
The first reason you are not seeing results: too much exercise at too high an intensity. Women over 40 often need less all-out work than they think for weight loss. Too much high-intensity exercise can lead to unstable blood sugar and rising cortisol, which can lead to cravings and energy crashes. And when you are not fueling properly, your body will break down muscle to power your workouts instead of building it. The best intensity comes from two places: heavy reps inside strength sets and short bursts of cardio intervals followed by real recovery.
Reason two: missing progressive overload. Muscle is your secret weapon for a firm body, better metabolism, more energy, and sustainable fat loss. One pound of muscle burns three times more calories than one pound of fat, and the metabolic benefits go far beyond that. Start tracking your effort along with reps and weight so you can see your strength increase month by month.
Finally, reason three: chasing the number on the scale. True success is about increasing lean muscle, not lowering body weight. Get a DEXA scan for body composition or try an in-body scan, then use progress photos every two weeks to stay on track.
Changing your body is not easy. It is not supposed to be. That is how our bodies protect us. But after thirty years of coaching, I can tell you the underdog often wins. Even if you think you are too far gone or you have never been lean and athletic, you can turn it around.
If you're interested in womens health, this is the podcast for you.
Topics covered
Resources Mentioned
Follow Me:
Find me on Instagram: @hollyperkins
Learn more on my website: hollyperkins.com
Connect with me on Facebook: facebook.com/HollyPerkinsFitness
Holly Perkins 00:00[Text Wrapping Break]If you feel that you're doing everything right and still not seeing results, this episode might be the most important one yet. If you've been working hard and really trying to improve your body composition, it's very possible that you're just doing too much of the wrong things, causing your workouts and nutrition to backfire. I see it all the time.
Holly Perkins 00:26[Text Wrapping Break]So if you're ready to start doing things differently so that you can become stronger, tighter, and leaner, keep listening. Welcome to the Holly Perkins Health Podcast. If you're a woman over the age of 35 and have health, fitness, or nutrition questions for your body, you're in the right place.
Holly Perkins 00:48[Text Wrapping Break]I'm Holly Perkins, a women's strength and nutrition expert with over 30 years of experience helping thousands of women transform their bodies to be stronger, more resilient, and more energetic inside and out. Every week, you'll walk away with a real plan for improving your body composition so you can feel better now, reduce inflammation, and create lasting health.
Holly Perkins 01:13[Text Wrapping Break]So if you're ready to create the body that you need to keep up with the life that you love, let's dive in. Hello, and thank you for being here. If you are new, welcome. I'm Holly Perkins, and I coach women very specifically to use strength training and nutrition practices to improve their body composition so that you are at least 70% lean muscle, ideally more like 75 or 80% lean muscle, so that you can be a lean, mean fighting machine and stay in the game of life and out of the rocking chair in the years ahead.
Holly Perkins 01:55[Text Wrapping Break]And if you've been following along, you know that I'm currently writing my next book, Muscle and Bone, that's coming out in 2026. Lately, I have been deep in the research of building muscle in a way that also supports bone health, and I saw a startling statistic yesterday. Did you know that approximately 40% of women over the age of 50 will suffer from osteoporotic fractures during their remaining lifetimes, with hip fractures particularly associated with high morbidity and mortality?
Holly Perkins 02:36[Text Wrapping Break]This is from a 2025 systematic review and meta-analysis on optimal resistance training parameters for improving bone mineral density in postmenopausal women. That's exactly my jam, and my heart literally stopped when I saw this statistic. As always, I link my research in the show notes below or above, wherever you're listening, if you want to follow through and read up on the research. And here's the thing — 40% really is a crazy number. For example, right now, I want you to think of 10 women in your life — your mom, your sister, daughter, daughter's best friends, coworkers, other family members.
Holly Perkins 03:22[Text Wrapping Break]Call to mind 10 of them and include yourself in that 10. Four of you are likely to suffer from an osteoporotic fracture in your lifetime. That is heavy. I have the chills right now as I say it. Not only does it just sound terrible to go through a hip fracture — the pain and suffering alone, I would say, is scary and upsetting enough to motivate me to avoid it — but what we also don't immediately realize is that this type of injury has profound implications on your future independence, your finances, your relationships, and your emotions.
Holly Perkins 04:10[Text Wrapping Break]You've got to do everything that you can right now to reduce your risk of weak bones, and strength training is the most powerful way — I would argue even more powerful than nutrition — in preventing this and giving your bones the stimulus they need to trigger the bone-forming cells called osteoblasts. We talk about this on a lot of other podcast episodes so that those osteoblasts can lay down more minerals and more bone matrix so that you can keep your bones strong for life.
Holly Perkins 04:48[Text Wrapping Break]My conversation isn't just about getting fit to look good, even though I'll argue I actually think that's a really respectable reason to get fit. But beyond that, it's really about feeling good today and knowing that you'll be able to stay active in the years ahead if you want to. And that all starts with muscle, but you already know that, right? And that's why you're here. So if you're taking action to improve your muscle but you're struggling, I've got some awesome tips for you today. If you're someone who thinks, "I work out, I eat clean, I'm doing all the things, I'm lifting weights, but nothing is changing..."
Holly Perkins 05:33[Text Wrapping Break]Listen, you are so not alone. It's actually the whole reason that I'm in business. And maybe you're someone who has felt skinny-fat, so maybe you're at a healthy body weight but your body fat is higher than you want. Or maybe you want to see a lower number on the scale, but really what you want is to reduce your body fat in general. Maybe you're frustrated by the stubborn fat that's around your belly, or maybe you're feeling like your workouts don't really work anymore. This was a big one for me.
Holly Perkins 06:07[Text Wrapping Break]Again, you are not broken. You are not the problem. But there's a good chance maybe you're just misinformed. In fact, I've had clients come to me because they heard my messages and my advice loud and clear — usually here on the podcast — and they took action. They're applying what I told them to do. I would even say that these are women who are more educated about fitness and nutrition than most. They really have a lot of things right, and they have a lot going for them.
Holly Perkins 06:39[Text Wrapping Break]And yet, after six months to a year of working hard, their DEXA revealed that yes, they lost weight — Wahoo! — but they also lost muscle. I cannot tell you how many times clients have come to me because of this and the DEXA scans that I've seen. And the thing is, that's just not okay if you're killing yourself and going after fitness and nutrition and lifting weights but you're not actually moving the needle on your muscle.
Holly Perkins 07:12[Text Wrapping Break]We gotta work on it, because in some ways, you're spinning your wheels. Now, exercise for the sake of exercise is always a good thing. And without a doubt, I have a lot of women in my community that are here because they just want to be active. They enjoy working out, and they just want to be able to feel better. And that is 100% A-OK as well. As I always say, anything is better than nothing. What I'm really talking about today is for you if you're actually wanting to improve your body in some way — whether it's performance or body composition, or you just want to feel tighter and leaner. That is what we're talking about.
Holly Perkins 07:54[Text Wrapping Break]Because who cares if you lose weight if it means that you also lost muscle? Think about that. If that's you — if you would say you just want to lose some weight, or you need to lose weight, or your doctor told you that you need to lose weight — would you really be happier if you lost the weight but it also meant that 30% of the weight lost came from muscle? Probably not. I guarantee you'll be much happier sitting, let's say, two to five pounds heavier on the scale because of muscle.
Holly Perkins 08:28[Text Wrapping Break]Because remember, muscle is smaller and denser than body fat. You know that old adage where they say, "What weighs more, five pounds of muscle or five pounds of fat?" I always giggle, because five pounds is five pounds, right? But five pounds of muscle is about 33% smaller in surface area than five pounds of fat. You're going to be smaller at any body weight on the bathroom scale.
Holly Perkins 08:55[Text Wrapping Break]And that's the goal here, beyond all of those other good things like feeling stronger, reducing your risk of disease, and improving your cognitive health in the future. There are so many reasons to do what we do, and if what's in the back of your mind is weight loss, this episode is for you, my friend.
Holly Perkins 09:13[Text Wrapping Break]In this episode, you'll learn the surprising shifts that happen in your 40s and 50s, why your workouts and nutrition might be backfiring, the big mistakes most midlife women make with their fitness, and a sneak peek into my next lab master class, which is called Stronger Every Week, which is going to help you further beyond today's episode. I know that your body is capable of powerful, visible change at any age. I believe that when you train smart, you become a powerhouse. If you doubt...
Holly Perkins 09:51[Text Wrapping Break]...your ability to get healthy or to improve your strength or to get the body that you want, I invite you to look around. One of the blessings of social media is that we get to see all of the women out there who are proving you wrong. There are so many women in their 50s, 60s, and 70s, and even some in their 80s who prove that you can build muscle, that you can get lean, you can be athletic, and you can be unstoppable. In my 20s and 30s, we didn't have social media.
Holly Perkins 10:31[Text Wrapping Break]It's really funny to look back on it, because "The Google," which is what we called it in the early days, didn't even come around until 1998, several years after I got my degree in exercise physiology and nutrition. So my entire education was library-based. We had to go to the library to look up our research and to write our papers. At that time, most of us believed that more is better. Push harder.
Holly Perkins 11:03[Text Wrapping Break]Do more. Work out longer. And that's exactly what I did for 10 years. And for 10 years I suffered. Sometimes I looked fit during those years, but most of those years I was fluffy. I was puffy. I was exhausted. I couldn't stop thinking about sugar and caffeine, and I couldn't ever progress in terms of my performance. I can remember on so many occasions realizing that despite the fact that I was pushing hard and working so hard and doing all the right things, my squat never got much heavier. I would bump around by like 20 pounds, and that was it.
Holly Perkins 11:51[Text Wrapping Break]I would never be able to go beyond that upper limit of about 20 pounds. Despite running faster and doing more mileage every week, the miles never got faster. It was all just a big misunderstanding, and thankfully, I figured it out. Around my 40th birthday, it became clear that more is not better. More is not working. Harder is not the path. It's about doing the right things at the right time.
Holly Perkins 12:27[Text Wrapping Break]So when I share my insights with you here and now, know that it comes from, number one, getting more educated over these past 30 years, my personal experiences and a lot of my personal suffering, and it comes from what I've learned through coaching women for all these years and being in practice. I remember when I was in my 20s and 30s, and I would have some clients who were postmenopausal, over 50, over 60, and I remember really and truly believing that their bodies weren't changing simply because of their lack of commitment.
Holly Perkins 13:08[Text Wrapping Break]They would blame it on menopause, and in the back of my head, I would say, "Okay, yeah, I know menopause is hard," but in the back of my head, I was like, "No, she's just not eating right," or "No, she's just not training hard enough." I never accepted their excuses, as I kind of deemed them, and really kind of borderline rolled my eyes at this notion that after 50 or 60, it gets harder to get into shape. And guess what? I was so wrong. I laugh at myself, actually.
Holly Perkins 13:43[Text Wrapping Break]I cringe at myself now when I think back to those times, because I could not have been more wrong. The big things that happen in your 40s and 50s legitimately are real. If you are someone who's in your — maybe even your mid to late 30s, your 40s, or your 50s — and you are struggling with odd symptoms or fatigue or emotional imbalances or allergies out of nowhere or digestive issues out of nowhere, please know you are not crazy, despite what people tell you. You know when you feel good. You know when you feel bad. We all have those days when we feel amazing.
Holly Perkins 14:30[Text Wrapping Break]And while it might only be one day a month, if you can experience it, it's possible. And that puts into perspective all those other days of not feeling good. It's legit. Estrogen is a powerful, important hormone in both men and women. By the way, we just have proportionately more as compared to men. We actually have quite a bit of testosterone compared to men, but estrogen has its own unique influences.
Holly Perkins 15:03[Text Wrapping Break]And so, as you get older, approaching menopause and beyond, and that estrogen is fluctuating and declining, it really opens up a completely different biological landscape that usually points back to increasing inflammation. Inflammation is the root of all evil. Regardless of your diagnosis or your health issue, inflammation is the problem, and so we just have to figure out why it's there, what we can do to improve it, and then adopt practices to keep it lower. There's a lot you can do nutritionally, but I will tell you this — strength training is one of the best ways that you can teach your body to better manage inflammation. It's the whole piece of the puzzle.
Holly Perkins 15:57[Text Wrapping Break]So let's go over exactly why you're not seeing results despite trying, and how you can fix it. The first reason why you're not seeing results is that you're just doing too much of the wrong stuff. I see this all the time. It's the workout enthusiast — the woman who's going to the gym every single day, sometimes two workouts a day, sometimes never taking a day off, sometimes doing two or three exercise classes in a row.
Holly Perkins 16:32[Text Wrapping Break]Often, what this really means is that there's too many minutes per week spent in activities where your heart rate is too high. This could be a HIIT workout, boot camp classes — it could literally be any kind of high-energy workout. Keep in mind, people tend to call cardio a certain thing, but if you're cleaning your house and your heart rate is high, that's cardio. Any physical activity that causes your heart rate to go up counts towards these weekly minutes.
Holly Perkins 17:10[Text Wrapping Break]And so, note that I said spending too many minutes in this territory, because the truth is, there is a time and place for higher heart rate intensity. Each week, you're engaged in different kinds of activities at different heart rates. Your heart rate in yoga is going to be different than your heart rate in your strength workouts. Sometimes my heart rate in my yoga is even higher than it is in some of my lower intensity strength workouts.
Holly Perkins 17:41[Text Wrapping Break]Sometimes, depending on your walks or your hiking, your heart rate might actually be higher than when you're on a step mill. The point is, in any given week, your heart rate is reaching into different zones or different levels. But even still, at the end of any given week, if we could add up the actual and specific minutes where your heart rate is above about 80% of your true maximal ability, we'd probably find that you're just spending too many minutes in that zone.
Holly Perkins 18:17[Text Wrapping Break]Now, I don't talk about zone one, zone two, zone three for cardio workouts, because your heart is very different than everyone else's. I always like to calculate it per person, and so you'll never hear me say zone two cardio or zone three cardio. Even though it's not inaccurate, it's just not the way that I teach things. Higher intensity workouts are important. It is important to get your heart rate above resting. It's important to get your heart rate beating higher than walking and even higher than a moderate steady-state cardio session. But after 40, women need...
Holly Perkins 18:58[Text Wrapping Break]...way less of the high intensity than they realize. In my experience, less is usually better. I didn't say none. And anytime a client comes to me doing all the things, only to find out that she's lost muscle, this is usually the case. For me personally, I do very few minutes at higher heart rates because it is so problematic. And so, when I do some of these interval or higher heart rate workouts, they are timed.
Holly Perkins 19:31[Text Wrapping Break]I am watching my heart rate and my stopwatch to make sure that I stay within this window of really the right amount for any given week. Doing too much cardio in general, or spending too many minutes at higher heart rates, can really backfire because, number one, it's systemically fatiguing, and it leaves you pooped out in general, when instead you need that vital life-force energy that you put into your strength workouts. Think of your energy on a weekly basis, and you really do only have so much.
Holly Perkins 20:10[Text Wrapping Break]We do want to increase that over time, but this week, you have a finite amount of energy. If you're spending that energy in cardio based activities, there's going to be less of that bandwidth, less of that general energy for your strength workouts, especially if you're someone who struggles with fatigue, and oh, by the way, that's the vast majority of women I know. And your strength workouts are where the magic is. It's where your energy needs to be dedicated.
Holly Perkins 20:45[Text Wrapping Break]Number two, it tends to destabilize blood sugar and drive up cortisol. It's a vicious cycle where you're adding more systemic stress on top of life stress, and this has biological implications that tend to tap into muscle glycogen stores, which then need to be replenished, which then often causes hunger and food cravings later. I always say, the stronger your hunger and food cravings, the more we've got to look at how your workouts are impacting your biology and therefore your blood sugar regulation.
Holly Perkins 21:23[Text Wrapping Break]Number three, if you're not fueled properly, you're going to tap into muscle to fuel workouts, and in this situation, you will literally be destroying the very muscle that you should be fortifying. Hard workouts tend to be catabolic for most women if you're not really precise in how much you're getting and when, and this means that you're not building muscle, you're actually tearing it down. You want to measure out and be intentional with your activities where your heart rate is above about 80% of your maximal heart rate ability.
Holly Perkins 22:04[Text Wrapping Break]My clients get the best results when their intensity work comes from just two places. Number one, the minutes where your heart rate elevates because of a few heavy reps inside of a strength training set. So, for example, imagine any given strength workout. There should be two to three exercises that are actually really and truly hard where some of the sets cause your heart rate to go up.
Holly Perkins 22:40[Text Wrapping Break]It's most often the second or the third set of bigger moves like squats or deadlifts or walking lunges, and your heart rate gradually increases during the set so that during the last few reps, your heart rate is actually up. In this way, strength training is, in essence, interval training for your heart, but it's inside of your strength workout. And in order to do this right, you need to follow that up with a set of timed rest.
Holly Perkins 23:15[Text Wrapping Break]So the key is that you're getting some of your intensity work intra strength training set during those harder exercises. The second place where my clients get their intensity work is inside of cardio specific workouts, but more specifically interval workouts, where you intentionally take your heart rate to 80, maybe 90% for just a few minutes, and then you offset that with a few minutes of recovery.
Holly Perkins 23:44[Text Wrapping Break]So this is interval training, but that is different than high intensity interval training HIT. A lot of people don't realize that interval training is still super important and valuable. It's the high intensity part that I'd like to just cancel, Alt Delete. Up next, my tips for losing the layer so that you can actually see muscle definition and why tracking your scale is backfiring. But first, did you hear that you can get free access to my brand new program called Strength Without Stress?
Holly Perkins 24:24[Text Wrapping Break]This four week strength training program is truly unique because it's designed to reduce the systemic inflammation that's caused by overly intense or lengthy workouts. It will help you build and maintain valuable lean muscle without making you feel wiped out. This is one of my best programs yet, and you can get it for free simply by posting a review of my podcast. Grab a screenshot of your podcast review and upload it at hollyperkins.com forward slash review. This is a limited time offer before I sell it for 197 dollars, so grab it now while it's free at hollyperkins.com forward slash review.
Holly Perkins 25:08[Text Wrapping Break]The second reason why you're not seeing results is that you're not getting progressive overload right. You might be lifting weights, and you might be truly working hard during your strength workouts while you're lifting weights, right? But are you actually progressing in some way? I was guilty of this for years, and it wasn't until later that I was able to look back and really see it. I was lifting heavy for sure. At times, there were times when I was called by other people "man strong," but because of my protocols at the time, I wasn't really optimizing my workouts for hypertrophy. I thought I was because I was lifting heavy.
Holly Perkins 25:57[Text Wrapping Break]But years later, I now know that I was just working hard. I thought because I could do a bodyweight deadlift, I was doing it right. But the truth is, I was actually capable of way more, and if I had just adjusted a few variables, I would have built muscle a lot easier. Muscle is the secret to a firm body, to muscle definition, a better metabolism, and more energy, and your body needs a heavier stimulus to actually build muscle.
Holly Perkins 26:34[Text Wrapping Break]If you don't provide that stimulus while also providing the right workout environment, it's just too hard to actually build muscle. So if you're not seeing results despite lifting weights, this is a big reason. Your workout protocol might not be setting you up for actual progress each week or month. In fact, this is exactly why I'm offering a new monthly lab that's called Stronger Every Week. In this 90 minute virtual workshop, I'm going to guide you step by step on how to train smarter, how to lift heavier, and how to keep progressing without overdoing it or without trying to figure it out on your own.
Holly Perkins 27:19[Text Wrapping Break]These labs are really a master class for women who want to feel strong, build lean muscle, and train smarter, but you don't know where to start. So, in this upcoming lab, you'll learn exactly how and when to increase your weights to build muscle, how to structure your sets, reps, and rest to keep progressing, why plateaus happen,
Holly Perkins 27:44[Text Wrapping Break]how to break through them quickly, how to keep your workouts exciting and effective without just doing more, and how to plan your week so that you stop guessing and start progressing. Labs are just 20 dollars, the replay is included, and also at the end, I always offer a live Q and A. So if you want to have a conversation with me, if you've got your specific questions, it's a great time for us to spend together. You can save your seat now by going to hollyperkins.com forward slash lab. Lifting weights is not enough if you're a woman over 40 or 50. As I always say, and even said in this episode, anything is better than nothing.
Holly Perkins 28:30[Text Wrapping Break]But if you're frustrated because you're working hard and not seeing results, you've got to make the transition to lifting heavier as your primary target. This is how you'll lose the layer, because number one, cutting back on garbage intensity exercise frees up energy so that you get better quality strength workouts, which means you're going to ultimately be able to lift heavier weight loads safely and more effectively.
Holly Perkins 29:03[Text Wrapping Break]Number two, lifting heavier is how you'll lose the layer, because one pound of muscle burns three times more calories per day than one pound of fat. That's a significant percentage even though the actual increase in calories burned each day isn't huge. Muscle is more metabolically active than fat, and therefore it's going to help you burn off the layer of fat.
Holly Perkins 29:35[Text Wrapping Break]Number three, strength training as an activity, and the muscle that comes from it, improves glucose regulation so that you manage your carbohydrates better and burn fat more efficiently. And this is really the powerhouse. It's the biological impact that muscle has on your entire metabolism. It's not just about how many calories muscle burns versus fat. And number four, muscle is metabolically active 24/7, so you're improving your fat burning potential even while you sleep.
Holly Perkins 30:14[Text Wrapping Break]The best way to do this is really simple. Print out a calendar or use some kind of workout tracking system, and then each workout, I want you to write down your best effort on each strength exercise. So if you're doing, let's say, three or four sets of leg press or goblet squat, simply write down the stats for your best performed set, or your hardest set, or what the highest weight load was. Of your three sets, one of them is really going to be peak performance and or your highest weight load. If your weight loads are different for your three to four sets, what weight did you use?
Holly Perkins 30:57[Text Wrapping Break]Write that down and for how many reps. Write that down and how much rest. If you track that for most or even all of the exercises in your workout, you're then going to be able to look back next month and see if you actually progressed. Now you don't have to progress on every single exercise every single month.
Holly Perkins 31:21[Text Wrapping Break]It is not linear like that, but on the whole, if you look at your workouts this month as compared to last month, they should be harder in terms of heavier weight loads, not just longer, not just harder because you're sweating more, not just harder because you're doing more workouts, but because your weight loads are going up. This is exactly what we navigate and really fine tune inside of the Body Composition Project, which is my six-month guided group coaching program. And there is a new group starting in September, if it's been on your radar.
Holly Perkins 32:01[Text Wrapping Break]The third reason why you're not seeing results despite working so hard is that you're probably using your body weight or your scale, your bathroom scale, to measure your success. Am I right? You know, sometimes I feel like a broken record here on the podcast because I say this all the time. All the time. Stop using weight loss as the goal.
Holly Perkins 32:29[Text Wrapping Break]Stop using your body weight as the target. Stop referencing your success by what the bathroom scale says. It's a huge mistake. And yet, next week, someone will call me and they'll tell me that what she's struggling with most is, gosh darn it, I just can't seem to take off that last five or 10 pounds, or I just, I'm doing everything, but I can't seem to take the weight off. That's part of the problem. So I guess I will just keep preaching it here until I don't hear this reflected back to me anymore.
Holly Perkins 33:07[Text Wrapping Break]But I can tell you this: if you shift your focus, your body will transform. Let me ask you this: are you basing your success on the scale at all? Because if you are, even in any little way, that's probably why you're not seeing results. Because if you're strength training right, you're going to be slightly heavier, even when you do burn off one, two, three, five, ten pounds of body fat. And some women hear this and they get scared because, of course, if they're determining their success by the scale, they don't want to gain weight, and so they run the other direction.
Holly Perkins 33:50[Text Wrapping Break]It's such a funny conundrum, because ultimately you're going to be smaller, tighter, and leaner. And I can't tell you how many women I've looked at their DEXA scans in the short term. So, every call it, some women will get a DEXA scan at eight weeks or 12 weeks into a program, and at that point, there's not going to be major changes. In six to 12 weeks, or even six to eight weeks, there's not major changes in your body composition. In my experience, it takes at least four months, 16 weeks, for us to see the change on the scan.
Holly Perkins 34:22[Text Wrapping Break]But it's really interesting because, on the regular, I'll see a scan where she lost five pounds of fat, gained three pounds of muscle, but her bathroom scale was saying after all this effort she only lost two pounds, and she’ll come to me upset and frustrated, again thinking that’s because she only lost two pounds on the scale. She didn’t. She lost five pounds of body fat, and she's four pounds—
Holly Perkins 35:00[Text Wrapping Break]—smaller, even though the scale only changed by two pounds. That is the power of muscle. You can lose weight and lose muscle, and that is not a win. True success is becoming first at least 70% lean muscle. That's your first target, and then, if you're already there or once you pass that, the target becomes 75 to 80% lean muscle. Notice I didn't mention anything about your body weight, because if you do that, your body fat will come down by 10%
Holly Perkins 35:39[Text Wrapping Break]and you're going to be 10% smaller. But who knows what the scale will be, because it depends on your starting point and your exact numbers. But when you do that, you'll get the results that you want. And guess what? When you do that, you'll be smaller and tighter and leaner and healthier and more resilient and have more energy and be in a better mood and have less hunger and appetite. But the scale might be the same as it is right now.
Holly Perkins 36:13[Text Wrapping Break]Take a moment to think about that if that's you that tends to really be focused on body weight. Oh, by the way, it's not your fault. You have been brainwashed and programmed your entire life to be focused on your body weight. You can't get away from media messages mentioning weight loss. It's all around you. So it's not your fault if you have this broken record repeating in your head.
Holly Perkins 36:38[Text Wrapping Break]So here's what you can do: start tracking your body composition, not your body weight. You can do this in a few ways. Number one, my favorite: you can get a proper and accurate body composition screening with a DEXA scan for body composition. I'm going to say it again, a DEXA scan specifically for body composition, not for bone density. It's the same machine, but a different report. Now, those are a bit more expensive, and they're harder to find depending on your location, and while that is always my first choice, there are other ways that you can manage and supervise your body composition.
Holly Perkins 37:17[Text Wrapping Break]So, number two, the second best way is to get an InBody bioelectrical impedance scan. It's not as accurate as a DEXA, but it will provide a baseline for you to track from. So, you're going to get the report back. It's not 100% accurate, but at least you've got that to put aside and then retest three or four months later after staying consistent on your program. Then you'll get another one so that you can compare. In between these body composition scans, you'll want to do progress photos, because you don't want to wait four months to find out if your program is working.
Holly Perkins 37:59[Text Wrapping Break]You do need some feedback every two weeks. We just don't want it to be the bathroom scale as the feedback. So, using progress photos or circumference measurements or even non-stretchy clothing to determine your progress is a great way to make sure that every two weeks, you're going in the right direction. So, inside of my coaching programs, my clients send me their progress photos every two weeks, and I'm able to objectively and expertly take a look at them to see: are they actually getting leaner? Because we don't look at the scale.
Holly Perkins 38:34[Text Wrapping Break]And while progress can be slow, and it usually is, you should be able to see some improvements in your photos, or your circumference measurements, or your clothing every two weeks. If you're just losing weight, like if you're only literally just losing body weight on the scale, you'll simply be a smaller version of yourself. And you'll see that in the photos. You won't look better, you'll just be smaller. Your clothes will be getting bigger, but your butt's not getting bigger, your hamstrings are not getting bigger, your delts aren't getting bigger, right?
Holly Perkins 39:10[Text Wrapping Break]And, oh, by the way, don't get scared at this notion of getting a bigger butt, because the truth is, it is really hard to make your muscles bigger to the degree that they're visible. You gotta add five pounds at least of muscle for it to actually appear on your body. Because you have to remember, when you gain muscle, you're not just gaining five pounds in your glutes.
Holly Perkins 39:34[Text Wrapping Break]Those five pounds of muscle that you gain are dispersed over your entire body. Some is in your biceps, some is in your triceps, some is in your quads, your hamstrings, your glutes, right? It's spread all over your body. So don't be scared away when I say bigger butt, but the truth is, we do want your muscles to be getting bigger. But if you're actually getting leaner, you'll look better. You'll look more athletic in those
Holly Perkins 40:00[Text Wrapping Break]photos. You'll look more toned. You'll have more muscle definition. You won't simply be a smaller version of the same body shape. In the end, you absolutely cannot measure or even assess your body composition on the scale using your body weight alone, because even an increase of just one to two pounds of muscle can mean a loss of body fat to the tune of two to three pounds.
Holly Perkins 40:30[Text Wrapping Break]So, the scale won't move. It's not going to show that loss, but what's happening on the inside is good. And there you have it, my friend, three reasons why you're not seeing results, and some things that you can do to fix it. I hope this helps. Listen, changing your body isn't easy. It's not. It really isn't, and that's exactly what Mother Nature intended via homeostasis. If changing your body were easy, we wouldn't have survived for millions of years. And after 30 years of practice, I can absolutely promise you this: it is often the underdog that shows up and has the most amazing transformation.
Holly Perkins 41:17[Text Wrapping Break]So, even if you think you are too far gone, or if you think you've never had an athletic, tight, and lean body and it's not possible for you, just know that anyone can turn it around. And I'm cheering for you. I hope you enjoyed this episode, and I hope that you will stay tuned for another brand-new episode on Tuesday of next week. Stay strong, my friend.
Holly Perkins 41:46[Text Wrapping Break]Thank you so much for tuning into this week's episode. I am so happy that you're here, and I hope you loved it. If you did, please take a moment to subscribe, share with your friends, and leave a review. And if you want more from me, check out my blog and coaching programs over at hollyperkins.com. That's all for now. I'll see you next week.