The Science of Strength Training: Learn How Lifting Weights (Even Light Ones) Helps You Lose Weight, Feel Better, and Live Longer

Mel Robbins: Hey, it's your friend Mel, and welcome to the Mel Robbins Podcast. So I've decided that you and I have been at this podcast thing for long enough that we can cover a topic that everybody talks about, everybody wants advice on, but for some reason, we're not supposed to talk about it. I don't know why this is so controversial, but it is. And today we're going to go there. What's the topic? Weight loss. We're talking about weight loss.

And the reason why I want to talk about this is because we've all been there. We've all been at that point in our lives where we're frustrated with how our clothes feel, where we feel like shit, where everything we're trying is not actually working or the things that we've been doing forever, in my case, this is me, are no longer working and having the same impact. And you start to feel like your weight, your waistline, your attitude, everything's out of control. And I want to talk about it today.

If you're like me, it probably means that you've spent most of your life trying to either lose weight or trying to stay in shape. This goes all the way back to when I was a little kid. I mean, I can remember my mom on the living room floor and Jane Fonda was on the television. She had those leg warmers on and my mom was doing all this stuff. And then the next thing I remember, the Thighmaster, where you're supposed to like squeeze it in and out. And then as I got older, I've tried everything. Step class, spin class, jazzercise, which I think we now call Zumba. I've gone to classes in person, online. I've done Pilates on a mat, on a reformer. I've tried everything.

And don't even get me started with the number of diets. Anybody remember the cabbage soup diet? Why on earth was that a thing? Eat for your blood type? I've done that. Low fat, high fat, no carbs, complex carbs. No wonder we are all yo-yo dieting. I mean, simply listing all of this off makes me start to feel like a human yo-yo.

And as I've been thinking about this topic and researching it, it occurred to me, if this is such an enormous problem for almost all of us, maybe we've been thinking about it all wrong. In fact, the expert that you are about to spend an hour with says that you and I are going to stop talking about losing weight right now. No more. It's the wrong approach. You and I need to start leveraging what she calls a muscle-centric medical approach to our health.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon is a medical doctor. She has completed two research and clinical fellowships, one in nutritional science and one in the science of aging. She has spent 20 years conducting groundbreaking research and treating private patients in her clinical practice. Her first book, *Forever Strong*, is filled with evidence-based strategies, and you're going to learn a lot of them here during our conversation today.

Doc G is here to teach you about the largest organ in your body. I know you're thinking, what is that? What is the largest organ in your body? Believe it or not, that's your skeletal muscles. And your skeletal muscles are not only the largest organ in your body, they are key to effective weight loss, to boosting your energy, burning fat, and she's going to talk to you today about how you can use a muscular-centric medical approach to reverse diabetes and to fight heart disease and cancer.

And my job in all of this is to translate all that she's saying into simple, actionable takeaways. In fact, I'm going to try to reduce all this research to two changes that you can make starting today to leverage all of the things that she's going to teach us. So if you want to lose belly fat and live a strong, long, healthy life, there is no more important thing for you to do than to listen to this conversation right now. Get your pens out and get ready to change your life because Doc G is in the house.

All right. Please help me welcome Dr. Gabrielle Lyon to the Mel Robbins podcast.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Thank you so much for having me. I'm thrilled to be able to sit down and talk with you.

Mel Robbins: I'm so excited that you're here. And I just want to start with the basics. What significance does it have that your muscles are an organ?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: First of all, skeletal muscle makes up 40% of your body weight, period, which is a huge amount of your tissue.

Mel Robbins: Wow.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And I think that this is a really important point. When we think about skeletal muscle, we often hear about just exercising the bicep and really just is it toned or not? Can I see it or not? And that's why this concept of muscle as the organ of longevity is so critical to get out to the public, because skeletal muscle is so much more than that.

Mel Robbins: Well, I'll be honest. I have only ever thought about muscles in a one-dimensional fashion. Can I see them or not? Do I have a six pack, which I do not? Do I have flabby arms that flap like skin wings? Or do I have nice tight biceps and triceps and all that stuff? So I have thought in such a... I don't know, I'm sort of embarrassed about how little I know, because I honestly did not even know that muscles were an organ. And there is so much research that you have in your new book, and we're going to dig into it. But I wanted to start at that baseline so that anybody that's intimidated by the gym, anybody that can't see any muscle definition, we're not here talking about a beach body blast workout program. We're talking about using muscle centric medicine as a way to unlock all of these health benefits that I personally had no idea that's the major benefit of doing weight training and why we all need to do it.

I've got a little like five pound weight here. Like when you do a bicep curl or you walk up a flight of stairs, what is actually happening as I am curling my muscle here and attempting to strengthen the bicep?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: There's a ton of things that happen and we're going to break it down very simply. Number one, you get stronger, which is the obvious. Number two, the non-obvious is that when you contract skeletal muscle, it secretes these myokines. Myokines are molecules that are released from exercising skeletal muscle that mediate the communication between skeletal muscle and other organs. They go throughout the body and help with bone health, brain health, and nutrient utilization. That just means when you contract skeletal muscle, it moves glucose, which is simply the sugar in your bloodstream, into the cells, into skeletal muscle.

Mel Robbins: That's incredible, especially with this epidemic of obesity that everybody is talking about, this idea of insulin resistance that everybody is talking about.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Skeletal muscle is your architectural infrastructure of everything.

Mel Robbins: You know, you've got so many medical degrees and fellowships. What the hell made you go from psychiatry and a practice that was in general medicine and all of these degrees that you have? What made you make the connection between muscles and people's health?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Thank you so much for that question. This has been a very long journey, which by the way, I don't recommend anybody doing that. I graduated high school at 17, pretty early. I moved to Hawaii and I moved in with my godmother who was a functional medicine OG.

Mel Robbins: Oh, cool.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: She was and is a PhD in nutritional sciences. I began sitting in on her patients and I believed that nutrition from a very young age was the key. Fast forward to then going to my undergraduate, which was in human nutrition, vitamin, mineral, metabolism at the University of Illinois.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: My life changed because serendipitously I landed in the lab of Dr. Donald Lehman. He is one of the grandfathers of protein metabolism.

Mel Robbins: Awesome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: A lot of the things that we take for granted now, he discovered in his lab 20 some years ago.

Mel Robbins: And you were standing there.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes. As an undergraduate, I was working in his lab and I was deeply influenced by this idea of dietary protein and skeletal muscle as it relates to women's health. Women and men, but the studies that I was working on were women, postmenopausal women. Fast forward through medical school, did two years of psychiatry, realized that that was not my bag, so did family medicine for three years, and then finally did a fellowship at Washington University in St. Louis in nutritional sciences and geriatrics which looked at aging individuals over the age of 65. I was a combined fellow. I was seeing geriatric patients but also doing obesity medicine research. And this concept of muscle-centric medicine had been building, but there was a flash of insight and I would love to share how it came about and what really changed everything for me.

Mel Robbins: Absolutely. What was the insight?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Well, at the time I was seeing patients in the hospital and in the nursing homes. I was doing that during the day. And then in the evenings, I was doing obesity medicine research, where I was running a weight management clinic. And we were also looking at brain imaging, we were looking at the influence of obesity and brain function. And there was just one participant in particular, we'll just call her Betty. Betty was in her mid 50s. She had big brown eyes, dark curly hair, she was a mother of three. She was someone who had struggled with yo-yo dieting her whole life. She had been told to lose the same 10 to 20 pounds that she put on after her first baby. She had been cycling through diet after diet. The information was to lose more weight, exercise more, do this cardiovascular training, and reduce her calories. And by doing that, what ended up happening is we destroyed her muscle. She would go through yo-yo dieting.

And seeing all of these patients cumulatively, I realized that this obesity epidemic that people have been trying to fix for the last 50 years wasn't obesity at its core the problem. But the one thing that the patients that I was seeing from the Alzheimer's patients to the cognitive impairment patients to the obesity, the struggling with weight, wasn't being over fat. It was actually about being under muscle. And it was the unhealthy muscle that was driving everything else.

Mel Robbins: Wow. I want to be sure everyone gets the benefit of that epiphany. Can you say that again? That from your medical and research background, you had this epiphany that the problem wasn't that people were too fat. Right. It was?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That they had unhealthy skeletal muscle.

Mel Robbins: Wow. And I gather that what you're going to prove to us today is that developing healthy skeletal muscle turns it around and unlocks all kinds of health benefits.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes, Mel. And in fact, it's never too late to start. And that's actually where I got the title of the book, which is *Forever Strong*. It's never too late to be forever strong. And I know that together we can change the trajectory of aging. We've been trying to combat this, quote, obesity epidemic for the last 50 years, and we haven't gotten anywhere. And in fact, we've gotten worse. And one thing I know for sure is that if you are trying to fix the wrong problem, you'll never get there. If you are working under a paradigm of thinking about a problem and you are not making any improvements, then perhaps we are looking at it from a perspective that really needs adjustment.

Mel Robbins: I want to make sure I'm following you. Are you saying that when we talk about obesity, obesity is not at the core of some of the major health issues that people face?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: So what I would say is that obesity in and of itself, in part, obviously, it's very complex, but a huge portion of obesity and the issues that ride alongside with obesity, like cardiovascular disease, like hypertension, like Alzheimer's disease, all of these common diseases that we're beginning to see more of, they're not diseases of being overweight. They're diseases of skeletal muscle first that begin decades before.

Mel Robbins: I think you're so cool. And I love your passion and your heart, but let's take a quick pause because I need to digest this. [Laughs] We also have to hear a word from our sponsors because they bring us all of this goodness at zero cost. Let's take a listen and we will be right back with more groundbreaking science from Dr. G. Stay with us.

[Sponsor break]

Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I am here with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. She is a medical expert. She has two fellowships in nutritional science and the science of aging. She has written a book, *Forever Strong*, and she is unpacking the groundbreaking research in science about leveraging what she calls a muscle-centric medical approach to your health.

So, Dr. G, one of the reasons why I was so excited to talk to you is because I feel like the conversation about muscle and strength has been hijacked by the fitness industry that is very much about surface, at least when it's marketed, and by men.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah.

Mel Robbins: And this is such an imperative aspect of living a healthier life, creating a better life for yourself. There are implications here that go way beyond the diseases and the issues that your patients were talking about. The biggest organ in your body, most of us have ignored. And women in particular, I personally speak for myself, I'm intimidated by the gym. I hear muscle, I think weightlifting, I think a neck a mile wide, I think veins popping out of my arms. I think that like, I can't do that. That's not for me. And we have been robbed of a very important, actually your work says critical, frontline habit that every single human being needs to put front and center in their lives, which is strengthening your muscles.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah, exactly. And keeping them healthy. There's no such thing as a healthy, sedentary person. There was some earlier research that looked at 18-year-old, quote, healthy, sedentary college students. The research shows that these individuals were beginning to have signs of unhealthy skeletal muscle with no overt signs of being overweight. If we address this early, if we address the health of skeletal muscle, which by the way, there's really two primary ways to do that: dietary protein, really nutritional planning, and then exercise training.

Mel Robbins: Wait, Dr. Gabrielle, are you saying that you can strengthen and build muscle simply by changing your diet?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You can simply build muscle if you are protein deficient by increasing the dietary protein of your nutrition plan. The other thing is when you design a nutrition plan that is protein forward, you will be able to support the health of skeletal muscle. And we're not talking about, again, bodybuilding, slamming protein shakes. None of that is necessary. These are things that are super simple, incredibly simple.

Mel Robbins: Well, you're going to make it simple. That's why we have you here, because I already love what you said, which is there's two things we need to focus on. The dietary protein, which we will unpack, we'll get into the science, and focusing on exercise and strength training that will help you build a healthy skeletal muscular system.

I also love something that you wrote about in your book that you say, we all need to stop looking at how much fat we need to lose. And we need to start talking about how much muscle do I need to gain. And how liberating would it be if instead of going, "I need to lose 10 pounds," you actually said, "I need to put on about five pounds of muscle. That's what I need to do." I mean, that's such a positive reframe. How did you arrive at that?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I realized that number one, the strategies that have been put in place have failed people. And when you focus on losing weight, which I don't know one person that hasn't done that, over years and years of yo-yo dieting, you actually destroy skeletal muscle. As we age and become more mature, it becomes much more difficult to put it on and regain the health of skeletal muscle if you've spent years yo-yo dieting. By thinking of always what we have to lose, it becomes very demotivating for people.

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: This really crazy thing that creeps in is sometimes they don't feel worthy of health and wellness in the way that potentially we would want them to feel. So by shifting the conversation as it relates to what people have to gain, and understanding that muscle is this currency of health. And in fact, it's the only currency that you can't bargain for. You can't buy it. You can't sell it. But you have to earn it. And by thinking about the skeletal muscle as currency you earn and put in effort, this crazy thing happens. You begin to cultivate a lot of internal strength. You begin to cultivate this can-do attitude and this way of confidence because you're not worried about if you're going to fall and break a hip. You're not worried about, "I can't eat that." You're not worried about these other things. You have this capacity to shift to a much more positive mind frame. And it's the one thing that you also have direct control over. The last time I checked, you cannot exercise your liver, but you can exercise skeletal muscle.

Mel Robbins: That's true. That's absolutely true. So it is within your control. I want to have you talk directly to the person that when you said, "If you've been spending a lifetime yo-yo dieting, you've really destroyed your muscles." And just tell them the hopeful message here and why it's imperative that if you've been yo-yo dieting, like most people have, if you're frustrated by going up and down and trying this diet and that diet and the other diet and this thing and that thing and the other thing, why is it never too late to put taking care of your muscles and making them stronger, the most important thing you could do at the center of your health?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Number one, it's never too late. And number two, just like you said, people have gone through periods of yo-yo dieting. That stops today. Everybody listening to this, they are going to stop yo-yo dieting. This is our deal, right, Mel?

Mel Robbins: That's right. Do you hear Dr. Lyon, damn it? She's telling you, you are going to stop yo-yo dieting. Put the soda down, pay attention. Sit up because we are going to give you the step-by-step way that you can take control. So if we're going to stop yo-yo dieting, what are we going to do?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: The first thing that we're going to do is we're going to leverage dietary protein. But first, let's talk about what protein is. Protein is actually not one thing. Are you ready for this, Mel? It's 20 different amino acids that make up protein.

Mel Robbins: What the hell is an amino acid? Like everybody throws around these terms. I don't even know what an amino acid does.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Great question. This is brilliant. Amino acids are those little tiny building blocks. Think about a sandcastle and think about all the little grains it takes to build a sandcastle. If you think about the sandcastle as protein, all those little sand grains are the amino acids.

Mel Robbins: I love you. I get that. And now I'm thinking about the fact that my bicep is tiny little particles of sand. Is that right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Pretty close. But I don't know. Yours looks pretty jacked. So yours is not sand. Yours is more like concrete.

Mel Robbins: I've been working out for this. I did a set just so they'd look really greased up for you when we did this. Okay. So how do I know what protein is the best protein? Because I would reckon you're about to tell us we all need to start eating more protein because these sand particle amino acid things are very important for our skeletal muscular health, correct?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That's right. But before I tell you that, I'm going to tell you why. Just overarching why protein is important.

Mel Robbins: Yes.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And then we'll get to the nitty gritty.

Mel Robbins: I love it. You like that? Yes. Sand, nitty gritty. Oh, I didn't even get it. See? Come on. Some mom jokes coming in here hot. Cannot be wasted.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: This idea that protein is really imperative is important for a few reasons. Number one, protein, again, is made up of these 20 different amino acids. What's so fascinating about protein from the big picture is that dietary protein improves satiety, just meaning you're not hungry. Here is the test that I tell people: if you're really hungry, go ahead and sit down with that chicken breast. That will tell you immediately, are you really hungry? Versus a bag of chips, you could probably eat that forever. You are not hungry from eating dietary protein.

The other reason why protein is so valuable is that it is very difficult to eat a high protein diet and actually gain fat because protein is so valuable to the body. It is what we call an essential macronutrient, meaning you can't make it. You literally cannot make it. You have to eat it. Versus carbohydrates, your body can make carbohydrates. In fact, your body can make some carbohydrates from proteins. And then the need for fat is not huge, right? There's some essential fatty acid need, but nothing major. Because of these amino acids that are in protein and just protein in general, it is very difficult to overconsume. It's very difficult to ultimately gain weight from a diet that is high in protein.

Mel Robbins: So the main benefit is that the macronutrient or the 20 sand molecules in a protein when you eat it, it gets used up by the body. It also makes you less hungry. So you have this benefit of being more efficient in terms of the fuel that you're putting in versus just snacking mindlessly on all this stuff that ends up getting stored somewhere in your body. Is that correct? Am I following you?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah. Okay. You're doing a great job. Protein is very controversial in the nutrition space.

Mel Robbins: Why?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Well, we'll get into that, but it's just very controversial.

Mel Robbins: Well, hold on a second. Can we just say something here? You have a fucking fellowship. You're a fellow. You've earned. What is it called? You've literally you are a fellow in nutritional science. You're a psychiatrist. You have been at ground zero studying this in the lab of the dude that synthesized protein for the first time. But, you know, like somebody on TikTok that has gotten in shape and is now telling everybody else how to do it that does not have the background that you have, quiet, because you're talking about the actual science here. And you're not saying you have to be vegan or you have to be a meat eater. You're saying everybody, from a medical perspective, the biggest organ in your body is your skeletal muscular system. It is the biggest organ. It has a function where it secretes stuff that is the molecules of hope and longevity. And you, by paying attention to this organ that you've probably ignored because you've been yo-yo dieting and worrying about how you look, you haven't been focused on how you feel. You haven't been focused on how your body functions. And like me, you didn't know better. You didn't know the science. Like I had no idea any of the stuff that you're talking about. And so there is no controversy in my mind because you are the authority who has been researching this. You are on the front lines with people with Alzheimer's and obesity. You are talking about this not from how you get your button shape for a bikini. You're talking about it based on the science around the way that your brain works and your body works. So thank you for listening to my TED Talk. I'm going to turn it back over to Dr. Gabrielle to tell us why a protein forward diet matters.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I've been in nutritional sciences for 20 years. And I started seeing with this influence and this social media that the information that is put out there is extraordinarily damaging. Where I really had to put my foot down was that the information that let's say a 50 year old woman is going to be hearing, and she's hearing it from the influencers on Instagram or TikTok or Facebook or wherever she's hearing it, that window of getting it right closes. There comes a time where we have to, which is exactly what we are doing today, is we are getting it right. So there's no longer confusion and there's no longer this distraction of trying to figure out what to eat or why we're eating it. Ultimately, the way in which we age can be strong, can be resilient, doesn't have to be riddled with obesity, diabetes, insulin resistance, all the ways that we think an individual has to age. It doesn't have to be that way. So that is why I wrote the book because I wanted to really put something out there to end confusion.

Mel Robbins: You know, Dr. G, let's take a pause real quick. Let's hear a word from our sponsors. And when we come back, more from the amazing Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Stay with me.

[Sponsor break]

Mel Robbins: Welcome back. I'm Mel Robbins and I'm here with Dr. Gabrielle Lyon. Her new book is *Forever Strong*. More importantly, she is the expert in nutritional science. She is teaching us about what's called a muscle-centric medical approach to your health and to weight loss. And Dr. G, let's get back into it. So can you just give everybody a quick list of all the health benefits that happen when you embrace what you're saying and you start embracing a protein-forward diet and you prioritize exercise that strengthens your muscles? What are the health benefits and the cognitive benefits of doing this?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Number one, better blood sugar regulation, better energy. You'll be stronger. You'll have better survivability against nearly any disease or issue or problem that life throws in front of you. Skeletal muscle, again, is the largest endocrine organ, organ system in the body. And what else skeletal muscle is, is it's a nutrient sensing organ. It senses nutrients.

Mel Robbins: Blows your mind, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: It actually senses the quality of the diet. It senses the protein quality of the diet, which is incredible. And one of the things that happens as individuals age is that efficiency of sensing protein and those amino acids decreases. So how do you overcome that? And what does it look like when that efficiency decreases? From a very visual perspective, it looks like sarcopenia, which looks like skinny, smaller, frail, elderly individuals. But you can overcome that efficiency issue and make older muscles act like younger muscles by increasing dietary protein. Number one. So now you've taken an older, more mature muscle. You've increased the dietary protein intake. And you can get your skeletal muscle to respond as if it was in your 20s.

Mel Robbins: Wow. What is another health benefit?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: It's incredible.

Mel Robbins: What's another health benefit of following this protocol and paying attention to this?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: The other thing is that healthy skeletal muscle is your metabolic disposal unit. You'll go to your yearly doctor and they'll say, here's your blood sugar, here's your triglycerides, here's your cholesterol. The biggest way you can make sure that those numbers are exactly where you want them to be is by having healthy skeletal muscle. So number one, we take care of skeletal muscle and we improve its efficiency. Efficient muscle is healthy muscle. Number two, we use skeletal muscle, healthy skeletal muscle, to make sure we don't get diabetes or insulin resistance and all the things that come alongside with that. So that's number two.

Number three, healthy skeletal muscle makes us strong and capable, which I would say arguably that's the obvious. And of course, healthy skeletal muscle, it is the tissue that you leverage through exercise to improve brain health. You know, we talked about those secreting molecules, myokines. They make your bone healthier. They make you more efficient and effective at metabolizing foods. It's incredible. They also impact the brain. And this is where some of the confusion comes into the space because you're hearing a lot of quote longevity experts saying cut back on dietary protein, you're going to live longer. Okay, well, let's say potentially that would be true. Let's just say for fun. Number one, how much longer do you think someone is going to live with no or low healthy skeletal muscle mass?

Mel Robbins: Not very.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That's right, because I didn't tell you the other thing. I think we're at number five.

Mel Robbins: Yeah.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: If you get injured, if you get an illness, what do you think your body relies on to protect you? Where do you think it pulls from those building blocks, those grains of sand? Where do you think it pulls from?

Mel Robbins: Your muscles.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That's right. Do you know that if an individual were to get cancer, one of the things that they oftentimes pass away from is this thing called cancer cachexia, which is this highly metabolic state which ends up destroying skeletal muscle. You cannot survive without skeletal muscle.

Mel Robbins: The list of benefits from the long term is absolutely, I'm sure you're just getting started. Can you give everybody a sense? If you were to make this change of having protein forward, we're going to explain this more, and you were to start resistance training, what are you going to feel day to day? Like what are the benefits of doing this almost immediately on your day to day life?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: If you get your first protein meal right, you will feel better immediately. I mean, it might not be in the first 30 seconds, but after that first meal, you will have more energy. You'll have better blood sugar regulation. You will feel better. We've seen it. And not only anecdotally, we see it in the literature. If you design a diet that is protein forward and balanced with carbohydrates, meaning you're not having too much carbohydrates, so you're not going to have this huge ebb and flow and crash where all of a sudden you're reaching for cupcakes or donuts, which you better not be at 10 a.m. But if you were. And then the other aspect of that is you will not be hungry. You are using nutritional science to leverage willpower.

Mel Robbins: Oh, that sounds sexy. Let's use nutritional science to leverage willpower, everybody. I want to keep digging into the protein. I think that that's really important to understand because the average American, by the way, the average woman is getting around maybe 60 to 68, if I'm going to be generous, grams of protein a day. And how many do we need to be getting as women?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I recommend close to one gram per pound, ideal body weight.

Mel Robbins: What?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah. And I even calculated this out for you. Okay, you ready for this?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I did this calculation for you. My ideal body weight is 138. That's when I always feel my best. So for you, if you were my patient, I would say, listen, Mel, in order for us to correct for muscle health, metabolism, satiety, then I would put you at roughly, easily, a minimum of 100 grams of protein, but between 100 to 120, maybe even 130 grams of protein.

Mel Robbins: I feel like I'm going to gain weight. There I said it. No way. I said I'm going to gain weight. That sounds like a lot. See, I think like I'm so indoctrinated. I don't know if there's a salad lobby that has been petitioning all of us psychologically, but I hear that intellectually. I know I got to start taking care of my muscle organ. I'm in. I want to think clearer. I want to lose the belly fat. I want to have more energy. God forbid something happened to me, I want to be strong enough to fight it off. I also look at my 85-year-old mother-in-law who has biceps and exercises and resistance trains, and the woman is an Energizer bunny at the age of 86. I want to be like that. And so I'm in. The second you said, Mel, it's between 100 and 130 grams of protein a day, I'm like, I am not becoming a weeble wobble on legs, Dr. Gabrielle. And I think that's exactly what a lot of us women who've been socialized to think that we have to be thin, that's our reaction. But it just goes to show you how fucked up this all is.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes, it is. The science isn't fucked up. Our psychology and the mixed messages and the diets we've been sold and the fact that I'm just going to speak for me, but everybody listening has no idea that this is what your muscles do. Right. And by the way, I calculated the amount of calories that we would be talking about so I could clarify it for you. Are you ready?

Mel Robbins: Lay it on me.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: So let's say you increase your dietary protein to 100 grams of protein a day. Okay. That would be a total of 400 calories.

Mel Robbins: Wait, what? Now, what are you eating? Wait, that's it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: But there's something I didn't tell you.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: What I didn't tell you is that the thermic effect of food, meaning when you eat dietary protein, because of its impact on muscle, increases metabolism. So while you're thinking, well, I'm going to eat 100 grams of protein and I'm going to get 400 calories, sometimes depending on how you dose it, you will use 20% of that energy just to metabolize that protein. It would be very difficult to gain weight. And it would be so difficult to gain weight. You are not going to put on weight from increasing your dietary protein. And in fact, the studies show that. So they've done overfeeding protein studies. Do you want to know what happens when people overeat protein?

Mel Robbins: I do.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Their body compositions get better. And you know what that means? It means they lose fat. So by eating more protein, the research shows in all these studies and in the work that you've done for 20 years, that when people focus on muscle health, resistance training, and a protein forward diet, they lose fat. They lose fat. Obviously, calories have to be controlled, but they lose fat and they gain muscle. You gain tissue, your body composition improves.

Mel Robbins: You know, we keep thinking about this in reverse, everybody. You're focused on losing fat when you should be focused on gaining muscle. And when you gain muscle, you actually lose the extra weight that you don't want. And I keep thinking about the fact that you look at somebody that's sedentary or heavy and you see the extra weight that they're carrying and you think about, okay, well, how am I going to get them to diet and do stuff so that we can get rid of that weight. And what I just got is inside that body is an organ called muscles. There's the architecture of a healthy human being. And you can activate the healthy human being that is inside the unhealthy body. And as you start to really strengthen your muscles, we'll get into resistance training in a minute, that starts to emerge from the inside out.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes.

Mel Robbins: And all of the extra weight and all of the disease and complications and symptoms that come with having what is an insufficient muscular system, if you start with strengthening from the inside out, it overtakes all of the unhealthy stuff on the outside. And that's what you see emerging. And if you think about these before and after photos that you see in these challenges online or whatever that people use to market diets or weight loss programs or weightlifting programs, we are looking at them wrong. Because what we're thinking is we're thinking that somebody is like somehow dieting and shrinking. What you're actually seeing is the muscle health emerging.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes. I just got it.

Mel Robbins: You got it. That is so cool. And it's not about what we have to lose. It's about what do we have to gain? It's this way of leveraging your system to create flux and movement. So then this healthy body emerges.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Why is this so important for women specifically? I think women have really gotten a constant narrative about, oh, you've hit menopause. Now you're going to have a menopausal belly and you're going to gain about 30 pounds. And it's going to be, this is how it's going to be. That does not have to happen. There are ways in which you can manage your body composition through diet and training. Again, we are leveraging protein and food as medicine and movement as medicine rather than taking something external. Here's what I would tell and why it's so important for a menopausal, postmenopausal woman. There is a natural decline in these hormones, estrogen, progesterone, there's an imbalance of testosterone, which can affect body composition. But one of the ways it affects body composition is we move less, we are less active. The way to combat that is through very simply doing some kind of resistance training, which simply means, again, against an external load, it doesn't have to be complicated. And it's not necessarily as difficult as people think. I've been seeing patients since 2006. I have seen a lot of midlife women and I've seen a lot of success.

Mel Robbins: Okay, what do we do? Dr. Gabrielle, I just heard, did you hear that? That was women in 194 countries around the world turning up the dial. What do we do?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Here's what they're going to do. They're going to make it super easy. Their first meal a day is going to have between 30 and 50 grams of protein. Easy. I don't care if it's a whey protein shake. I don't care if it's Mel's pea protein shake. I care. I don't necessarily want it to be collagen because collagen, while great for other things, is not great for muscle health.

Mel Robbins: Okay. So collagen is a different separate kind of protein. It has a protein score of what is considered zero. It's still great, but we're not going to put it in the category of muscle health. Thank you for saying that, because I, here I am making my smoothie and I'm adding the mushroom stuff for the hot flashes and I'm adding the protein powder. And I don't even know if it's got the lupin thing in it. And I put in the collagen. I'm thinking that's another 10 to 20 grams of protein. So I can put that in the 50 protein column. What you're saying is, Mel, that is good for your hair and nails, but when it comes to complex amino acids, that protein scores a big fat zero. So now I'm learning something. This is really good. You're like a pro, homie. You are a pro.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Thank you. So all these women in a million different countries, you've got your dial turned up. You're going to make it so simple. This is legitimately fail-proof. You are going to have between 30 and 50 grams of protein at that first meal. You're not going to have over 30 grams or so of carbohydrates for that first meal because we don't want to kind of skew this insulin and give you this robust response. Again, I'm giving broad generalizations.

Mel Robbins: Got it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Okay. But, you know, we're just going to define it and design it so that people can execute right away.

Mel Robbins: Great.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You can have a little bit of berries. You can mix it in water. You can mix it in almond juice or whatever it is that you want. Something not major that is calorically dense. Okay. You've done that. You're doing great. Maybe you want some kind of smaller meal in the day. Maybe it has 20 grams of protein and 20 grams of carbohydrates. What does that look like? That could be three eggs. It could be your chicken salad. You know, it could be whatever it is you want.

Mel Robbins: I'm not so crazy about that one. I love you for that.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Thank you.

Mel Robbins: Yeah, you're welcome.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: The last meal, if you're having two larger meals and a smaller meal in the middle, your last meal is also important because you're getting ready to go into an overnight fast. Okay. So you've woken up in the morning coming out of an overnight fast, your skeletal muscle, your organ of longevity is primed for nutrients. You stimulate muscle with your dietary protein. You've done an amazing job. You've improved your signaling. You've made your muscle youthful. You are no longer hungry. Your body is now metabolizing things. We're not gaining weight. We are really setting you up for success. Your next meal is a little smaller. Your last meal of the day is going to mirror your first meal.

Mel Robbins: Oh, I thought you said it was smaller.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You know, your middle meal is smaller.

Mel Robbins: Okay, got it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: So now I'm doing my 30 to 50. I'm having my protein shake or my hamburger with my salad or whatever else. The last meal of the day is between 30 and 50 grams of protein. You want your burger, you want your chicken, you want your salmon. Great. You have now nailed it. Okay. By the way, if people understand the concepts in this book, you will lose body fat by just addressing the dietary component of protein, which is mind-blowing. You will improve your body composition by changing your dietary protein for breakfast. By simply doing that, by swapping out your cereal, by adding in dietary protein, we have seen huge changes in body composition simply by doing that. And also, by the way, some of this data was isocaloric, meaning people both had the same amount of calories. They were both taking in 1600 calories. And the postmenopausal women, what one group did was change the first meal of the day to have an optimal protein, which was around 40 grams of protein. And then the second group had around, I don't remember exactly what it was, but it was probably closer to 50 grams of carbohydrates and 13 grams of protein, which is what most women are doing now. And the body composition effects were negative for the carbohydrate group versus the protein group. They lost weight. And again, calories were the same. So it was simply changing around the macronutrients.

Mel Robbins: Okay. Can you talk a little bit to the vegetarians and folks that have a vegan diet? What are the considerations as you're thinking protein forward and the amino acid sand particle aspect of the macronutrient and protein?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yes. All dietary protein is not created equal. Ideally, you are eating whole foods. So now this brings us to this category of dietary protein and what makes up dietary protein. How do we score it? How do we think about it? An overarching way to do this very simply is that anything that is of animal nature, that means does it run, does it swim, does it walk, is a high quality protein.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And what defines high quality protein is we talked about that there are 20 different amino acids. Got it. We're obviously not going into those 20, but there are a handful of essential amino acids.

Mel Robbins: And are those not present in plant-based proteins?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: They're very low in plant-based proteins. So what would you have to do? You would have to over-consume or increase your consumption of these plant-based proteins to bring up that level of essential amino acids.

Mel Robbins: Got it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And I'm going to give you a very clear example. Let's say you are going to eat three or four ounces of a beef patty, a lean beef patty. That has this essential amino acid leucine. Leucine is the critical amino acid for muscle health.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Now, remember you and I were talking about how each amino acid had these dual roles and we weren't going to go into all 20, but there are a handful that are really important and critical for health and well-being.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: One of those amino acids is leucine. And leucine, what's so fascinating is that it requires a certain amount to trigger skeletal muscle. So essentially, if you're eating under that amount, then you're not actually stimulating this mechanics of skeletal muscle. Oh, three to four ounces of a lean beef patty would stimulate muscle, would give you this, whatever number, two and a half grams of leucine to trigger the muscle to begin to have this process. If you were to try to do that in quinoa, you would need six cups of quinoa because of the difference in the amino acid profile to trigger muscle the same way.

Mel Robbins: Wow. That's not a good plan. First of all, it's a lot of quinoa. Second of all, that's like carbicide. You don't want to be doing that. Carbicide is a word?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah.

Mel Robbins: No. Well, it can't be now. Wow. I think you should trademark that. Is there a supplement for our friends that are vegetarian or vegan that they can take to up the lysine or to get the amino acids without having to overdose on quinoa?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Totally. Here's what you want to take: a plant-based rice or pea blend of protein, making sure that you're hitting at least 20 grams of protein in that blend.

Mel Robbins: It's important to understand because I drink smoothies a lot because they're easy and I use a plant-based formula. And here I am like dumping more scoops in thinking I'm loading up and I'm protein forward and you're sitting here telling me not that, not really, not necessarily. But I know I'm doing something and that's better than nothing.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You are. You are, Mel. I'm going to interrupt you because you're doing great.

Mel Robbins: Thank you.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: So the plant-based protein powders is a way to begin to balance these amino acids because they've made it in a way where they've balanced these.

Mel Robbins: Okay, so this is a way to do it.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Great. You're talking about if you're doing whole foods, like you got to be really... If you were doing whole foods and not adding supplements, you may need a total of 35% more dietary protein.

Mel Robbins: I love that. Okay. So here's what I want to do next. I want to get into the second piece of advice for muscle health, which is actually lifting weight. And what I would love to know is for those of us that feel bombarded with all different types of ways to exercise. Should I do yoga? Should I do Pilates? Should I go to the gym? Should I put on a streaming class? Do I need bands? Should I pick up a weight? Do I, are the weights different than the hot mom walk wristband things? Do I need to squeeze the thing? Should I do HIIT? Should I do resistance? Like it is so overwhelming. So if you were to talk first to people, to anybody listening, it's like, okay, Doc G, I'm in. I'm in. You got me with the protein. I'm going to check this out. I feel so much smarter. I love you. I get it. But the resistance training, it's very confusing.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Here is the one non-negotiable that everybody is going to take away and build on. No pun intended here. Resistance training is any move against weight. So that could be body weight. You could be doing pushups. You could be doing bicep curls. You could be doing bands. You could be doing any different type of resistance training. That is a non-negotiable for muscle health and body composition.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I will say all exercise is important and anything is better than nothing. But when we are talking about muscle centric medicine, we are talking about getting stronger and building the infrastructure of our body for the time that we need it. The way that we're going to do that collectively is we are going to do resistance training as a non-negotiable, which, again, could be weights, could be machines, could be at home pushups or band workout. Even, you know, if someone really wants to do yoga and Pilates, they could, but that is not going to be ideal over a period of time. But it's a great starting place.

Mel Robbins: Gotcha. And what's the minimum amount of time? I realize you say some is better than none, but for just somebody going, I'm going to take this seriously. Three days a week, two days a week, one day a week. Where's a starting point for somebody where this is like a whole new world?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Here's what I say. I say that you should be lifting a minimum of two days a week.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And that would be, if you're only going to do two days a week, then you're going to do full body. And I love the idea that you are doing what we call multi-joint movements. So for me, what did I do this morning? I go, oh man, I'm going to be on Mel Robbins podcast. I'm getting my butt in the gym and we did deadlift.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I don't necessarily think that people need to start with that. But again, I've been training for, you know, a period of years. So for me, deadlift. But for, you know, someone who is just starting out, there are still machines. Machines are very safe that they could do a squat on a machine or a leg press on a machine. There are things that involve multi-joints and multi-body parts at once. Super easy. We don't need to overcomplicate it. Two days a week would be the minimum, whether they're doing upper body and lower body. All of those, again, two days a week.

Mel Robbins: Gotcha. And if you were to take a protein forward diet and you were to do two days a week of full body resistance training, okay, how long does it take for that inner muscular body to start to appear and you to start to see some sort of something happening?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Here's the great news of someone who's just starting out. Those people will get the bigger benefit and see more improvement faster than someone who's been training for a long period of time.

Mel Robbins: How long?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: I would say maybe six to eight weeks. You stay with it that long.

Mel Robbins: Can we see a little something better? Like we're going to feel better though, right?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You will feel better immediately.

Mel Robbins: Okay. That's all I need to. You know, feel better immediately and you will begin to improve while transient those immediate markers like blood sugar, like triglycerides, like HDL that everybody talks about. Again, it's over time, but these will be immediately impacted, which is incredible, which is absolutely incredible. Are there some aspects to resistance training that women should be doing differently for maximum benefit?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That's a great question. There was a period of time where I believed that you had to lift heavier weights. And I personally prefer to do that. But the evidence would suggest as long as a woman is really taxing herself, you know, she's not on her phone and she's not kind of distracted. But going to where she really goes to fatigue, then I think that it's not necessarily for women. But here's one other thing that I think women should do.

Mel Robbins: Tell me.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: One high intensity interval training session a week.

Mel Robbins: Okay. What does that actually mean?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: So this could be on, say, an airdyne bike or a rower, or if someone is at home with no equipment, it could be as many air squats as they could do for a 45 second to a minute session, all out effort. You're really going to put in high effort for a minute and then you're going to rest. And then you could do that. Again, there's many different ways to do that, but you could do this for a total of 20 minutes and that's your workout. So you do 10 rounds with a minute in between and that's it. You have taxed your muscles. You've released myokines. You've improved your blood sugar and you're going to eat your dietary protein. You're going to be stronger. Over a period of time, you are going to be stronger from following that.

Mel Robbins: I love this. And I love that you're saying 10 to 20 minutes. I love that you've got resources that we can link to. I love that you've got a playbook in Forever Strong. I know a lot of people were hanging on the words when you said just, you know, you can do resistance training for 20 to 30 minutes, three times a week. For women, it's important to go to failure. If, for example, you're doing an online streaming class and it's like one of those small weight things and you are doing your arms up and down and you've been holding them up for five minutes and you're like, I can't do this anymore. And you drop your arms. Is that what you mean by failure?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Yeah. Yes.

Mel Robbins: Great.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And by the way, if you work hard enough, you could get a great workout in seven minutes. You could get a great workout in one minute. If you gas yourself on some kind of just all out 80 to 90% more effort, that's good. It could literally take you four minutes. It doesn't have to take a ton of time.

Mel Robbins: What are the ways to make muscle magic and what the heck is muscle magic?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Basically the way that I think about that is how can we add in snippets in the day to really augment our health? What are we going to do about health and wellness that's going to take two seconds to do and going to be at the forefront of our mind? Number one, you like numbers. Number one, every hour complete 10 to 20 air squats.

Mel Robbins: Dude, you could totally do that. You could totally do that.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Number two, stand at your desk, which I'm sitting right now, but I do have a standing treadmill desk. Number three, get your heart rate up with a brisk walk to the bathroom or water fountain 10 times a day.

Mel Robbins: Great. Easy.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: You literally, if you had a glucose monitor, you ate lunch, you have that glucose monitor on, you can see improvements in your blood sugar just by leveraging skeletal muscle instantaneously. Um, we're at number four. Bring a resistance band to your office and get in a quick 10 reps of Mel's bicep curls or any exercise of choice. Just resist the band, people.

Mel Robbins: Yeah, you could do overhead press, you could do whatever you want to do. I have a question. So a lot of us have these wrist weight things. [Sound of Mel opening something] They were very popular when we were all in lockdown, the hot mom walk. So there's a one pound wrist weight. If I just wear these all day long, is that like something that I can do that will help? Or is that not a good thing?

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: It will help. Is it going to be optimal? Maybe not, but it'll help.

Mel Robbins: Okay.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: And when you said-

Mel Robbins: I think you could put like, I think we could put a little more-

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Probably.

Mel Robbins: Given that you've practiced as a psychiatrist in a family medicine practice, and you've spent 20 years and are a fellow in nutritional medicine, I wanted to ask you some questions from our audience and see if you would give people advice. So Vicky writes, "Doc G, how do I get my 24-year-old daughter to start taking charge of her health? I send her podcasts. I send her articles. The more I do, she turns away as she wants to be in control, which I know she should be. She's a workaholic. She's a perfectionist. I'm worried because she's burying herself in work. And that means she claims she doesn't have much room for exercise or enough sleep. She's put on about 25 pounds since graduating and I'm just really worried about her. What can I do?"

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Well, first of all, don't worry. We've got this and I'm going to share with you a little secret. Over time, the most and highest success a person will ever be able to achieve, the one common denominator is their health. So if Vicky's daughter cares about becoming successful, which she clearly does, right now she is making a rookie entrepreneurial mistake. I have seen this over and over and over again. Human beings are predictable. This behavior of late nights, early mornings, little sleep, charge hard and burn out, it goes like this, right? And as people's career goes up, this behavior goes like this until ultimately something breaks, people hit rock bottom, and then they have to rebuild. So one of two things are going to happen. Number one, you're going to get to it early and you're going to say, listen, you care about being successful. You are so driven. You have external discipline. So this is someone who is exhibiting external discipline to drive the needle forward. That is a translatable skill. We are going to encourage the external discipline to then translate to internal discipline, not with the goal of weight loss, not with the goal of being healthy, but all of which is going to be framed around this idea of daily success and future success. She's going to be able to perform better at work and dominate. And that is how you are going to change her mind.

Mel Robbins: Dr. G is in the house. That was genius. You know why? It's manipulative and it works because you've attached motivation to something that she's demonstrating that she actually cares about, which is her success. And when you carve out a little bit of discipline to start to weight train, by the way, because of all the benefits with sharper thinking, with the discipline that it takes to fit it in, with the fact that you get this rush of endorphins and adrenaline and you're able to focus, it translates directly to you being better at your job or taking care of your kids or anything that you want to do. And in fact, for you stay at home moms, let me tell you something. There is new research out that shows that the best way to help a kid who is struggling is to help the caregiver by helping the caregiver start to take care of themselves and start to become healthier themselves. It translates directly. And so I freaking love that you just said that. I've got another one from Maddie. And I know that you had some issues with binge eating when you were a teenager. And so I think you'll be in a very, you're in a really important position to make a difference here. Maddie writes, "I'm 19 years old and my social media feeds are filled with fitness influencers. I enjoy fitness a lot. I love the way the gym makes me feel and the reward of how my body can look, but I get too carried away with my image sometimes and let it control my day and my mood. I struggle with binge eating at night, but I haven't been diagnosed with an eating disorder. Do you have any tips for comparing myself to other people, comparing my body to other people's bodies? And even more importantly, how do I just build a better relationship with myself and my body?"

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: That is a very deep question and I absolutely can relate because when I was her age, I also struggled. And I think a lot of younger women struggle. One of the things that younger women now that are up against that I didn't have and many of us didn't have is that social media has no rules. So the first thing that Maddie has to do is limit time on social media. And I mean, really limit it to what is she trying to gain out of it? And this is going to take some internal fortitude because it is addictive. And that is how these apps, which we all love, but are designed and they allow for dopamine release. And we want to keep going back for more. I personally have a lock on my social media. I can spend 30 minutes a day on social media max until I'm locked out. And that is exactly what Maddie should do. Because comparison is a kiss of death for people. Really truly is about being one's best version of oneself and shifting away from the external. Again, this whole conversation hasn't been focused about the external drivers of looking good, but understanding that the better you treat yourself, we only have one body. The better an individual treats themselves from the inside, the more capable Maddie's going to be throughout her entire life. And ultimately, she's going to go through a period where, you know, each decade we compare less, right? Right now, Maddie, you're at the height of comparison. And that's also part of being a 19 year old woman. But this is an amazing opportunity to develop some mental toughness. And what do I mean by developmental toughness? I mean, having a lot of discipline to say, you know what? I am not going to go and look at those things and compare whatever it is that those people are doing. And the other thing is I'm actually going to focus on a goal that I set for myself that is not external. It shouldn't be based on external looks. It could be based on. So she said something very important. She said something about the progress in the gym. Right. I don't see progress in the gym. Well, what about saying you are going to do 10 dead hang pull ups? That has nothing to do with how you look. It purely has to do with embracing the discomfort of becoming more skilled at a movement.

Mel Robbins: You know what? This actually points to the whole reason why I wanted to have you on. Because the reason why Maddie and just about everybody on the planet, particularly in that age group, has trouble with comparison is because they're focused on what they look like versus being in the gym to take care of your muscular health. Being in the gym because of the different amino acids and the way that your neurotransmitters and your thinking and your mood and your mental health are impacted. And one thing that helped me a lot, because I struggled, like everybody, with profound comparison, is if you're going to compare yourself, right?

Mel Robbins: If you just have this habit of looking around and laser focusing in on the one person whose body type is exactly the opposite and genetically impossible for you to ever achieve, and then beating yourself up for the fact that you're not 11 feet tall or three feet tall or whatever it is that you wish that you were.

If you're going to do that with one person, try for a day admiring everybody. Admire everybody in the gym. Admire the freckles on that person over there. Admire the curly hair on that person over there. Admire the monster calves that that person over there has. Admire the gap between the teeth of the other person over there.

Find something that you admire that's unique about every person that you pass by, just casually, and you'll start to notice that you can flip it from this seeking of someone looks better than you, to training yourself to see something unique and beautiful in everybody, because we all look very different. I think intellectually we know this, but that's a way to start to train your mind to default in a very different way.

Pamela wrote, "Mel, I need mental strategies and thoughts to lose weight because I really want to stay in shape. I'm tired of calorie counting. What do in-shape women tell themselves? Because the old strategies are no longer working for me and I need an epiphany."

So Doc G, mental neutrality, have a neutral mind. This next meal is not that big of a deal. This one last cheat meal, these cookies—it's so good, I can't not have X, Y, and Z. Be neutral. All of this hype around food and dieting is all stuff that we made up. It doesn't have to be that way. Just neutral mind, my friend. It's not that big of a deal. It's just one more meal.

Allow yourself to gain control, take actions to become the person that you know that you can be, and ask yourself: Are these actions and these behaviors in line with who I want to be? And you close the gap.

I think that people always put together weight loss goals. And when you have goals, that means when you hit a goal of 10 pound weight loss, you're now back at the starting point of what's your next goal. As opposed to putting together standards. What is the standard? How are the standards of how you function? You are going to execute on an appropriate training program. You're going to set a standard for the kinds of foods that you're going to eat. You are going to set a standard for yourself for how strong you want to be. We're not chasing goals here. We're setting standards for our life that allow us to execute and live a life of longevity, of strength and resilience.

Mel Robbins: Dr. G, you have given me so many epiphanies today. You've changed the way that I think about what I'm eating. You have had me learn so much and everybody listening about muscle-centric medicine, the importance of this. I feel a sense of freedom and liberation from decades of thinking about calories and losing weight. And I really am empowered by what you've taught us today and how it impacts my health, how it could help shape my body and my future and my longevity. So what a gift. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for spending so much time with us and going into such detail. I cannot wait to have you back. And everybody, the book is *Forever Strong*, a new science-based strategy for aging well. Dr. G, everybody. Thank you so much.

Dr. Gabrielle Lyon: Thank you for having me. I love these conversations. Don't you? When it's like epiphany, epiphany, epiphany. I think the biggest one for me is really thinking for real about my muscles, about this organ I've been neglecting. This is so cool. It has changed me forever.

Mel Robbins: Okay. So I know you got a lot out of it. And I want to just say something else. Everything that I talk about with you here on the podcast, it is meant to open up possibilities. If you feel inspired and empowered, and it's safe to do so, try it. But only you know whether or not it works for you. So take what she says, try it out if you feel inspired, and make sure that you're constantly checking with yourself. And I'll be checking in with you about this too.

All right, I got to go prepare a snack that's about 30 to 50 grams of protein. And now I know the collagen is zero protein. I feel so empowered. And I hope you do too. And the reason why is because I love you. And I tell you that every time I talk to you, I love you. I believe in you. And I believe in your ability to be smart about the decisions that you're making, especially those that you're making about your health, because you deserve to live a long and strong and healthy life. And now you have the research and the tools to do it. Let's go get them. I'll talk to you in a few days.

[Outro music begins]

Mel Robbins: Hey! Oh my God. Okay, I gotta get in here. Let me put these on. All right. Are we ready, everybody? Okay, great. And they are the key to effective weight loss. Oh my God. World-class medical expert. Okay. Let me try that again. The number one change that I need to make in order to start to melt away the belly fat. The number one thing we all need to do in order to melt body fat. You want to say body fat or belly fat? Belly fat. Okay, here we go.

[Sound of a door opening]

Mel Robbins: I don't know who that is. Good job on those bicep curls. I'm really liking that form. So what is my mitercrombie? I'm sorry, I can't talk. That's like, wait, that's like Abercrombie? Yes. Call that apicromity. Yes.

[Laughter]

Mel Robbins: Oh, and one more thing. And no, this is not a blooper. This is the legal language. You know, what the lawyers write and what I need to read to you.

[Clears throat]

Mel Robbins: This podcast is presented solely for educational and entertainment purposes. I'm just your friend. I am not a licensed therapist. And this podcast is not intended as a substitute for the advice of a physician, professional coach, psychotherapist, or other qualified professional. Got it? Good. I'll see you in the next episode.