Fitness content is full of finished stories. Someone tells you what worked after it already worked, with the bad weeks edited out and the numbers rounded in a flattering direction. You get the conclusion without the process, which doesn’t teach you much if what you actually want is to learn how to run your own training.

So I’m doing it the other way around. Every month, I’ll share the real thing: the program I’m following, why I built it that way, the sessions exactly as they’re written, my numbers, and then what actually happened. Including the weeks when I miss sessions, feel terrible, or get something wrong.

For this first edition, we’re starting with the program I’ll be running for the next 8 weeks, with one goal: to become a faster runner while doing my best to maintain the muscle I’ve built.

The logic behind this goal and the trade-offs I’ll need to make

I’m running a half marathon next year. Before I start adding distance, I want to get faster over a shorter one first, because pace matters when you’re trying to make longer distances feel manageable.

The plan is three runs a week: one long run, one speed session, and one easy run to build volume. That puts me at around 25-30 kilometers a week, which tends to surprise people when the goal is simply to run a 5K in under 25 minutes. But you don’t get faster over 5 kilometers by only running 5 kilometers. A fast 5K is built on the aerobic base underneath it, your ability to hold a hard effort for 25 minutes without completely falling apart. And that base comes from the slower, longer runs.

You’re probably wondering how I’ll manage that much running while being a gym girlie who trains four to five times a week.

Well, for these eight weeks, I’m dropping down to four, with shorter sessions and fewer sets. And no, this isn’t because cardio “kills your gains.” I’ve already written a whole article about why that idea is mostly a myth. It’s more about recovery. I only have so much of it. If I spend most of it trying to recover from five days of lifting, my speed sessions will suffer, my runs will feel awful, and the whole experiment stops being worth doing.

So for these eight weeks the gym has one job: maintain what I’ve already built. I’m not trying to build muscle while also running 30 kilometers a week. That’s not a realistic goal for me right now, and pretending I can maximize both at the same time is probably the fastest way to end up doing both badly.

So, here’s the exact training split and nutrition plan I’ll be following.

Read more

But here’s my confession: I want to feel good in a swimsuit, so for a few weeks I’m eating a bit less to try to shed a little fat.

And every time I’m about to say that out loud, I feel the urge to soften it. To add disclaimers. To explain that I’m doing it in a healthy way, that I haven’t fallen back into my old habits, that I promise I’m still healed. As if wanting to look leaner was something I needed to apologize for.

This article is me saying it honestly. And then telling you what it actually costs, because contrary to what some people will try to sell you on social media, getting leaner has a price.

when did wanting to be leaner become controversial?

I have this conversation with my close friends more often than you’d think. At some point someone lowers her voice and asks something like “is it bad that I still want to lose a little?” Like she’s confessing something. Like she needs permission to admit she cares about how she looks.

And I get why. In some spaces, especially the ones trying to undo the damage of diet culture, aesthetic goals have become almost taboo. The acceptable goal is “getting stronger.” Say you want visible abs or leaner legs and you can feel the room shift, like you just outed yourself as not fully healed.

So women end up with two scripts, and honestly, both of them are dishonest.

script #1: diet culture

You should always want to be leaner, whatever the cost, and the cost will never be mentioned. Just “tone up,” earn your beach body, eat 1,200 calories. I lived inside that script for about twenty years, and I’ve already written about what it did to me, so I won’t retell it here.

script #2: the correction

If you still want to be leaner, you have healing to do. Your desire is internalized misogyny, train for strength, love your body, and please stop talking about fat loss. It comes from a good place, I really believe that. But look at what it does: someone else is still deciding what you’re allowed to want, just in the opposite direction.

But there’s a third option, and it’s the one I’m trying to live in. You name what you want, out loud, without shame. And then you look at the price without flinching. Both parts matter, the wanting and the receipt.

Wanting to look leaner is morally neutral. It says nothing about your values, your intelligence, or how healed you are.

Aesthetics is what got me through the gym door at 37. Performance is what kept me there for six years. Both of those things were real, and pretending the first one never existed would be rewriting my own story.

wtf "leaner" actually means and the price list

Quick definition before we go any further, because this word tends to create a lot of confusion. Being leaner simply means having more muscle and less fat. There’s no special quality called “toned” that you can train for and, more importantly, there’s no special method designed to tone your body.

What helps you build muscle effectively is, as you probably already know, strength training.

For “leaner” to look like anything, the muscle has to already be there. Otherwise you just become a smaller, flatter version of yourself (I know, because that was me, the original skinny fat girl).

One thing I'd do before chasing it, though: check what you actually mean when you say you want to be leaner. Sometimes it really is about how you look. But sometimes it's code for:

— “I want to feel in control” or
— “I had a rough month and I want to feel like I’m doing something about myself”

Fat loss won’t buy those. Your wants deserve to be taken seriously, and taking them seriously includes checking what they’re made of.

Now the price list. Getting leaner has a price, a real one, and I want to lay it out the same way you’d look at the price of a trip before booking it:

• Hunger. A deficit means giving your body less energy than it burns, and your body notices. If it’s done well, we’re talking about a low-grade hunger that visits regularly, for months. Anyone selling you fat loss without hunger is lying to you.

• Performance. Your lifts stall, or drop a little. Recovery gets slower and training feels heavier. For someone who has learned to love progress, this is the cost that hurts the most.

• Headspace. More planning, more food decisions, more “no thanks” at dinners you’d normally enjoy without thinking. If you read my article about food tracking, you already know how much mental space food management can take.

Add mood, sleep and energy, which all degrade the deeper the deficit goes and the longer you stay in it. That’s normal physiology doing its job, and no amount of discipline exempts you from it.

But the most important thing I can tell you about the price is that it climbs. Going from soft to athletic costs a few months of mild, livable discipline. Going from athletic to visibly shredded costs a completely different life.

One last line on the receipt. Being lean comes with maintenance costs. Whatever you did to get there, you’ll need to keep doing, even if it’s a less restrictive version. That’s why “photoshoot lean” and “livable lean” are two completely different products. And they come with two very different price tags.

what my first real bulk-and-cut process taught me

Last year I did my first real bulk. Six months, about six kilos gained, with my dietitian watching the numbers the whole way. And it was a good bulk, honestly. A solid part of those six kilos was muscle, and I stayed relatively lean through the whole thing.

And still, seeing myself bigger affected me mentally. I knew the plan, I understood the numbers, I had a professional in my corner, and my head struggled with the mirror anyway, more days than I expected. I’m telling you this because it kills a very convenient story, the one where doing everything correctly means the mental part follows automatically. It doesn’t always. Twenty years of programming don’t dissolve because your macros are calculated properly.

So after the bulk, I decided to cut. Four months, supervised, structured. A start and end date, a plan, and someone watching the data with me.

I need you to see the difference between that and what I did in my twenties, because on paper they look similar. Both involve eating less. But my old under-eating was just a way of living I never really chose, with no start, no end, and nobody checking whether it was hurting me. The cut was a project. It was the same tool with a completely opposite meaning.

And the cut showed me exactly where my personal line is. The first three months were manageable. Some hunger, some planning, nothing dramatic. Then came the last month, when we lowered calories a bit more to finish the job, and the food noise started. If you’ve never heard the term, food noise is when thoughts about food get louder and more frequent without being invited. You’re in a meeting and part of your brain is negotiating your next snack. That was new information about myself, and now I know where my curve bends.

I’d do it again if I felt the need, though. I want to say that clearly, because that’s the sentence script #2 doesn’t allow.

Fast forward to today, and to the part I hesitated to write.

As I said, I’m in a slight deficit right now because I’m going on vacation and I want to feel good in a swimsuit. I know how that sounds. We’ve spent years, rightfully, repeating that every body is a beach body, and that nobody has to earn the right to wear a swimsuit. I’m not walking any of that back. You can put on a bikini today, exactly as you are.

And at the same time, I feel better in my skin when I know my body will be exposed and I’m at my leanest. Both things are true. Being honest about this means being willing to hold both, instead of only saying the more virtuous one out loud.

That’s what an informed aesthetic choice looks like to me. I know what I want. I know what it costs. I’ve decided I’m willing to pay the price. And, most importantly, I know when the transaction ends.

(When I’m back, my dietitian and I are changing the brief anyway, because I’m running a half marathon next year and my body will have a completely different job to do. Goals rotate like that. An aesthetic phase, a performance phase, maintenance. All of them just have to make sense for me, and for nobody else.)

if getting leaner is on your mind

If you’re sitting with your own version of “I’d like to be leaner,” here’s what I’d want you to know, from someone who’s been on every side of this.

→ Build muscle first. Months of consistent lifting before any cut, because there has to be something under the fat to reveal. You also need to know your maintenance calories, at least roughly, because you can’t create a controlled deficit from an unknown number.

→ A healthy relationship with food. This is what lets you handle a few months of an intentional caloric deficit without old wounds reopening, and it matters more than anything else on this list. If restriction ever owned you, that history is part of YOUR price, and it belongs in the decision.

→ The right timing. A deficit during your most stressful season costs double. Pick a boring stretch of life, one without a calendar full of social events, when you actually have the headspace to plan your meals every day.

→ Set a modest deficit, around 300 to 500 kcal below maintenance, and aim to lose roughly 0.5% of your body weight per week while keeping your protein high and your training heavy. The research is clear that slower rates preserve muscle and performance far better than aggressive ones. And if you can, have a professional run the numbers with you. My bulk and my cut both worked because someone was watching the data with me the whole time.

→ Define the exit before you enter. An end date, plus red lines that stop the cut automatically, with no negotiation: your cycle goes irregular, your sleep breaks, training starts feeling like punishment, or the food noise moves in and won’t leave. Deciding your stop conditions in advance is what separates a project from a spiral.

You’re also allowed to have a price cap.

“Leaner than I am now, but nowhere near shredded” is a perfectly valid goal. You can want some of the look without wanting the full-time job that comes with maintaining it. Getting 80% of the result for 20% of the cost isn’t giving up. It’s just knowing what you’re willing to pay.

In a few weeks I’ll be on vacation, a little leaner than I am today, eating all the food I love with zero guilt, not training, and feeling really good in my swimsuit. I wanted that, I said it out loud, I knew the price, and I paid a small, deliberate amount of it with my eyes open.

That’s what I want for you too, whatever you end up deciding. Your wants are yours. Nobody gets to assign them to you, and nobody gets to shame you out of them. Just make sure that when you buy, you’ve seen the full receipt first.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks for reading,
—Glicia

* sources

• Long-term persistence of hormonal adaptations to weight loss, Sumithran et al., NEJM, 2011

• Effect of two different weight-loss rates on body composition and strength-related performance in elite athletes, Garthe et al., IJSNEM, 2011

• A systematic review of dietary protein during caloric restriction in resistance trained lean athletes, Helms et al., IJSNEM, 2014

• IOC consensus statement on Relative Energy Deficiency in Sport (RED-S), updated 2023, BJSM

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

I get it. I really do. I want results too, every time I start something new. I want to know the work is going somewhere and that I’m not wasting my time.

Lifting is never wasted time though. Besides whatever aesthetic goal you have (and yes, you’re allowed to have one), you start collecting the benefits the moment you pick up a weight, whether or not any of it shows up in the mirror. But being able to see your own effort still matters. It’s what keeps you going back on the weeks when nothing feels like it’s happening.

This is why you need a way to read your progress, especially when the scale and the mirror are both telling you you’re stuck.

My road to body recomposition wasn’t a straight line, and I want to say that first, because almost everything you read about it looks like a clean before and after with a tidy arrow in between, and mine was nothing like that.

At the start, I almost quit.

I’d done the reading. I knew what body recomposition was supposed to be and yet, I’d decided that six weeks in, I would see something. My body fat would come down, maybe I’d have a bit of definition in my shoulders, the scale would either drop a little or, best case, stay exactly where it was while my body rearranged itself underneath.

I was also eating more than I’d eaten in years, which, if you’ve read anything else I’ve written, you know wasn’t a small thing for me.

Six weeks in, I stood in front of the mirror and I looked exactly the same. I took photos. Same corner of the bedroom, same morning light, same gym clothes. I lined them up next to the ones from week one and I couldn’t find a single f* difference.

I’d be lying if I told you that, at that moment, I wasn’t seriously considering giving up.

i was measuring the right goal with the wrong tools, at the wrong moment

Six or seven weeks isn’t enough time to build visible muscle. It just isn’t. Muscle takes months, and if you’re trying to build it while also losing fat, it takes longer, because you’re asking your body to do two jobs at once. I knew this in theory. I could’ve explained it to you over coffee. But knowing something and believing it at 7am in front of a mirror are two very different skills, and I only had the first one.

And the three tools I was using to measure my progress were genuinely terrible at that point. Let me explain.

(i) The scale can move a kilo or two in a single day depending on water, salt, where you are in your cycle, and how much food is currently sitting inside you; (ii) the mirror is even worse, because you see yourself every single day, which is exactly the frequency at which change becomes invisible; (iii) and the photos, which I thought were my objective measure, were being taken and judged by a person who was in a mood. Some days I looked fine, some days I looked like I’d gone backwards, and it was the same body in the same week.

So I had three sources of information, all three were lying to me, and I was making decisions based on them anyway.

One thing before I go on, because I don’t want you to close this and throw your scale in a drawer. None of those tools are actually useless. Weigh yourself if you want to. Just stop reading any single number, and look at the average across a few weeks instead. Keep taking the photos too. Take them, and then leave them alone for months, because two photos taken a week apart will always show you nothing, and two photos taken six months apart will sometimes show you everything.

So keep collecting. Every measurement you take now is data you’ll be able to read properly later, once there’s enough of it to mean something.

how a before-and-after post completely changed the way i measured progress

It’s going to sound strange coming from me, because I don’t like before-and-after posts and I don’t publish them. But a few years ago one showed up on my feed at exactly the wrong moment (or maybe the right one).

Same woman, two photos. And the caption said she weighed the same in both.

I went back and forth between them probably ten times. In the second one her whole body was different. Visible muscle, visibly less fat, shoulders and waist in a completely different relationship to each other. Same number on the scale but two different bodies.

And that’s the thing that finally clicked. If a person can look like that at the same weight, then weight was never the variable I should’ve been watching. All that time, I’d been staring at a number that was incapable of telling me what I actually wanted to know.

So I stopped tracking my body and started tracking what my body could do.

At my next workout, I opened the Notes app on my phone and wrote down every exercise from that session, along with the weights I used and the reps I did. Then I did it again the next time. And the next. (I now log everything in an app I’m building myself, but honestly, the Notes app did the job for a long time, and it’ll do the job for you too.)

A few weeks later I scrolled back to the first entry, and the weights weren’t the same weights anymore. The thing I couldn’t see in the mirror had been sitting in a note on my phone the whole time, and I hadn’t even noticed it happening.

And this is why those numbers matter more than they sound. If you’re getting stronger, two things are true at once: your training is giving your body a reason to adapt, and you’re eating enough to let it happen. You can’t really fake that combination. Strength going up is your training and your nutrition telling you they’re working together, weeks before your body gets around to showing it to anyone.

what i actually watch now & why

There are four things, and they arrive in the follwing order:

Weight at the same reps. This one moves first, usually somewhere between week two and week six, and it’s the simplest proof you’ll ever get. Same exercise, same number of reps, more weight. My Romanian deadlift was 35 kilos when I started, 40 on a good day. Six months later it was 60.

Reps at the same weight. If you train with dumbbells you already know the problem: the next pair up is a two kilo jump, and two kilos is enormous when you’re pressing ten. So you sit at the same weight for weeks and it feels like nothing’s happening. But if you did eight reps in week one and you’re doing twelve in week six with the same dumbbells, that’s progress. Write it down.

Recovery. This is one of the clearest signs the work is landing. When I started, I used to lose half my reps by the last set, and then one day I noticed my third set had stopped falling apart. Which meant I was getting stronger and recovering faster after each workout. I also stopped needing two days to walk down stairs like a normal person after leg day. Nothing about me looked different, but my body was very obviously handling more.

Your waist against your hips. It’s a ratio, not a weight, so measure both and watch the relationship between them. When your waist holds steady while your glutes and shoulders start filling out your clothes differently, that’s your sign that body recomposition is happening. It will always be the slowest one, so please, please be patient.

how long this actually takes

It depends. I can’t tell you how long it’ll take for you to see results, because everyone’s different and there are a lot of variables involved: your genetics, how many times a week you train, what your nutrition actually looks like, how much you sleep, and so on. What I can give you is a rough idea of what happens for most people.

The first two months are mostly your nervous system getting better at the movement. You’re learning to use what you already have, which is why strength can climb quickly while absolutely nothing visible happens. Months three and four are where the structural change starts. Around month six you can usually see it yourself, if you know where to look.

That’s normal and that’s not you being slow. I know it’s not what anyone wants to hear, including me. But it is what it is. And that’s also why I now give a program (here’s how you can create yours) at least twelve weeks before I judge it. Anything shorter, and I can’t tell the difference between a real signal and a bad day.

Before you ask whether your program is working, count how many sessions you actually did against how many you planned. Not how many you meant to do. How many you really did.

If you planned sixteen and you did nine, the program isn’t what failed, and no amount of clever measuring is going to rescue that. I say this with love, and also because I’ve been the woman with nine out of sixteen and a very detailed opinion about why the program was wrong.

three exercises are all you need to track your progress

I said three exercises to track your progress, not the only three exercises you’re doing. Your program stays exactly as it is, with all the accessory work and everything else you like in there. You’re just picking three movements out of it to follow closely, so that you always have something to compare against.

Three, because two isn’t enough to show you a pattern and five is enough to make you quit. I’ve tried logging every single exercise of every session and I lasted about three weeks before the notebook became the reason I dreaded going.

Here’s how I’d choose them.

Go for compound movements, meaning the ones that use several joints and a lot of muscle at the same time. They respond to progress much more clearly than isolation work, and they move in whole kilos instead of tiny fractions, which makes the change obvious when you scroll back. A bicep curl going from 8 kilos to 9 is real progress, it’s just a small, slow signal. A squat going from 40 to 50 is very hard to miss.

Pick things you can load precisely. A barbell or a machine works better here than a band or a bodyweight movement, because 2.5 kilos is a step you can measure and “the band felt harder today” isn’t. Nothing wrong with bands and bodyweight exercices, they’re just difficult to use as a ruler.

Cover your whole body with the three: one lower body, one upper body push, one upper body pull. If you want a set that works for almost anyone, here’s where I’d start:

• for lower body, a squat, a deadlift (or Romanian deadlift), or a hip thrust

• for pushing, a bench press, a dumbbell press or an overhead press

• and for pulling, a barbell (or dumbbell) row, or a lat pulldown

Mine are a Romanian deadlift, a lat pulldown and a shoulder press (which I do on a machine).

Then pick things you’re willing to keep in your program for at least twelve weeks, which mostly means picking things you don’t hate. There’s no point choosing the technically perfect exercise if you’re going to swap it out in a month, because the second you swap it, your comparison goes back to zero. You can’t measure progress on something you’ve done twice.

What you’ll write down: The date, the exercise, and the weight x reps of your heaviest working set. You don’t need every set and you don’t need a note about how you felt. Three lines a session, plus sessions done against sessions planned at the end of the month. It takes less than five minutes.

Six years later, I still can’t stop thinking about how this method helped me stay focused and not give up. It’s also really fun to look at the entries you wrote years ago, compare them with the ones you wrote last week, and see how much strength you’ve gained.

So if you’re six weeks in and nothing has changed, it’s entirely possible that everything is already changing and you just have no way to see it yet. My evidence was wrong, not my training, and I nearly threw out something that was already working because I was reading the wrong data. Start writing it down today, because the version of you in three months is going to want to scroll back and see where she started.

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

That’s all for now,
—Glicia

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

For some of us, it can be an anxious time too. We’ve been training hard for months to put on muscle, and of course we don’t want to lose it all over one week away. The good news is that maintaining muscle is much easier than building it. It only takes a fraction of the training volume needed to make new gains.

Research on detraining (the fancy word for what happens when you stop training) shows that most trained people maintain their muscle size for about two to three weeks before any measurable loss occurs. Strength sticks around even longer, often four weeks or more, because a big part of strength comes from your nervous system learning how to produce force. And thankfully, that doesn’t disappear after a long weekend or a vacation.

So if you’re away for a few weeks and you’d rather not work out, don’t. Enjoy your trip. Walk a lot, go for a swim, carry your own bags, stay generally active, and when you get home, pick up your usual program where you left off. I promise you’ll be just fine.

And if you want to keep training anyway, simply because you enjoy it and you like keeping your body moving, I made a program for you. It’s designed to replace your regular routine whenever you can’t make it to the gym, whether you’re on vacation, traveling for work, or simply don't have access to your usual equipment. It uses bodyweight and resistance bands only, so you don’t need to pack thirty five different accessories.

Hope it helps, and most importantly, enjoy your holidays. Rest, eat the foods you like, spend time with the people you love. Your little routine will be waiting for you when you come back.

The download link is at the end of this article ⬇️

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

Read more

I’ve been lifting weights without interruption for six years now (holidays and the occasional flu aside), and I’ve been walking into gyms for over a decade. You’d think that qualifies as an environment where I feel completely at ease. And yet. Every time I have to train somewhere other than my usual gym, panic shows up before I do. My brain seems to forget every movement that’s become automatic to me by now.

At the end of last year, my regular gym closed for renovations, so I had to find somewhere else to train in the meantime. I found a small, family-run gym close to home, and on my first session there, I felt like a complete beginner again. Which made no sense on paper. I knew how to use most of the machines, I had my program with me, and I knew exactly what I was doing. My heart was pounding so hard I thought I was about to have a panic attack.

I’m a naturally anxious person, and I don’t like being the center of attention. Knowing someone is watching me, for any reason, makes me painfully aware of myself: my flaws, my mistakes, every small thing I could be doing wrong. A new environment where I’m also likely to be watched is the perfect recipe for my brain to spiral.

In the end, everything went fine. I trained at that little gym for almost two months before I could go back to my usual one. I’m telling you this story because I know, from the inside, the anxiety a beginner feels the first time she walks into a gym. By nature, gyms are intimidating places. There’s a certain masculine aura, all sweat and testosterone, hanging in the air. Even when a gym makes a real effort to feel welcoming to women, and even though the last few years have brought a genuinely positive shift toward encouraging women to lift, the weight room is still, more often than not, full of men. I understand the hesitation. I understand why some women refuse to set foot in one at all.

But if you actually want to build muscle, change your body, and get strong, at some point you have to walk in. Training at home is great, especially when you're starting out. Unless you've built yourself a fully equipped home gym though, you'll hit a wall pretty fast: not enough equipment, and no real way to keep progressively overloading your training. I've written about progressive overload more times than I can count, because it's the single biggest driver of real results, not just how your body looks, but your strength and performance too.

In this article I'll walk you through five simple steps to get past the fear of training in a gym when being a gym girly doesn't come naturally to you.

choose a gym that removes friction, not one that looks perfect

Forget the gym with the perfect aesthetic look, the nicest equipment or the best reviews if it’s 40 minutes away. The gym you’ll actually go to is the one that’s close, easy to get to, and doesn’t require willpower just to walk through the door.

I've been doing this for years, and I know for sure that if I have to wake up at 4:30 am to get ready and get to the gym at 6 am to train before work, the chances I skip most of my workouts are high. For years I trained in a gym that wasn't pretty, taht didn't offer any of the extras: no sauna, no fancy protein shakes, no ultra high-tech equipment. But it was 5 minutes away from me, and it had everything I needed to train with intensity and progressive overload. That was enough to keep me going year after year, because there was no friction involved.

Beyond location, pay attention to the vibe. Smaller or family-run gyms, like the one I ended up in, tend to feel less intimidating than a massive commercial chain packed with mirrors and men mid-deadlift. Look for gyms that offer a free trial or a day pass. Go once before you commit to a membership, and go at the time of day you’d actually train. A gym that feels calm at 10 am can turn into a completely different place at 6 pm.

If the free weights section still feels like too much in the beginning, start with machines. They guide your movement, the risk of doing something wrong is low, and most of them come with instructions printed right on them. You can move to free weights once the machines stop feeling foreign.

get your program and split right from day one

Nothing feeds gym anxiety like standing in the middle of the floor wondering what to do next. Walk in with a plan. As a beginner, a full body routine two to three times a week, or a simple upper/lower split, will take you much further than anything complicated.

When I first decided I wanted to start strength training, I had no clue about programs, splits, or training volume. I was going to the gym 3 times a week and, since I didn't know what to do, every time I just did all the machines available (yes, you read that right, I did ALL the machines in one session 😄). It was exhausting and barely efficient. If I had known what to do back then, I'd have ten years of proper training behind me by now. I'd have seen results faster, and my whole fitness journey would have been so much easier and smoother.

Also, please, please, please, resist the urge to copy an advanced lifter’s program because it looks impressive online. Their split exists to manage years of accumulated fatigue and very specific weak points. Yours should exist to build a base. Once the fundamentals are second nature, and only then, is it worth adding complexity.

get curious about the science behind lifting instead of letting it intimidate you

One of the fastest ways to feel like you belong somewhere is to actually understand what you’re doing there. Instead of assuming everyone else in the weight room knows something you don’t, get curious. Learn what progressive overload actually means and why it matters. Learn roughly how much protein your body needs to build muscle. Learn why lifting heavy won’t make you bulky.

The more you learn, the more engaged you’ll become. This isn’t about turning yourself into a certified coach overnight. It’s more about replacing intimidation with information. Understanding the basics of how strength training works transforms it from a mindless chore into something intellectually stimulating. You start making connections, seeing patterns, understanding why certain things work and others don’t.

And honestly, it’s just cool to know what’s happening inside your body when you lift. Your muscles are literally adapting and getting stronger, your bones are getting denser, and you’re building something that will serve you for decades. That’s pretty amazing when you think about it.

learn the unwritten rules so you stop guessing

A big part of feeling like an outsider in a gym is not knowing the etiquette, and being terrified of breaking a rule nobody explained to you. So here it is, spelled out:

• wipe down equipment after you use it

• re-rack your weights

• if someone is between sets on a machine you want, ask if you can work in rather than hovering behind them like a threat

• don’t film yourself without checking if anyone in the background minds

• don’t sit on a machine doomscrolling between sets if you can help it, both for your own focus and everyone else’s comfort

• put the weights back where they belong, not a 65 kg dumbbell next to an 8 kg one; it makes no sense, sorry

• understand that the gym is a public space, so if someone asks to work in with you on a machine, don’t act like it bothers you (even if it does)

find the courage for the first step, then repeat it

Everything above helps. But at some point, none of it replaces actually walking in. The first session will probably feel awkward no matter how prepared you are. Mine did. You go once, it’s uncomfortable. You go again, it’s slightly less uncomfortable. You keep going, and one day you realize the fear quietly left without announcing itself.

Unfortunately, I don't have a life-changing hack for you. What kept me coming back day after day, and then year after year, was thinking deeply about my body-and-health-related values. I wrote down the things that really matter to me when it comes to my body and my physical health.

I know I want enough muscle, not only for my overall health but also for the look I like. I want to feel strong and perform well in my workouts. I can't achieve that training at home. And hear me out, please: that doesn't mean you can't build muscle and change your body training at home, at least up to a point. But like I said before, there are limits only a fully equipped gym can get you past. So for my goals, I need the gym.

Write down your goals. Be honest about what you really want, and if it makes sense to start going to the gym, get your membership and take the first step. I promise you won't regret it.

before you go…

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

Thanks for reading,
— Glicia

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

I turned 43 this year and I still have trouble believing it when I look in the mirror. It’s hard to explain, but I don’t see a midlife woman in the reflection. Maybe because in my head I’m still a 20-year-old trying to figure out how life works, full of dreams and wanting to live incredible things. Maybe because I was blessed with my family’s genetics and I don’t look my age. But mostly because, health-wise, I’m in the best moment of my life. I’m in my best shape ever. I have endurance, energy and strength I never had before. I feel capable. Which is the complete opposite of my twenties, when I had no confidence, was physically weak, underfed, and constantly sick. Back then, a simple cold could keep me in bed for days. Today I can’t remember the last time I got sick.

So this image of the woman in her forties that lives in the collective imagination doesn’t match anything I know. And I’m certain it doesn’t match the reality of many other women either. Because contrary to what this whole discourse wants us to believe, your forties don’t have to be a decade of pain and decline. This is not the age where you’re supposed to have fragile health, aches everywhere, and a body you don’t recognize anymore.

But that’s the story being sold, and business is good. The moment the algorithm decides you’re over 40, your feed changes. Suddenly it’s full of “coaches” explaining that your metabolism is broken, your hormones are out of control, and your belly fat is a cortisol problem that only their 30-day reset can fix. There are supplements for your hormones, detoxes for your liver, protocols for your inflammation. Everything has a name, a villain and a price tag. And I understand why it works. This marketing targets a painful spot for most women: getting older. It catches us at a vulnerable moment, when the body starts changing, when doctors shrug off our questions, when reliable information is hard to find. Fear sells better than facts. If someone tells you your body is broken and then offers you the solution, you listen. Especially when everything around you keeps repeating that aging, for a woman, is a slow catastrophe you should fight with everything you have.

Don’t get me wrong. The changes are real. Perimenopause is real, and for some women the symptoms are brutal. None of this should be minimized, and I won’t pretend a positive mindset fixes hot flashes. What I refuse to accept is the conclusion the wellness industry draws from it: that your body after 40 is a problem to solve, and that the solution costs 89 euros a month.

Here is what really works: lifting heavy weights, eating enough instead of surviving on 1,200 calories, taking care of your sleep and your mental health. And most importantly, doing all of this for months, then years.

The hard part is that nobody can sell it to you, because you have to do it yourself.

I started lifting seriously at 37. Six years later I’m stronger than I’ve ever been, and I’m not an exception or a genetic miracle. I’m just proof that the timeline they sell us is wrong. The women I see at the gym in their 40s, 50s and 60s are proof too. Maybe my real problem with “midlife woman” is that marketing turned it into a diagnosis. A market segment. A before picture. And I refuse to be a before picture. Lifting not only changed my body, it changed the way I see and treat myself. I’m not a fragile woman, desperate and ready to believe the first person who tells me that at 40 I should stick to gentle movement so I don’t stress my body, eat like a toddler to lose belly fat, and swallow 15 different capsules every morning to regulate my hormones.

I’m doing exactly what I should be doing, and my plan is to spend the second half of my life stronger than the first. Here’s how you can do it, too:

#1. Lift weights, and lift heavy

Two or three sessions a week are enough. Muscle is the closest thing we have to an anti-aging medicine. It protects your bones, your metabolism and your independence later in life.

#2. Eat enough food

Being on a low-calorie diet most of the time is not a health plan, it’s a slow burnout. Prioritize protein at every meal (a portion the size of your palm is a good start) and stop treating carbs like the enemy. If you’re lifting heavy, eating at maintenance will improve your body composition without needing to deprive yourself.

#3. Take your sleep seriously

Seven to nine hours is where your hormones, your recovery and your mood actually get regulated. No supplement can make up for chronic bad sleep.

#4. Move outside the gym

Daily walks, stairs, carrying your own groceries. This kind of low-intensity movement takes care of your heart, your joints and your stress levels without wrecking your recovery.

#5. If you have real symptoms, see a real doctor

Irregular cycles, brutal hot flashes, sleep falling apart, mood swings that scare you. That’s a conversation for a gynecologist or an endocrinologist, with bloodwork on the table, not for a stranger on Instagram selling a hormone-balancing protocol.

before you go…

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

See you in the next letter,
— Glicia

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

If you told me ten years ago that I’d be the person who actually enjoys going to the gym, who even looks forward to it, I would’ve laughed in your face. But here we are: writing a publication about fitness, training for my personal trainer certification, and in better shape than I was in my twenties (FYI, I’m 43 now).

The reason I’m telling you this is because for a long time, none of it worked. I tried every program, every diet, every “just eat less and move more” piece of advice you can imagine, and none of it stuck. Not because I wasn’t trying hard enough, but because I was chasing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. It took years of trial and error, and a fair amount of wasted time and money, before I found the strategies that actually worked. And by “worked,” I don’t just mean physically. Yes, my body changed. But what changed more was how I saw strength training altogether: not as a punishment for what I ate, or a countdown to some ideal body, but as something I got to do for myself, that made me stronger, sharper, and more at home in my own skin.

Since I started this newsletter, I’ve wanted to build something beyond the articles. Something that goes further than a Sunday read. Because I know how it feels to stand in the middle of all the fitness information out there today, contradictory studies, fifteen different opinions on the same topic, and have no idea where to start. I’ve been there. I spent years piecing things together from forums, Instagram reels, and trial and error, when what I actually needed was a clear, structured place to begin. That’s what I wanted to build for you.

I’ve been sitting on this for months, turning it over in my mind, refining it, getting it just right. And now I’m finally ready to share it with you:

Introducing The Member Hub, an ever-growing library of resources and frameworks designed to help you get stronger with more confidence.

Here’s what you’ll find inside:

⭐️ Practical tools (not just articles): In-depth guides on training, nutrition, and routines, complete with checklists and step-by-step breakdowns you can actually put into practice.

📝 The Logbook: A monthly training journal where I share the exact program I’m running, my goals, the why behind them, what worked, what didn’t, and what I’m changing next. It’s a real-time look at how I set goals, adjust my training, and track my progress along the way.

🦋 Seasonal Challenges: Four times a year, we’ll tackle a new goal together. Whether you’re rebuilding your routine, staying consistent with your training, or working on healthier habits, each challenge is designed to help you move forward without overcomplicating the process.

what this means for you

The Member Hub is exclusively for paid subscribers.

The idea is simple: help you build your own library of resources you can actually return to, instead of saving the same ten articles over and over and never doing anything with them.

All the resources will live in one place, in the archives of this publication, under “The Member Hub” so you can find everything easily the moment you land on the never not hungry homepage.

Subscribe now

final thoughts

When I started publishing never not hungry nine months ago, I honestly had no idea if anyone would want to read what I had to say. I wrote because I couldn’t keep all the burning, passionate ideas inside me any longer. The fact that there are so many of you here now, reading, sharing, and writing to me about how these ideas have changed the way you think about strength training, nutrition, and your health, means more than I can put into words.

I’m very aware of paywall fatigue on Substack. I feel it too. That’s exactly why I took so long to make the leap and launch this project. I hope it helps you cut through the noise, stop restarting from zero every time life gets in the way, and actually build the kind of strength, in your body and in your head, that sticks.

Thank you for your support, for reading, commenting, and sharing my work. It means a lot ❤️,

—Glicia

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

Which brings me, very conveniently, to today’s topic.

Over the last six years, my relationship with training has had real highs and real lows. Some months I couldn’t wait to get to the gym. Other months, the couch won more often than I’d like to admit. If I had relied on motivation alone, I would have quit years ago. What kept me consistent was never willpower. It was systems. Small structures that make training easier to execute and, just as important, more enjoyable. Today I’m sharing the five that made the biggest difference for me.

1. learn when your body actually wants to train

I’m a morning person. When I train early, I have more energy, I’m more focused, and the whole day seems to roll better. So I plan all my workouts for the week at fixed morning slots, like appointments I don’t negotiate with myself every day. That’s the point of a fixed schedule: the decision is already made. You’re not spending mental energy at 6 pm debating whether you’ll go or not. You just go, because it’s Tuesday and Tuesday is lower body.

That said, I don’t let it become a prison. If something comes up and I can’t train in the morning, I simply swap the order of my tasks when possible and train later. The workout still happens, just at a different time.

If you don’t know your best window yet, pay attention for a week or two. Notice when you have the most energy and when your workouts feel the least like a chore. Then build your schedule around that, not around what some 5 am motivational video told you.

2. review your goals at least three times a year

Goals expire. The goal that excited you in January can feel completely stale by June, and training without a clear purpose is the fastest way to lose steam. So about three times a year, I sit down and ask myself what I actually want from my training right now.

I like working in phases. Some phases are all about performance: lifting five times a week, chasing progressive overload, maximizing muscle growth. Others are more about quality: slowing down my tempo to perfect a movement, improving mobility, working on my general fitness. And some phases are just... calm. Maintenance mode. Those matter too.

Right now, my goal is to be a fitter person in the health sense of the word. My lifting is focused on the main muscle groups, with extra attention on my glutes because that’s my current aesthetic priority (I contain multitudes). On the cardio side, I want to run faster, so I follow my running plan religiously. My current split: lower/upper four times a week, plus two runs that I plan to bump up to three in the coming weeks.

The beauty of phases is that they match your life. Crazy season at work? Maintenance phase. Feeling ambitious? Performance phase.

You’re not failing your plan, you’re adjusting it.

3. save your best media for training only

This one is my favorite because it feels like cheating. I pick media I really want to consume and I make it exclusive to training. All my runs (including the long ones) are on the treadmill right now—I refuse to run outside in this heat, I have my limits—and I always have an audiobook ready for them. The rule of the game: I can only listen to that audiobook during my long treadmill runs. Nowhere else. So every week I actually look forward to a 90-minute treadmill run because I need to know what happens next in the story. Same logic with music. I have playlists I only play when I lift.

There’s real science behind this. It’s called temptation bundling, which is a fancy way of saying you pair something you should do with something you love doing. Your brain starts associating the workout with the reward, and showing up gets easier.

And it works way beyond the gym. Podcast you love? Only while folding laundry. Trashy reality show? Only while meal prepping. Use it on any task you keep avoiding.

4. find a rhythm you can keep for years

The best training plan is not the most impressive one. It’s the one that fits your actual life. If you can only train twice a week, that’s completely fine. Two sessions a week, done consistently for years, will beat six sessions a week that collapse after three weeks every single time.

If your time is limited, make those sessions count. Go for full body workouts built around compound movements, meaning exercises that work several muscle groups at once, like squats, rows and presses. More muscle worked per minute, more results per session.

Consistency is boring advice, I know. But it’s the entire game.

5. don't be afraid to mix it up

Strength training stays the foundation, and I’ll die on this hill. Building muscle protects your bones, your metabolism, your joints, and your independence as you age. Health organizations recommend a minimum of two strength sessions a week, and I consider that non-negotiable for long-term health.

But around that base, play. Yoga, pilates, running, hiking, whatever calls you. Variety breaks the monotony, trains your body in different ways, and keeps motivation fresh. I love lifting, but running does something for my head that no barbell can. And I recently started doing Hyrox sessions from time to time. I’m hooked, and I want to make it a regular part of my routine.

so, to sum it up…

Know your best time and protect it. Give your training a purpose and renew it a few times a year. Bribe your brain a little. Choose a rhythm you can sustain. Keep it varied enough to stay fun.

Notice that none of this requires being a disciplined person. I'm not one. On paper, I'm actually a great candidate for quitting, but having a setup that catches me on the days when motivation doesn't show up is what keeps me going. Hard days will always come, for everyone. The people you see training year after year aren't more motivated than you. They've just made showing up the path of least resistance.

So my advice: stop waiting to feel motivated and start making it easy, and pleasant, to show up. Discipline isn’t something you have. It’s something you set up. And you can start setting it up this week, with just one of these five strategies. Pick the easiest one first.

Now I’m curious. What actually keeps you showing up? Or if you keep falling off, where does it usually break down? Tell me in the comments, I read every single one.

before you go…

If you think this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

That’s all for now,
— Glicia

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

it took me an embarrassingly long time to learn the thing nobody hands you when you start lifting: you cannot build muscle on a diet of “less.” muscle needs food. real food, enough of it, on purpose. building it slowly, with a little extra on your plate, is how you actually change your body.

that’s the whole reason i put together a step-by-step bulking guide for you. it’s the guide i wish someone had given me when i started my fitness journey, before i wasted all that time scared of carbs and terrified of the scale moving up.

so here's what you'll find inside this guide

a full walk-through of how to run a bulk from start to finish, written for women, in plain language, with nothing thrown at you that i don’t explain. it covers:

• how many calories and how much protein you actually need, with the math done for you

• how to set your macros without overthinking it

• training, cardio, sleep, and recovery, the parts that quietly make or break your results

• what to do when the scale stalls, or climbs too fast

• how and when to end a bulk, which is the part almost everyone forgets

• the mindset side, because watching the scale rise on purpose is hard after years of dieting

honestly, this is the kind of resource i’d have happily paid for when i started.

if you’ve been lifting for months and look exactly the same, or you’ve wanted to build muscle and had no clue where to start, this one’s for you.

the download link is at the end of this article ⬇️

about the author

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. i write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

Read more

i didn’t touch creatine until i’d already trained consistently for a full year, with all the other parts of my routine locked in. that choice was entirely intentional, and it’s the whole reason i can talk about creatine honestly. because i do the work, i can say that yes, creatine is a great supplement and it works.

my problem with creatine, and with most supplements on the market, is that the internet has turned it into either a miracle powder or a dangerous chemical, depending on which video the algorithm serves you. and like everything these days, the truth is a lot more nuanced than that.

what creatine actually is and who it’s for

creatine is a compound your body already makes and stores, mostly in your muscles. you also get it from food, mainly red meat and fish. its job is to help regenerate ATP, which is the molecule your cells use for quick, explosive energy. when you lift something heavy or sprint, you burn through ATP fast. creatine helps you top it back up faster, which means you can do a little more before you fail.

when you supplement with creatine you’re not adding a foreign substance. you’re topping up a tank your body keeps anyway, just usually not all the way full.

supplementing with creatine monohydrate (the cheap, well-studied form, ignore the fancy expensive versions) raises the amount stored in your muscles. the international society of sports nutrition, after reviewing decades of research, calls it the most effective supplement available for increasing high-intensity exercise capacity and lean body mass during training.1 that is a strong statement from a cautious body of scientists, and they don’t hand those out lightly.

now, i need you to really pay attention, because this is where most women get it wrong. creatine helps most when you train hard and push close to your limit. if you lift heavy, do sprints, or play a sport built on short explosive bursts, that’s exactly the kind of effort it supports. it buys you an extra rep or two and a bit more power, and over months that adds up to real strength and muscle.

if you go to the gym once in a while, scroll your phone between sets, and your sleep and nutrition are a mess, creatine will do almost nothing for you. i mean that plainly. a supplement is the last 1 percent, and it only matters once the other 99 is handled.

and that's exactly why i waited a year. i wanted the foundation built first, so i could actually tell what the supplement was adding.

now let's talk science for a second. i know it's boring, but it's the only way to know whether you're investing in something worth your money or just paying for expensive pee. for women specifically, the research is promising but still catching up, because we've been badly underrepresented in this field for years. a recent review found positive effects on strength, exercise performance, and possibly mood and cognition in women, with particularly interesting benefits around menopause and bone health. 2 some studies show smaller short-term strength gains in women than in men, but longer trials tend to close that gap. the honest summary: the case for women is strong and getting stronger, even if it’s not settled in every detail.

what it feels like for me

four and a half years in, here’s my actual experience.

i won't lie, when i started taking creatine i had big expectations. i'd done my research and read the studies, but a part of me still secretly hoped it would help me build noticeably more muscle, and build it faster. what i actually got was less dramatic than that, but good enough that i've never stopped taking it (and honestly, i think i'll take it for the rest of my life).

recovery is the biggest benefit i got. i feel like i’m able to bounce back faster between hard sessions, and i feel less wrecked the day after legs. i also recover better for my runs. i’m doing 2 runs a week right now (on top of 4 lifting sessions), one focused on speed and one more focused on distance and endurance. i usually do my long runs on the weekend and honestly, i feel really good and recovered, and i’m almost sure creatine is helping me with that.

another cool benefit is the pump. i mean, everyone loves a good pump. after i started taking creatine, my muscles feel a little fuller. this side effect is not in your head and, most importantly, it’s not fat. creatine pulls a small amount of water into your muscle cells. it’s an osmotically active compound, which is a fancy way of saying water follows it inside the cell. your muscle cells swell slightly, which is what creates that full feeling.

and last but not least, creatine helps me train harder. on the days my muscles are screaming, it lets me squeeze out those extra one or two reps and push a set closer to failure instead of stopping with something left in the tank. that matters more than it sounds. training close to failure, that point where you genuinely couldn’t do another clean rep with good form, is one of the biggest drivers of muscle growth. so anything that helps me get a little closer to that line, a little more often, is quietly helping me build more muscle over time.

the myths that make me cringe

let me clear out the nonsense, because there’s a lot of it.

“creatine makes you fat or bloated.”
it can cause a small increase in water held inside your muscles, which might show up as a kilo or two on the scale early on. that’s water in the muscle, not fat, and many people barely notice it. it’s also part of why your lifts go up.

“creatine causes hair loss.”
this one comes from a single 2009 study of rugby players that found a rise in DHT, a hormone linked to hair loss in some people. the problem is the study never actually measured anyone’s hair. not once. no follicle counts, no hair density, nothing. and in over fifteen years, nobody has been able to replicate even the hormone finding. a 2025 randomized controlled trial measured both DHT and hair health directly over twelve weeks and found no difference between creatine and placebo.3 the scary headline is built on one shaky study that measured the wrong thing.

"creatine wrecks your kidneys."
this is probably the most repeated and most wrong. in healthy people, robust research, including systematic reviews covering doses from 1 up to 80 grams a day across durations from days to years, shows no harm to kidney function.4 the confusion comes from a lab quirk: creatine slightly raises a marker called creatinine that doctors use to estimate kidney function, which can look alarming on a blood test without meaning anything is actually wrong. if you have a pre-existing kidney condition, talk to your doctor first and get monitored. for everyone else, the safety record is excellent.

how i take it

no loading phase, no cycling. i take 3 to 5 grams of creatine monohydrate every day, whenever is convenient, usually stirred into a glass of water or a shake. that’s my whole protocol, and it’s backed by the official recommendations.

you can do a loading phase, around 20 grams a day split into four doses for a week, if you want the effects faster. it works, but it’s optional, and it’s more likely to cause that early water-weight bump and the occasional upset stomach. a flat 3 to 5 grams daily gets your muscles fully saturated in about three to four weeks with none of the fuss. consistency is the only thing that matters. creatine isn’t a pre-workout you feel kick in; it works by building up and staying topped off. take it every day, training day or not.

so, to sum it up, creatine is one of the few supplements that earns its reputation. it’s cheap, it’s one of the most studied compounds in sports nutrition, it’s safe for healthy people, and it does what it claims if you train hard enough to need it.

but it’s a multiplier, not a starting point. it multiplies the work you’re already doing. if the work isn’t there, there’s nothing to multiply. build the training, fix the food, protect the sleep, and then, if you want a small, reliable, well-researched edge, creatine is waiting. that’s the order i did it in, and four and a half years later, it’s still in my routine every morning.

before you go…

are you taking creatine? if yes, how long, and have you noticed a difference? hit reply and let me know. i read every response.

and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

if you handed me a blank slate tomorrow, took away the six years of training, the gym routine that runs on autopilot now, and told me to start over, i wouldn’t panic. i’d actually feel a little relieved. because i know now what took me years to figure out, and most of it is simpler than the fitness internet wants you to believe.

when i first started, i did everything backwards. i ate less, trained more, and treated my body like a problem to fix. i bought into the idea that getting in shape meant shrinking. it took me a long time to understand that an athletic body is not built on restriction. it’s built on fuel, consistency, and a handful of habits that are almost boring in how plain they are.

so here’s how i’d do it again, from zero.

nutrition: eating to support your training, not to punish yourself

i’ll be honest with you. the biggest shift in my whole fitness life had nothing to do with a workout.

it was learning to eat enough.

for years i thought “healthy” meant tiny portions and constant low-grade hunger. i’d eat a sad lettuce salad (no carbs, not enough protein, no taste) and call it a meal, then wonder why my workouts felt like wading through mud and why i was thinking about food every fucking hour. the name of this newsletter is a joke and a confession at the same time. i spent so long fighting hunger that now i treat it like information. hungry usually means my body needs something, and that something is fuel.

if i started over, my plate would follow a simple shape. a clear protein source in every single meal. half the plate fruit and vegetables. the rest a mix of carbs and fats that i actually enjoy eating.

if you have no idea where to start with nutrition, i wrote a whole piece on it, with a step-by-step breakdown 📝

never not hungry

how to eat to gain muscle and lose fat (beginners friendly)

If you've ever tried dieting, you've probably ended up in one of these two camps at some point…

Read more

3 months ago · 915 likes · 11 comments · glicia carence 🧚🏻‍♀️

for the purpose of this article, i’ll just cover the basics.

protein first, because it’s the one most beginners undereat and the one that matters most for building muscle. protein is the raw material your body uses to repair and grow the tissue you break down when you train. i’m not precious about the source, i just make sure something protein-rich is on my plate before i build the rest of the meal around it.

then the produce. half the plate fruit and veg, because that’s where most of your fiber, water, and micronutrients live. and because it lets you eat a genuinely large amount of food for not many calories. this is the trick that changed how full and satisfied i feel: high volume. i’d rather eat a giant bowl that takes me twenty minutes to finish than a sad little portion i inhale in three bites and resent afterward.

my faves: big roasted vegetable bowls, fruit with yogurt, soups, air-fried veggies and potatoes, all sorts of veggies mixed with carb sources to add more volume for fewer calories (pasta, quinoa, rice, beans). and don’t forget the spices and condiments to bring flavor. all of these are delicious, nutritious foods you look forward to, not food you tolerate.

and whole foods most of the time. not all the time. i’m not interested in a version of fitness where you can never have a croissant, which would be both tragic and unsustainable. the “most of the time” is doing the heavy lifting here. if the bulk of what you eat is minimally processed and built around protein and produce, the occasional pastry or glass of wine doesn’t move the needle.

food is not the enemy of the body you want. it’s the thing that builds it. you cannot grow muscle, recover from training, or have the energy to be consistent if you’re running on fumes.

eat to support the work, not to apologize for existing.

training: full-body strength, built on movement patterns

if i started over, i would not walk into the gym and start doing random machines based on whatever was free. i did that for months and it got me nowhere except mildly sore and very confused.

i’d train three to four times a week, full body each session, and i’d build everything around seven movement patterns: squat, lunge, hinge, push, pull, carry, and rotate.

let me explain why patterns instead of body parts, because this is the thing i wish someone had told me on day one. your body doesn’t move in “biceps” and “abs.” it squats down to pick something up, it hinges at the hips to lift from the floor, it pushes things away, it pulls things toward you, it carries heavy bags up the stairs, it rotates to reach across. train the patterns and you train the whole functional, athletic body, not just the muscles that look good in a mirror.

for the first four weeks, i would chase one thing only: form. light weights, slow reps, paying attention to how each pattern actually feels. this is the most important phase of your program. spending four weeks learning to brace your core and move well is what lets you load heavy later without your lower back filing a complaint. i rushed this part the first time and paid for it with a tweaked back that set me back longer than four weeks ever would have.

then, for the next eight weeks, progressive overload. this is the engine of the entire thing, and it sounds fancier than it is. progressive overload just means gradually asking your muscles to do a little more over time. a little more weight, one more rep, one more set, better control. muscle grows in response to a demand it isn’t used to. if you lift the same weight for the same reps forever, your body has no reason to change. so you nudge it. last week you squatted 30 kilos for eight reps, this week you try for nine, or you add 2.5 kilos. small, steady, written down so you actually remember what you did. the notes app is your training partner.

cardio i’d treat as a tool, not a way to burn as many calories as possible. this is a big one for women especially, because so many of us were taught that cardio is how you earn your food or undo a meal.

i refuse to train that way anymore.

i run because it clears my head and because a strong heart and good aerobic fitness matter enormously for living a long, capable life. but you don’t need to run if you don’t like it. instead, add two or three moderate cardio sessions a week, the kind where you can still hold a conversation, plus maybe one harder effort. walking counts. cycling counts. dancing in your kitchen counts. it’s all movement that makes your body work better.

habits: the part you’re keep skipping (and the part that decides everything)

this is where most plans fall apart, and where i’d put more attention than i used to.

you can have the perfect meal plan and the perfect program, but if you sleep five hours, drink two glasses of water a day, and barely move outside the gym, none of it sticks. the habits around your training matter as much as the training. they’re just less exciting, so nobody sells courses on them.

the mistake i made, and the mistake i see everyone make, is trying to overhaul everything overnight. new diet, new program, 10,000 steps, three liters of water, eight hours of sleep, all starting monday. by thursday you’re exhausted and you quit, and then you decide you’re “just not disciplined.” you are disciplined. you just tried to change ten things at once, which nobody can do.

so i’d build from my real baseline, slowly. that means being honest about where you actually are, not where you think you should be.

if i currently walk 3,000 steps a day, my goal isn’t 10,000. it’s 4,000, then 5,000. water, same approach. if i barely drink any, i’m not going to suddenly chug three liters. i’d put a bottle on my desk and refill it twice. being even slightly dehydrated makes you tired, hungry, and weak in the gym. it’s the cheapest performance upgrade there is.

and sleep, which honestly might be the most important of all and the one i guarded least when i was younger. sleep is when your body actually repairs the muscle you trained and balances the hormones that control hunger and recovery. train hard and sleep badly and you’re pouring water into a leaky bucket. i’d pick one thing, a consistent bedtime, or no screens for the last hour before bed, and protect it like it matters. because it does.

the thread running through all of this is patience with yourself. pick one habit, get it steady, then add the next.

let’s wrap it up

if i had to start over, i wouldn’t try to be impressive. i’d eat enough, with protein and color on every plate. i’d lift full body a few times a week, learn the patterns, get my form right, then slowly add weight. i’d walk more, drink water, sleep like it’s part of the program, and i’d change one thing at a time instead of burning out trying to change all of them.

i already know someone is thinking, “how am i supposed to lift three times a week, add cardio, sleep eight hours, and get my steps in while having a job, kids, and an actual life?” i hear you, and i mean it. life gets hard, time is the one thing none of us have enough of, but hear me out.

if something matters to you, it’s worth giving it whatever you can, even when that isn’t much. if you don’t have the time to go all in right now, that’s completely fine. do what you can with what you have. you might not get the results you were hoping for, at least not as fast, but you’ll be building something anyway. i’m not going to pretend two workouts a week is the same as four. it isn’t. but two is a world away from zero.

see you in the next one 💌

before you go…

what's the hardest part of your fitness journey right now? not the beginning, not the end goal. right now, where you are today. hit reply and tell me. i read every single one.

and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

about the author

I’m Glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. I write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. When I’m not writing, I’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of Paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. Welcome to my little corner of the internet. I hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

Disclaimer: This is educational content, not medical advice. If you have a health condition, are pregnant, or have a history of disordered eating, talk to a doctor or registered dietitian before changing how you eat.

If you've ever tried dieting, you've probably ended up in one of these two camps at some point.

The first camp tracks everything obsessively. Every almond weighed, every coffee logged, every meal photographed before the fork touches the plate. It works for a while, and then life happens, and the whole system collapses.

The second camp refuses to track anything. They want a "healthy lifestyle" and "balance," which sounds good in theory. But in practice it usually means eating more or less the same way they've been eating for years, with no real grasp of calories or portions, and wondering why nothing changes.

I know that because I was in these two camps too many times. I tried to be healthy and eat only “clean” foods, telling myself that clean food is fine, it couldn’t make me gain fat, so I could eat as much as I wanted of that high-protein-sugar-gluten-taste-free banana bread as if it didn’t have any calories (unfortunately, it has a lot of calories and tastes like nothing).

I also obsessively tried to track every grain of rice, eating as little as possible, hoping that my body would magically change, that fat would disappear and that I would wake up one day shredded as f*.

Well, it didn't happen. Neither approach built the body I wanted, and here is why. The first one works short-term and burns people out. The second one keeps you exactly where you are, because without any clue of how much and what you're eating, you're going nowhere and your body won't change the way you expect.

The sustainable path sits between those two extremes, and it rests on three pillars. The first is the foundation, which means understanding how your body uses food. The second is the skill set you need to apply that understanding to your daily life without it becoming a second job. The third is the mindset, meaning what happens in your head around food, and why that is often what makes or breaks your results.

By the end of this article, you will understand every basic principle you need to eat for body composition change. Not a diet. Not a 30-day plan. A framework you can come back to for the rest of your lifting life.

Read more

the version of me that actually built the body i wanted did not do any of that. she made small, simple changes, one at a time, and stuck with them long enough for them to become automatic. it would make a terrible reel, but it worked better than every dramatic reset i ever attempted.

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protein first

this was the first real mindset shift. instead of building a meal and then trying to figure out where the protein would fit, i started with the protein and built everything else around it. eggs in the morning before anything else. chicken or fish as the anchor of lunch and dinner. a fat free greek yogurt when i needed a snack instead of reaching for whatever was in the cupboard.

i was not counting macros at that point, i was just making sure protein was present at every meal. that alone changed how i looked and recovered more than any supplement ever did.

eating before training

there’s no solid evidence that you should eat before training. for some people, training fasted is fine, for others, like me, it’s just not possible. my body refuses to work properly if my stomach is empty. for years i trained fasted because i thought it would help me burn more fat, and there’s no solid evidence for that either. so all it did was make my sessions feel terrible. when i started eating at least a small meal before training, the difference was immediate. more energy, better focus, stronger lifts (which means more gains). i couldn’t believe i had spent so long making things harder for myself for no reason.

if you’re like me, here’s my pro tip: about 1 hour before training, try to eat a small meal. carbs are the best option, but if you want to add some protein or fats, no problem. here are my fave pre-workout meals:

• banana + cinnamon + honey

• bread + jam + peanut butter

• granola bar

packing my bag the night before

this sounds ridiculous but it removed one of the biggest barriers i had. when my gym bag was ready by the door, going to the gym felt like the default option instead of a decision i had to actively make after work. on the days i had to pack my bag before leaving, the chances of me talking myself out of it went up significantly. removing friction works better than relying on willpower. every time.

tracking my workouts

i started writing down my exercises, weights, and reps in the notes app on my phone. nothing fancy, no special app at first, just a simple log. i cannot stress enough the difference it made. i could see what i did last week, which meant i knew exactly what i needed to beat this week. it turned every session into a small challenge instead of a random collection of movements.

tracking is what made progressive overload possible, and progressive overload is what made my body change.

sleeping like it’s my job

i spent a long time optimizing my training and my nutrition while sleeping five to six hours a night and wondering why i was always tired and sore. when i started treating sleep as part of my training plan, not something that happened after i was done with my day, things improved fast. i aim for seven to eight hours now. i am not always perfect at it, but the nights i sleep well, i train better, i recover faster, and i make better food choices because i am not running on caffeine and survival mode.

one thing at a time

the other thing i did differently was not trying to change everything at once. i picked one habit, focused on it until it stopped requiring effort, and only then added the next one. it took months to build the routine i have now. but because each piece was solid before i added the next, nothing fell apart. when you try to change ten things at once, one bad day takes down the entire system. when you change one thing at a time, a bad day is just a bad day.

there is no single moment when everything clicked. it was slow and quiet, but when i look at pictures from three years ago and compare them to now, the difference is the result of exactly these things. not a detox, not a 30-day challenge, not a complete life overhaul. just a few boring changes i never stopped doing.

about the author

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. i write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

but if your goal is to look "toned," and pilates is the only thing you are doing to get there, we need to talk. because the result you are picturing in your head and the stimulus pilates provides to your muscles are not the same thing, and the fitness industry has done a fantastic job of making you believe otherwise.

what “toned” actually means

the word "toned" gets thrown around constantly in women's fitness, and it almost never gets defined. when most women say they want to look toned, what they are describing is visible muscle definition. shoulders with shape, arms that look firm, glutes that are round, legs that have lines. that look requires two things:

enough muscle mass to create shape, and a low enough body fat percentage to see it.

there is no third option. there is no magic quality called "tone" that you can develop through specific movements. toning is not a physiological process. what people call toned is simply muscle plus leanness. and building muscle requires a certain type of stimulus that pilates, by design, does not provide enough of.

why pilates falls short for muscle building

muscle grows in response to mechanical tension. this is not an opinion, it is one of the most well-documented principles in exercise science. mechanical tension induced by resistance training is the primary driver of muscle hypertrophy, triggering the signaling pathways that increase protein synthesis and ultimately make your muscles grow.1 in other words, you need to load a muscle with enough resistance, progressively increase that resistance over time, and do enough volume to trigger adaptation and maintain that stimulus.2

this is what strength training with weights does. you squat heavier this month than last month, your muscles adapt by growing. and the evidence is clear that this works for women, not only for men. a recent systematic review and meta-analysis covering 126 studies and over 4,000 female participants found that resistance training significantly improves muscle mass and body composition in women across all ages.3

now, here's the thing. pilates uses bodyweight, springs, and bands. these can be challenging, especially for beginners, and they absolutely improve muscular endurance, core stability, and flexibility. but the resistance is limited, and the ability to progressively overload is minimal compared to a barbell or a set of dumbbells. you can only make a spring so much harder. you can add 2.5 kg to a barbell every week for months.

this does not make pilates bad. it makes it a different tool for a different job. a screwdriver is great, but if you need to hammer a nail, it is not the right choice.

the marketing problem

here is where i get frustrated. pilates is marketed to women as the path to a “long, lean, sculpted” body. studios use images of slim, defined women and imply that the reformer is what got them there. the language is always the same. lengthen, sculpt, tone. never “build muscle” or “get stronger,” because that sounds too aggressive for the audience they are targeting.

and that is the real issue. it is not pilates itself, it is the story around it. women are steered toward low-resistance, low-intensity exercise and told it will give them the body they want, while the thing that would actually get them there (lifting heavy, eating enough protein, being patient for a year or two) gets positioned as too masculine, too bulky, too much.

the women in those pilates ads who look “toned”? most of them also lift weights. or they are naturally lean with a body type that shows definition easily. the reformer is part of their routine, not the whole thing.

if you pay enough attention you’ll get what i mean. most pilates influencers have the same speech:

“i was doing a lot of strength training and i was bulky, and now i’m doing only pilates and my body completely changed.”

what they’re not telling you is that they probably did a cut to lose fat so their muscles would show, the same muscles that were built—guess how? lifting weights. but now they want to sell their pilates program, so they preach that the lean body they have was built only doing pilates 🙄

you can do pilates and strength training

if you love pilates, keep doing it. it is good for mobility, core strength, body awareness, and it can be a great complement to a strength training program. i am not asking you to quit.

but if you have been doing only pilates for months and wondering why your body is not changing the way you expected, this is probably why. you are missing the stimulus that builds muscle. adding two or three strength training sessions per week with actual weights, compound movements, and a plan for progressive overload will do more for the “toned” look in three months than another year of reformer classes alone.

you do not have to choose one or the other. but you do need to be honest about what each one can and cannot do. and right now, the industry is not being honest with you about that.

body recomposition is the thing most of us actually want but never get told how to do. losing fat and building muscle at the same time sounds like a contradiction, and for years i thought it was one. it isn’t. it just takes the right setup, and almost nobody explains that setup in plain language. so i wrote the handbook i wish i’d had when i started. it walks you through how recomp actually works, who it works best for, how to set your protein and calories, how to train so your body has a reason to hold onto muscle, and how to know if it’s working when the scale won’t tell you. no guesswork, just a clear plan you can follow.

and because recomp lives and dies on how you train, i’m adding a bonus on top: my current glute program. it’s the exact one i’m running right now. after years of experimenting with different strategies, i finally created the perfect glute workout and i’m sharing it with you. so if you want juicy (and also functional) glutes—because we’re here for the gains but also the strength benefits—you should give it a try. you can slot it straight into your week or use it to replace your current lower body day.

save both, come back to them, and take your time. this is the kind of stuff that works when you stop rushing it.

the download link is at the end of this article ⬇️

about the author

i’m glicia, a personal trainer and photographer based in paris. i write about getting stronger, eating actual food, and making fitness a little less complicated. when i’m not writing, i’m photographing my beautiful clients through the streets of paris, reading romantasy, or lifting heavy things. welcome to my little corner of the internet. i hope you’ll stay.

💖 find me elsewhere (instagram, pinterest, spotify)

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okay, i hesitated a lot before hitting publish on this one, because it’s more personal than what i usually share. but i don’t think i’m the only one who has struggled with body image, and honestly, it’s still a work in progress for me. as women, we’re told from a very young age that the way we look is tied to how people see us, how much we’re worth, how deserving we are of being appreciated and loved.

for a long time, i thought taking care of my body meant controlling it. measuring it, shrinking it, forcing it into a shape i had decided was the “right” one. i called it discipline. i called it self-care. i even called it love, sometimes, when i wanted to feel better about what i was doing. but none of it was love. it was an exhausting war i was fighting against myself every single day, and i was losing without even realizing there was another way to live.

this is the story of how i stopped (or at least, how i’m trying every day).

the teenage years, or when the mirror became the enemy

i grew up in a family where doing things correctly was almost a slogan. be disciplined (in every sense of the word), hold yourself well, get good grades, don’t embarrass anyone. i understood very early that to be loved, or at least appreciated, i had to be a living example of everything considered proper. and for a while, i pulled it off. i was the good student, the polite girl, the one adults nodded at approvingly. i learned the shape of what i was supposed to be, and i squeezed myself into it.

the problem with being the perfect example of anything is that there is no room to be a person underneath. you become the performance. and when the performance slips, even a little, the panic is immediate.

i was a perfectionist before i even knew the word. i remember rewriting entire pages of homework because one letter looked wrong. i remember crying over grades that most kids would celebrate. i remember the feeling of my stomach tightening whenever i thought someone might be disappointed in me. that feeling became the soundtrack of my childhood, and then of my adolescence, and eventually of almost everything i did for the next twenty years.

things got harder when i hit adolescence. i was always very thin. i don’t want to pretend i know what people in bigger bodies go through, and i’m not here to compare struggles, but being very thin can also mess with your confidence in ways people don’t talk about much. especially when you hear, on repeat, things like:

“you look sick. you should put on a few kilos. your legs are too skinny”—

comments meant to be caring, maybe, or meant to be jokes. they all landed the same way. they all told me my body was wrong.

i was bullied as a kid, and in my teenage years it got worse. that’s when my need for validation and my fear of other people’s eyes became a full-on obsession. every mirror was a tribunal. every photo was evidence. i spent hours analyzing my body from angles i didn’t even know existed, convinced that if i could just see myself the way others saw me, i could finally fix whatever was so obviously wrong.

and i was a teenager in the late 90s and early 2000s, which did not help. if you lived through that era, you know. the magazines lined up in every corner shop, telling us which celebrities had "let themselves go" for gaining three kilos. reality tv shows that treated women's bodies like entertainment. the infamous "heroin chic" aesthetic making a comeback every other season. britney's abs on loop. the low-rise jeans that required a certain kind of hip bone to even wear.

every piece of media was telling me the same thing in slightly different words, and the message was loud and consistent:

you are never thin enough, and when you finally are, you still won’t be thin in the right way.

because that was the real trap. even when i was thin, i wasn't thin the way i was supposed to be. i was "too skinny", not soft in the feminine places. you had to be thin, but with the right attributes, the ones that made you look like a woman instead of a kid.

i didn't fit. i never fit. and instead of questioning the rules, i decided the problem was me.

the internal voice that never shut up

the voice in my head during those years was relentless. it pointed out everything. the way my shoulders looked in a tank top. the fact that my thighs didn’t touch. my arms, too thin. my face, too tired. the meal i had eaten, too much. the meal i hadn’t, not enough. and underneath it all, the constant accusation of being lazy.

i was so afraid of being judged that i judged myself first, pre-emptively, to beat everyone else to it. it felt like armor. it was actually the knife.

i couldn’t be kind to myself. i didn’t even know what that would look like. kindness felt like letting my guard down, and letting my guard down felt like an invitation for someone else to point out what i had missed. so i stayed vigilant. i stayed critical. i stayed exhausted.

all of that internal noise had to go somewhere, and it went straight into my relationship with my body. food became a system of punishment and reward. exercise became a way to earn the right to exist in my own skin. i went through phases of eating as little as possible, telling myself it was discipline. i tried every restrictive diet that promised to fix what the mirror was telling me was broken. i did hours of cardio i hated because someone told me it would make me smaller, and smaller was the only goal i knew.

exercise, during those years, was not something i did for joy. it was something i did as punishment. punishment for not looking like the version of myself i had built in my head, a version that did not exist and never would, because she was stitched together from magazine pages and impossible standards.

i wasn’t trying to take care of my body. i was trying to correct it. and i treated it the way you treat a problem, not the way you treat something you love.

how strength training reshaped my relationship with my body

there was no dramatic moment i can point to and say “that’s when everything changed.” it was quieter than that. it was a slow accumulation of tiredness. i was tired of counting calories, of hating what i saw, of performing discipline for an audience that was mostly in my own head.

and one day i just thought, i cannot do this for another twenty years. i cannot keep waking up inside this fight. something has to give.

i didn’t know what i wanted yet. i just knew i wanted out.

i never thought of myself as athletic. i admired athletes, the way you admire people who speak a language you were told you’d never learn. strong women on magazine covers, runners crossing finish lines, gymnasts doing impossible things. i thought they were incredible, and i thought they were a different species. that wasn’t for me. my body wasn’t built for that. i wasn’t built for that.

when i first walked into the weights area of a gym, i was sure i was doing something wrong just by standing there. i believed every myth about lifting. that it would make me bulky. that women who lifted were doing something extreme and i should stick to the little pink dumbbells in the corner where i belonged.

i started anyway. mostly because i was too tired to keep doing what i had been doing. i figured if nothing else worked, i might as well try the thing that scared me.

the first few weeks, i had no idea what i was doing. i copied people. i watched videos. i asked dumb questions. i was bad at everything, and for the first time in my life, i didn’t care that i was bad at it. that was the strangest part. my perfectionism, the thing that had ruled me for decades, seemed to take a step back at the squat rack. maybe because i was so obviously a beginner that there was no point pretending otherwise.

somewhere in those first months, a small shift happened. i added two and a half kilos to a lift i had struggled with the week before, and something in my chest cracked open. not because i had burned calories and earned a meal. because i was stronger than i had been seven days ago, and i could feel it in my hands.

that feeling is the closest thing i’ve ever had to a turning point.

it was the first time in my life that my body had done something for me instead of being something i had to fix. the first time i had a reason to be grateful to it instead of angry at it.

slowly, my workouts started to look different. i stopped tracking them by how sweaty i got and started tracking them by how strong i felt. i stopped focusing on burning calories and started focusing on getting stronger. i stopped chasing smaller and started chasing more. more weight on the bar, more reps, more food to actually fuel all of this, more rest so my body could repair itself. every single variable flipped in the opposite direction of what i had been doing for twenty years, and for the first time, i was getting somewhere that felt real.

people often ask me what changed, and the honest answer is that it wasn’t one thing, it was a handful of small rewirings that stacked on top of each other until i was standing somewhere new.

from how it looks to what it can do

i want to be honest with you. i won’t pretend that i don’t care about aesthetics, about how my body looks. there’s this idea that chasing aesthetic goals in the gym is futile, something only dumb, illiterate influencers do. and i don’t agree with that. for me, wanting to change your body is not a problem in itself. the problem is the culture around it, but that’s not the point of this article.

so yes, i still want visible abs and defined shoulders, and there’s nothing wrong with that. the difference is that now, i want those things for reasons that don’t involve pleasing others. i have my own standards of what is aesthetically pleasing—like a jacked upper body, which by society’s standards of feminine beauty, is not what women are supposed to look like.

what i want you to take from this is that i spent years convincing myself that my body was a problem to be fixed. strength training gave me a completely different way of seeing it: something i'm building, something worth investing in. that one reframe changed how i eat, how i move, and honestly, how i talk to myself.

the small shifts that made a big difference for me:

🫀 learning to see movement as respect instead of punishment

when i go to the gym now, i'm not there to atone for anything. i'm there because my body is the only one i get, and showing up for it is a way of saying thank you.

🌸 accepting that constancy beats perfection, every single time

perfectionism had kept me stuck for years because anything less than the perfect week felt like failure, and failure felt like a reason to quit. once i let go of the idea that a workout had to be ideal to count, i started showing up on tired days, bad days, unmotivated days. those are the days that actually built me.

🦋 learning to listen to my body instead of fighting it

hunger is information, not a character flaw. fatigue is information. energy is information. i spent decades overriding every signal my body sent me, when really it had been trying to help me the whole time.

🧠 redefining what “in shape” even meant

for most of my life, being in shape was code for being thin. now it means being able to carry heavy groceries up five flights of stairs without thinking about it. it means waking up with energy and lifting something today that i couldn't lift last year. the definition got bigger and more honest, and suddenly i was already in it.

⛓️‍💥 detaching from other people’s eyes

i still catch myself sometimes, wondering what someone thinks of how i look in the gym, what someone thinks of the plate on my bar. but it has less power now. building confidence through actions instead of appearance is a completely different kind of confidence. it holds.

it’s not about becoming someone perfect

i still have bad days. i still have moments where the old voice tries to come back and tell me something is wrong with my body. the difference now is that i don’t automatically believe her. i listen, i notice her, and then i go to the gym and do the thing she told me i couldn’t do, and she gets a little quieter every time.

i am stronger than i have ever been. not just physically, though that too. i eat more than i ever have in my adult life, and my body is the most functional, most capable, and most trustworthy it has ever been. i train because i love what it gives me, not because i’m trying to earn my place. i am still a work in progress, and for the first time i think that’s beautiful instead of terrifying.

if i could tell my teenage self one thing, it would be that self-love is not always soft. it is not bubble baths and affirmations in the mirror, though it can be. more often, it’s choosing what is good for you even when it’s uncomfortable. it’s eating the extra meal when your brain tells you not to. it’s resting when you’d rather push. it’s letting yourself be bad at something long enough to get good at it.

it’s stopping the war in your mind.

self-love is not about becoming someone perfect. it is about learning to treat yourself like someone worth taking care of. that’s it. that’s the whole thing.

i did not wake up one morning loving myself. that’s not how it works, and anyone selling you that is lying. what happened is slower and, i think, more honest. i stopped treating myself like someone i hated. and from that small shift, everything else started to grow.

Trust me, nobody is born a gym girl. I know it looks that way from the outside. You see women walking into the weight room like they own the place, loading up a barbell without hesitation, moving through their session like they have been doing it forever. But at some point, every single one of them was exactly where you are now. Confused, a little intimidated, wondering if people were staring at them.

A few years ago I walked into a gym for the first time in my life. I spent my first session doing random machines in whatever order I found them, wiping each one down like my life depended on it, and leaving after 30 minutes because I felt like I did not belong. That was my start. It was not cute, and nobody would have looked at me and thought “she’s a gym girly.”

But I went back. And then I went back again, and again, and again. And that is the whole thing, really.

If the gym feels like a foreign country right now, good. That means you are paying attention. It is a new environment with unwritten rules, equipment you have never used, and people who seem to know exactly what they are doing. Of course it feels uncomfortable.

The thing nobody tells you is that most people in the gym are not watching you. They are between sets, looking at their phone, thinking about their next exercise, or trying to remember if they did 3 sets or 2. You feel visible because you are hyper-aware of being new. That fades, I promise. It took me about two weeks before I stopped feeling like everyone was judging me, and about a month before the gym started feeling like a place I actually wanted to be.

a few things that make the beginning easier

📝 go in with a plan. even a simple one.

Knowing you are going to do 4 exercises before you walk through the door removes the anxiety of standing there wondering what to do next.

You can use one of the beginner templates from my article on programming your workouts ⬇️

Or find any basic full body routine and follow it for a few weeks. The specific exercises matter less than having a structure.

🎀 if the free weights area feels like too much at first, start with machines.

Machines guide your movement, so the risk of doing something wrong is low. They also have instructions printed on them, which is more than most dumbbells can offer. You can transition to free weights once you feel more comfortable with the movements.

⏰ go at quieter times if it helps.

Early mornings, mid-afternoon, or late evening tend to be less crowded. Having more space and fewer people around can make a big difference when you are still finding your footing. This is not a permanent strategy, just training wheels until you stop caring.

🎧 put your headphones on.

A good playlist or podcast creates a bubble around you that makes everything feel less exposed. It also signals to other people that you are in your zone, which tends to keep unsolicited advice to a minimum.

🦋 and give yourself a real chance.

Not three days, not one bad week. At least four weeks of consistent sessions before you decide whether this is for you. The first two weeks are adaptation. Your body is learning, your brain is adjusting, and everything feels harder than it will eventually be. The version of the gym that you will learn to love does not reveal itself on day one.

you do not need to feel like you belong before you start

This is the part that most women get backwards. You do not need the right clothes, the right shoes, the right level of fitness, or the right body. You become a gym girl by going to the gym. That is it. The identity follows the action, not the other way around.

There is no entrance exam. There is no minimum strength requirement. There is no moment where a light switches on and you suddenly feel ready. You start before you are ready, you keep showing up, and one day you realize you have not thought about whether you belong in weeks. Because by then, you just do.

I still remember the first time I walked into the weight room without hesitating at the door. It was not because I had gotten strong or because I finally looked the part. It was just because I had been there enough times that my body walked in on autopilot.

Repetition did what confidence could not.

So if you are reading this from your couch, wondering if you should sign up, or if you already have a membership but keep finding reasons not to go, here is your sign. Go once. Then go again. That is all it takes to start.

before you go…

What’s the most difficult part for you when it comes to your fitness journey?

and if this was useful, tap the ❤️, drop a comment, and share it with someone who needs to hear it.

💖 Find me elsewhere (Instagram, Pinterest, Spotify)

My grandma was the strongest woman I knew. Not in the gym sense. She never touched a barbell in her life. But she was the kind of woman who ran her own world. Independent, sharp, always moving, always doing something. She raised me, and for the longest time, I thought she’d just be like that forever.

Then she got sick. And she never recovered.

She spent the last five years of her life in a bed. Five years. The woman who used to do everything for herself couldn’t get up, couldn’t walk, couldn’t do the small things that made her who she was. I was 15 when it happened. I didn’t understand it the way I do now. At that age, you just feel the sadness of it without being able to put words on what it actually means.

The real shift came years later, when I saw other people in my family go through the same thing. Losing their independence, spending their final years unable to do the things they loved. That’s when I started connecting the dots between an active lifestyle, strength, and what kind of life you get to have when you’re older. I stopped thinking about fitness as something that existed to make me look a certain way and started seeing it for what it really is: a way to stay free and live on my own terms for as long as possible.

This conversation is happening a lot more in the fitness world right now, and I think it’s one of the most important shifts we’ve seen in a long time.

the longevity conversation is not just a trend

If you’ve been on social media lately, you’ve probably noticed that longevity is everywhere. Podcasts, books, influencers talking about optimizing your healthspan. Some of it is genuinely useful. Some of it is rich people spending thousands on blood panels and hyperbaric chambers. But underneath all the noise, there’s a real and important idea.

The choices you make now about how you move and eat will directly shape the quality of your life decades from now.

And here’s what keeps coming up in almost every serious conversation about longevity: strength training. Resistance training, specifically, keeps showing up as one of the most powerful tools we have for aging well. The research behind this is not new, but the mainstream attention it’s getting definitely is. And frankly, it’s about time.

I have to be honest, I’ve become a bit obsessed with this topic lately. A big part of that started with reading Outlive by Peter Attia. I don’t usually pick up non-fiction unless it’s something I genuinely can’t stop thinking about, and longevity had been on my mind for a while already. In the book, Attia breaks down what he calls the “Four Horsemen” of aging (heart disease, cancer, neurodegenerative disease, and type 2 diabetes) and makes a case for a completely different approach to health. Instead of waiting until something breaks and then trying to fix it, he argues we should be building strength, metabolic health, and cardiovascular fitness now, as a strategy to prevent those diseases from taking over later. Exercise, and strength training in particular, is at the center of everything he recommends.

Reading it only made me want to keep digging. I love understanding the science behind how our bodies work, especially when it comes to health. And the upside is that I get to break it all down for you so you don’t have to sit through the boring graphs and complicated data.

So let’s get into what actually goes on in your body over time, because most people don’t think about this until it’s already a problem. I’ll keep it as simple as I can. The goal here is for you to understand the tools that can help you live a better and longer life, in a way that feels manageable and doesn’t turn into a full-time job.

what happens to your muscles as you age

Stay with me. I know this part is a lot of science, but I promise it's important if you want to live a better and longer life.

Starting around age 30, your body begins to lose muscle mass. The rate is roughly 3 to 5% per decade.1 That might not sound like much when you’re 35. But by the time you reach your 70s and 80s, it adds up fast. Some research suggests that by the eighth decade of life, people can lose up to 50% of their muscle mass.2 That’s not just about looking different. That’s about your body literally not being able to do its job anymore.

This process has a name: sarcopenia. And it doesn’t just affect how strong you are. It’s connected to a whole cascade of problems. Lower metabolic health, higher risk of falls, loss of independence, and higher mortality.3

Muscle isn’t the only thing that weakens over time. Bone density decreases too, and this is especially relevant for women. After menopause, the drop in estrogen accelerates bone loss significantly. Osteoporosis and osteopenia become real risks, and with them comes a much higher chance of fractures. A hip fracture in an older adult is not a small thing. It can be the beginning of a rapid decline in overall health and independence.

Resistance training directly addresses this. When you lift heavy things, you’re not just building muscle. You’re putting mechanical stress on your bones, and your bones respond by getting denser and stronger. This isn’t a marginal benefit. For women who are approaching or past menopause, this is one of the most effective non-pharmaceutical tools available for protecting bone health.4

the fitness industry failed women

This part frustrates me because it's barely talked about, and when someone does address women in perimenopause or menopause, it's usually to sell them some b.s. protocol with zero evidence behind it.

When women go through menopause, their bodies start losing muscle at a much faster rate than before. Estrogen, testosterone, and growth hormone drop—and all of that makes the body way more vulnerable to losing the muscle it already has. By the time women reach late postmenopause, a significant number of them are already dealing with real muscle loss.5 And most of them have no idea, because nobody warned them.

Think about that for a second. Women are going through one of the biggest physical transitions of their lives, and the mainstream fitness industry’s response is... more cardio. Eat less. Get smaller. Buy this detox tea. Do this 1200-calorie meal plan.

The messaging women receive about their bodies has almost nothing to do with their actual health. It’s built around aesthetics, around shrinking, around taking up less space. And it completely ignores what’s actually happening inside.

Nobody is telling women in their 30s and 40s to start building as much muscle as they can before menopause hits. Nobody is explaining that the muscle you carry going into that transition is like a safety net, that the more you have, the more you get to keep. Instead, women are sold the idea that being small is the goal, when their bodies are literally begging them to get stronger.

And here’s what makes it even more frustrating. The science on strength training and longevity is overwhelming. Research consistently shows that resistance training significantly lowers the risk of dying from pretty much everything, including heart disease, cancer, and all-cause mortality.6 Not by a tiny margin either. We’re talking about meaningful, measurable reductions in risk. When you combine strength training with aerobic exercise, the protective effect gets even stronger.7

Less than an hour of resistance training per week is already enough to make a real difference. And yet, so many women still avoid the weight room because the industry told them that lifting heavy would make them “bulky” instead of telling them it could literally extend their life.

If these results came in a pill, every doctor on the planet would prescribe it.

how to make it work in real life

I know. You just read a lot of science and your brain is probably going “cool, but what do I actually do.” Fair enough. The good news is that you don’t need to train like an athlete or spend three hours a day at the gym. You just need to be intentional and consistent.

If you’re starting from zero or coming back after a long break, here’s a realistic way to build a routine that covers all the bases.

1. strength training, 3 times a week

This is the non-negotiable. Full body sessions or an upper/lower split, whatever works for your schedule. Focus on compound movements like squats, deadlifts, rows, presses, and hip hinges. These exercises work multiple muscle groups at once and give you the most bang for your time. You don’t need to lift crazy heavy right away. Start with weights that feel challenging but manageable for 8 to 12 reps, and build from there.

2. zone 2 cardio, 2 to 3 times a week, 30 to 45 minutes

Zone 2 is low-intensity cardio where you can still hold a conversation, but just barely. Think brisk walking, easy cycling, light jogging, or even a long walk with some incline. This type of training improves your metabolic health, your cardiovascular endurance, and your body’s ability to use fat as fuel. Attia considers zone 2 one of the most important types of exercise for longevity, and the WHO recommends at least 150 minutes of moderate-intensity aerobic activity per week.8 You can combine this with your daily life too. Walk to the grocery store instead of driving, take the stairs, go for a walk after dinner. It all adds up.

3. one higher intensity cardio session per week

This could be interval training, a hard cycling session, or anything that pushes your heart rate close to your max for short bursts followed by recovery. Think 4 minutes hard, 4 minutes easy, repeated 4 times. This kind of training targets your VO2 max, which is your body’s ability to use oxygen during exercise. VO2 max declines with age, and a higher VO2 max is strongly associated with lower mortality risk. You don’t need a lot of it, but a little goes a long way.

4. mobility and balance work

This one gets overlooked a lot, especially by younger women who feel like they don’t need it yet. But building good mobility and balance habits early makes everything else work better and protects you from injury now and from falls later. Even 10 minutes before your workouts dedicated to mobility drills, single-leg exercises, or simple balance practice is enough to make a difference over time.

Beyond the gym, a few other things matter more than people realize:

• Sleep is one of them. Your body repairs muscle tissue, consolidates memory, and regulates hormones while you sleep. Consistently getting 7 to 9 hours of quality sleep is one of the simplest and most powerful things you can do for your health.

• Protein intake is another big one. Most women don’t eat enough protein to support muscle growth and maintenance. Aim for around 1.6 to 2.2 grams per kilogram of body weight per day, spread across your meals.

• And daily movement outside of your workouts counts too. Walking, taking the stairs, carrying your groceries, playing with your kids. An active lifestyle is not just about what you do in the gym, it’s about how you move through your entire day.

None of this has to be perfect. You don’t need to hit every single session every week to see results. What matters is the pattern over months and years. Show up more often than you don’t. That’s it.

I used to train because I wanted to look a certain way. I think most of us start there, and that’s fine. But at some point, the reason has to evolve, because aesthetics alone won’t keep you going through the years when progress is slow or life gets messy.

For me, the shift happened when I started connecting the dots between what I saw in my family and what I was learning about muscle, aging, and health. I stopped thinking about training as something I do for right now and started seeing it as something I do for the version of me that will exist in 30 years. The version of me that wants to travel, carry her own bags, walk up stairs without thinking twice, live alone if she wants to.

On days when I don’t feel like going to the gym, I don’t think about how I’ll look. I think about what I’m building. Every rep is a deposit into a long-term account. Every session is me telling my future self: I got you.

And honestly, when you train with that perspective, the aesthetic stuff comes along anyway. But it stops being the point. The point becomes freedom. The point becomes independence. The point becomes choosing how you want to live for as long as possible.

The other day I was talking with a friend about social media and all the fitness content out there, and she asked me:

“How do you stay in the fitness world (lifting, learning and writing about body science and nutrition, interacting with other people doing the same thing) without falling into all of its bullshit?”

I’d be lying if I told you the answer came easily. My first thought was to say:

“If you want to stay in the fitness world without falling into its traps, don’t look on social media.”

But the truth is, I still go on social media from time to time, and I still consume fitness content (though I usually prefer to do it on YouTube, and no, YouTube is not social media in my personal opinion, but I digress).

My personal experience with social media when it comes to fitness is complicated, to say the least. I used to follow dozens of fitness influencers. I told myself it was for inspiration and motivation, and for a while, I think it actually was. I would see a training video, feel excited about my next session, maybe pick up a new exercise or a nutrition tip. It felt productive, like I was learning and staying motivated just by scrolling.

I can’t pinpoint the exact moment it flipped, but at some point, the inspiration turned into something else. I would watch a woman with visible abs post her training day and immediately think about how far I was from looking like that. I would see someone’s progress photo and feel like my own results weren’t enough. Not fast enough, not visible enough. The content that was supposed to motivate me started making me feel guilty for not doing more, not training harder, not being further along.

And the worst part was the cycle it created. I would feel bad about my progress, and instead of getting up and doing something about it, I would keep scrolling. Watching another stranger’s workout, then another one, then another one. Sitting still while their lives moved forward and mine did not. I was stuck in this loop, consuming other people’s effort while producing none of my own, and I could feel it eating at me mentally in a way I hadn’t expected.

It took me a while to see that what I called inspiration was actually making me miserable.

Last year, I started setting some boundaries around the way I consume content on social media. It helped me stay sane while pursuing my fitness goals (and now also working in this industry). So in this article, I’ll share how I approached that.

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the comparison trap

When you’re constantly scrolling on social media, it’s hard not to fall for the comparison trap. I would see someone’s physique and immediately measure myself against it.

— “She started training at the same time as me, why does she look like that and I don’t?”

— “She eats the same calories, why is her progress faster?”

— “She has visible abs, what am I doing wrong?”

What I wasn’t seeing was the lighting, the angles, the pump right after a workout, the years of training before she even started posting, and the simple fact that her genetics and mine are completely different. I was comparing my real life to someone’s highlight reel and treating the gap between them as evidence that I was failing.

And this is not just about fitness. This pattern showed up in every area of my life where I was trying to build something. When I started my newsletter, I spent more time reading other people's newsletters than writing my own. When I was growing my photography work, I spent hours looking at other photographers' portfolios and feeling like mine would never be that good.

The comparison always led to the same place. Inaction.

The mechanism is always the same: you see someone who seems further ahead, you feel behind, and instead of doing your own work, you spend the next twenty minutes consuming theirs.

too much information, not enough execution

The other thing social media does is flood you with options. Every day there is a new workout split, a new nutrition approach, a new opinion from someone with a large following who sounds very confident. When you are exposed to fifteen different strategies in a single scroll session, it becomes almost impossible to commit to one.

So you don’t.

You start a program on Monday, see a different one on Wednesday, wonder if yours is optimal, and by Friday you’re researching a third option instead of just finishing the week.

This isn’t a discipline problem. It’s an environment one.

Your brain was not designed to process this many competing inputs and still make a clear decision.

The irony is that the people posting these programs and tips online are successful precisely because they picked one approach and stuck with it for a long time. But the platform rewards novelty, so they keep producing new content that makes you think you need to keep changing too.

how i took my brain back (and you can too)

About a year ago I decided to treat this like what it was, a problem, and actually do something about it. Not in a dramatic I-deleted-all-my-apps kind of way, but with small, intentional shifts that added up to a very different relationship with my phone.

1. creating a feed that doesn't make me feel like I'm not enough

The first thing I did was a ruthless unfollow. I went through every fitness account I followed and asked myself one question. Does this person’s content make me want to train, or does it make me feel like I am not enough? If the answer was the second, gone. I kept two or three creators whose approach aligned with mine and who genuinely taught me something. Everyone else, no matter how popular, no matter how nice they seemed, I unfollowed. My feed is my environment, and I get to choose what lives in it.

2. setting specific times to consume fitness content

No scrolling before training. No scrolling during training. My session is my session, my program is my program, and my numbers are my numbers. If I need to look up a technique for a specific exercise, I search for it intentionally, watch the video, and close the app. That is very different from opening Instagram with no purpose and letting the algorithm decide what I think about for the next thirty minutes.

I also started using screen time limits. Not because I do not trust myself, but because the apps are literally designed to keep you scrolling. A simple 30-minute daily cap on Instagram was enough to make me more intentional about when and why I open it. When you know your time is limited, you stop wasting it on content that does not serve you. Also, it helps to use it on your desktop, where the experience isn't the same and the urge to doomscroll is less tempting.

3. replacing the scroll with something else

The urge to pick up my phone did not disappear overnight, so I needed an alternative. In the morning, instead of opening Instagram in bed, I started reading a few pages of a book or writing down three things I wanted to get done that day. After training, instead of checking what everyone else was doing, I looked at my own numbers from the past few weeks. The comparison shifted from me versus strangers to me versus last month. And that comparison actually felt good.

Finally, I stopped treating social media as a place for validation. I used to post and then check how many likes it got, as if the number meant something about my value or who I am. When I stopped doing that, I realized that my life had been outsourced to strangers.

The real validation was in my personal achievements, and none of that needed an audience.

I stopped comparing my week 6 to someone else’s year 4. I started paying attention to my own data, my own progress, my own trajectory. And when I looked at those instead of looking at someone else’s, I could actually see that things were working (not only at the gym, but in different areas of my life).

The moment I started treating social media as a tool I use on purpose instead of a place I go to by default, things got better across the board.

Not just my physique, but my output, my clarity, and honestly my mood. Because constantly measuring yourself against other people’s curated results is exhausting, and it takes energy away from the one thing that actually moves the needle. Doing your own work.

If your phone is the first thing you reach for in the morning and the last thing you look at before bed, and the content you consume makes you feel like you are not doing enough, that is not inspiration. That is noise. And the fastest way to make progress on anything, whether it is your deadlift or your career or your side project, is to turn down the noise and focus on what is actually in front of you.

Your progress is real. Stop asking Instagram to confirm it.

I closed the app. I felt a little crazy. Because I have been lifting heavy for years, I sleep well, my cycle is regular, I eat enough, and my bloodwork is boringly normal. And yet, for a few seconds, I almost believed that my Wednesday leg day was secretly wrecking me.

If you have been anywhere near fitness content lately, you know exactly what I am talking about. The cortisol girlies are everywhere, and their message is always the same. Stop pushing. Stop sweating. Stop lifting. Walk more, stretch, sip adaptogenic lattes, and whatever you do, do not go near a barbell unless “you want to bloat, break out, and gain ten kilos of stress weight.”

I want to talk about this, because the science behind it is actually pretty clear, and the version being sold online is mostly panic wrapped in pastel graphics.

so what is cortisol, actually

Cortisol is a hormone your adrenal glands make, and calling it the “stress hormone” is a little like calling water the “drowning liquid.” It is technically true in the wrong context, and deeply misleading in every other one.

Cortisol helps you wake up in the morning. It regulates your blood sugar, your blood pressure, your immune response, and how your body uses fat, protein, and carbohydrates for fuel. It follows a daily rhythm, peaking about thirty minutes after you open your eyes and dropping throughout the day until it reaches its lowest point around midnight. Without it, you would not be able to get out of bed, handle a cold, or recover from a hard workout. People whose bodies stop making cortisol have a serious medical condition called Addison’s disease, and they need to take it as medication to stay alive.

So cortisol is not the villain. It is one of the hormones keeping you upright.

exercise raises cortisol (and that is the whole point)

Here is the part the short videos leave out. Every time you train hard, your cortisol goes up. That is not a bug, it is the feature. Cortisol is part of how your body mobilizes energy so you can actually lift the weight, finish the set, and recover afterwards.

Acute bouts of exercise cause a temporary rise in cortisol, with the biggest spikes coming from higher intensity and longer sessions. The key word here is temporary. Cortisol goes up during and shortly after training, then comes back down, usually within a few hours.1

Even more interesting, the people who train regularly tend to show a blunted cortisol response to stress over time. In other words, their bodies get better at handling stress, not worse. Which means that vigorous exercise actually dampened the cortisol response to a psychological stressor later in the day, resulting in lower overall cortisol levels and faster recovery.2

Translation, the woman telling you your deadlifts are frying your hormones has it backwards. Consistent training is one of the things that makes your stress response more resilient, not less.

acute spikes versus chronically high cortisol

This is where the confusion lives, and where most of the internet panic comes from. There is a real medical phenomenon called chronically elevated cortisol, and it is a problem. It is linked to insulin resistance, belly fat, poor sleep, and a weakened immune system. That is true, and I am not dismissing it.

But a short spike during a workout is not the same thing as chronically elevated cortisol. Not even close. One is a normal physiological response that resolves within hours. The other is a long-term dysregulation of your entire stress axis, usually driven by something that is putting your body under sustained pressure for weeks or months.

Conflating the two is like saying that because sprinting raises your heart rate, running causes heart disease. It is technically a sentence, but it is also nonsense.

what actually drives chronic cortisol issues

If you want to know what keeps cortisol stuck high over the long run, the research points to a pretty consistent list, and your squat rack is not on it.

Under-eating and chronic dieting.

A meta-analysis* published in 2016 looked at 13 studies and found that caloric restriction, especially fasting, significantly raised cortisol. The authors concluded that restricting food is itself a biological stressor, because one of cortisol’s main jobs is to release stored energy when the body thinks fuel is running low.3

In female athletes, short-term low energy availability has been shown to raise cortisol, suppress muscle protein synthesis, and disrupt hormonal function.4 So yes, the irony is brutal. The 1200 calorie diet that gets sold as a “cortisol reset” is probably what is raising your cortisol in the first place.

Not sleeping enough.

Sleep deprivation raises evening cortisol levels by around 37 to 45 percent the following day and delays the normal drop into the quieter nighttime phase.5 Chronic short sleepers consistently show higher cortisol than people who sleep enough, and this pattern is linked to insulin resistance and metabolic issues.6

Ongoing life stress.

Work pressure, unresolved anxiety, caregiving, grief, financial strain, a relationship that drains you. The stuff we all know is hard and somehow still underestimate. This is the stress cortisol was designed for, and when it never switches off, neither does the hormone.

None of these look like a barbell (just saying 👀).

why this trend is specifically aimed at women

Here is the part that frustrates me the most. Almost none of the “stop lifting, it is spiking your cortisol” content is aimed at men. The same intensity of training that gets framed as hormonal damage for women gets framed as discipline and grinding for men. Same sets, same reps, different story.

It fits into a much older narrative that women’s bodies are fragile, that we should not push too hard, that we should shrink and soften instead of getting strong. The language has been updated for 2026, it sounds wellness-coded and science-adjacent, but the underlying message is the same one women have been fed for decades. Do less. Take up less space. Walk, do not lift.

And it works because it sounds caring. It sounds like someone is looking out for you. That is what makes it so sticky, and so worth pushing back on.

my personal take on that

When I stopped under-eating and started lifting heavy four times a week, a lot of the symptoms people now call high cortisol got better, not worse. I slept deeper. My cycle got more regular. My energy stabilized. The bloating I used to blame on stress turned out to be what happens when you eat 1400 calories and try to train like an athlete.

What changed was boring and unsexy. I ate enough, around 2200 to 2400 calories most days, with protein at every meal. I prioritized sleep like it was my job. I kept lifting heavy, because strength training is one of the most effective tools we have for long-term metabolic and mental health. And I stopped taking advice from anyone trying to sell me a supplement in the same breath.

If you are training hard, eating enough, and sleeping well, your cortisol is almost certainly doing exactly what it is supposed to do. The short spike after a heavy set is not damage, it is adaptation. It is your body learning to be stronger.

Do not let a thirty second video with a sad piano track talk you out of the one thing that has been shown, over and over, to make women healthier as they age. Lifting heavy is not a cortisol problem. It is often part of the solution.

Get medical advice from your doctor, not from someone whose pinned comment is a discount code.