I first want to start off with one of my favorite parts of the month that feeds my soul.

As some of you may know, every month I go on GoFundMe and I select a random breast cancer patient’s fundraiser to support on behalf of our community, Ivy, and myself.

Today when I was on there, I stumbled upon Kelly’s fundraiser, who is battling stage 3 triple-positive breast cancer. The fundraiser was started by her four kids, and as I was reading her story, there is one line that absolutely made me cry: “We Need More Time With Our Mom”... Fudge that hit me hard.

That hit me hard, so I’ve made her our recipient for the month. This is the 76th cancer patient we’ve been able to support since I started my coaching business, and it fills my heart EVERY SINGLE MONTH ❤️

This is why I do what I do: not only to support those who are already going through cancer, but to help YOU reading this reduce your chances of being in that position.

Because I know that if I can help someone eat plant-based whole foods, exercise, move their body, build muscle, and lose fat/visceral fat, I am greatly reducing the risk of ever seeing any of you on GoFundMe.

So thank you to those of you who have ever joined our 1:1 program, bought my book, or joined our new course. This is possible because of you, so thank you.

Now let’s get into today’s message, since I didn’t receive any questions from last week’s newsletter (I guess I’ve taught you everything already 😉; in all seriousness, if you have any questions you’d like me to answer, just reply to this email and I’ll include them in the following newsletter issue).

This past Sunday, I was at our new church that Ivy and I just found because we moved near Las Vegas. And the pastor said something that I had to write down because I knew I would want to share it with you all.

I’ll make it my own version since I can relate to it on a personal level.

He said, “Some of you are in an abusive relationship... with yourself.” If a stranger were to talk to you the way that you talk to yourself, you would hit them. If I asked you to raise your hand right now if you resonate with that, I’m sure I’d see a lot of hands up.

Some people like to tone it down by saying we are our own worst critic, but the honest truth is that some of you are in a straight-up abusive relationship with yourself.

I’ve been coaching for over six and a half years, and I can tell you that the number one thing that prevents people from succeeding in their transformation is that little voice in the back of your head. The one that beats you up when you make a mistake, the one that tears you down when you eat a meal you’re not supposed to, the one that yells at you when you miss a workout.

It’s not the workout; it’s not the meal plan. Those are straightforward; they are simple, and it’s just math for the most part. The complexity comes in when you add that voice inside of your head. That’s why I believe in coaching. Because yes, your coach will give you the plan, but their main goal is to help you stick to it. And sometimes that looks like walking you off the mental ledge; sometimes that looks like helping you to navigate the voice in your head. Because that will determine what type of action you will take moving forward.

The pastor then said one more thing that I think will bring it all together.

”If you want to change your choices, you have to change your voices.”

Boom - Mic drop Read that one more time: if you want to change your choices, you have to change your voices.

I’ve found that to be true with ANY area of life: relationships, business, fitness, fat loss, marriage, etc...

If you see yourself as “shit,” then guess how you will show up.

If you see yourself as someone “who can’t stick with it,” guess what? You won’t be able to stick to it.

How you talk to yourself matters, so if this newsletter does nothing else but get you to look at your internal dialogue, then I will consider that a win. Everyone deserves to lose that unwanted fat; everyone deserves to be as fit as they want to be. Everyone deserves to be happy and live their best life. And every single one of you must make it a MUST, because like I said earlier in the newsletter, I don’t want to see your name on GoFundMe.

And if you have kids, please remember that line from above: “We Need More Time With Our Mom” or Dad. You have a responsibility to those you brought into the world to take care of yourself ❤️

I hope this gets you to take some type of action today to change the trajectory of your life, whether that is committing to something new or recommitting if you were on the journey and fell off track.

Now I have one little announcement for you.

As you know, I launched our Forever Fit course over 1 month ago, and we sold out of the initial founding spots in 8 days. I’ve now decided to make some adjustments to it because of the feedback from our members inside the course and from our readers.

In fact, our custom Mavy Wellness Coaching platform is infinitely better today than what we were using when we first went live.

Our members are loving the weekly group calls and having direct access to Coach Ivy and me. On a recent call, we ran a deep-dive workshop on building workout plans from scratch. One of our members brought her custom workout to the call, we refined it live together, and the entire group got to learn the exact nuance behind the programming.

If you are someone who wants to master the intricacies of coaching yourself, access custom software that generates your workout and meal plans, and join an uplifting, high-vibe community... I invite you to book a call with our team today.

We recently made the decision to remove the direct checkout link from our website. After careful consideration, we decided that every new member must go through a brief application call first. We care deeply about the culture inside our community, and we want to ensure every single person who enters is a great fit, keeps the positive vibes high, and is truly ready to do the work.

(And as always, our world-class 1-on-1 coaching program isn’t going anywhere. It remains the premier plant-based body recomposition program in the world, and access to that flagship program is also handled through our application calls.)

Whether you are curious about our group community or our high-touch 1-on-1 coaching, click the link below, book a quick call with our team, and Ivy will guide you to the exact path that fits your goals best:

Book your call here: → https://mavywellness.com/

That is all I have for you today ❤️

I hope you have a fantastic weekend, and thank you for reading. Sincerely,

P.S. I have an incredible soul post (self-reflecting article) coming out this upcoming Saturday on the fixed cost of criticism, which I think you will really enjoy. Stay tuned for that.

Maxime Sigouin

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I’ve been doing cardio on my bike, but I haven’t run in a really long time because I injured my ankle in September 2025 playing basketball, right as I was starting to feel better from a concussion at my pro scouting event in July 2025.

Let me tell ya... it felt GOOOOD to run. I felt alive. I felt like I was living to the fullest.

Not just because of the runner’s high, but because I was doing something I had been terrified to do for half a year. I was afraid to push myself out of fear of getting re-injured.

It made me realize how much I’ve been living in fear of my own body breaking down. I haven’t played basketball in months since I walked away from my dream of playing professionally due to concussion side effects and costs.

It wasn’t that I didn’t trust my body, but I was holding back. As a lifelong athlete, that is a tough sensation to live with.

To be frank, I only ran for 25 minutes and then finished on the bike because I didn’t want to push my luck. Smart progress means easing back into things.

During that run, I realized how much this fear was preventing me from living. I stopped going on certain hikes, skipped activities, and stayed away from playing basketball for fun, which used to bring me so much joy. I was slowly transitioning into a hermit.

I miss feeling the power my body can generate. I miss the stamina, the speed, and feeling explosive.

My body isn’t 18 anymore. Recovery takes longer, especially in a calorie deficit, and injury rehab takes patience. But having been an athlete for most of my life, I think it’s a shame when people never get to experience what the human body is truly capable of when you fully commit to a goal.

When I was 16, I was 6’4” and 160 lbs, built like a fat spaghetti noodle. I decided I wanted to be strong, so I put in the work. Years later at 19, I built myself up to 240 lbs and deadlifted 500 lbs off the ground.

That experience changed my life because I did what I said I would do.

It is an incredible feeling to feel powerful in your own skin. Everyone has the potential to feel that way, but it requires a willingness to work for it.

I’m sharing this because I know I’m not the only one fighting through setbacks or feeling afraid to get back out there. Whether a setback takes months or years to overcome, the journey back is always worth it.

I’m done living in fear. I still need to be smart with my recovery, but I refuse to let fear stop me from challenging myself.

If you’ve ever had to rebuild yourself after a injury or major life pivot, know that you aren’t alone.

Have you ever had to overcome a physical or mental setback that made you afraid to push yourself? Drop a comment below, I’d love to connect and hear your story.

Sincerely,

Maxime

I hope you had a fantastic week.

Ivy and I flew back this week from Washington, DC where we got to sponsor and attend the International Conference for Nutrition in Medicine.

We had a blast and also had the pleasure of leading a group workout class on one of the mornings. Check out this awesome group of physicians and health professionals prioritizing their health 👇

We already sponsored the conference for next year, so be sure to join us! :)

Now, onto this week’s newsletter.

As you know, I’ve been doing this new thing where I answer your submitted questions inside the weekly newsletter. We’ve received a few this week, which I’ll answer below. If you want your questions answered, simply reply to this email or comment below on Substack 🌱

But before I get into answering the questions, I wanted to share something I was reflecting on during my morning run today.

People often share the advice to “just move your body and eat a whole-food, plant-based diet, and everything will be fine.”

To a certain extent, that is true if you are trying to go from level 0 (the Traditional Western diet and a low level of activity, like most people live nowadays) to level 1 of having a healthy baseline.

Going from eating meat and processed food to whole-food, plant-based will get you incredible results. Going from not moving to going for walks and doing some exercise will help you make good progress… until it doesn’t anymore.

I know why, but I think a lot of people struggle to get from level 1 to level 2, 3, or even 4 and beyond.

It’s because they continue to follow that general advice and those basic rules.

Listen, I’ve shared these “general rules” before because, depending on who I’m speaking to or what podcast I’m on, that advice will work for the vast majority of the population. The majority of the population isn’t like you and me (I know you are on my level if you are reading my newsletter).

BUT there comes a time when specificity matters.

As you know, I like to use analogies to explain everything. Let’s use swimming as an example, simply because I can speak on a deeper level about it since it was my best discipline when I used to compete in Ironman 70.3.

Most people say that they can “swim” because they can get in the water, move around, and not drown (level 1). That’s fantastic, not drowning is a great goal.

BUT if you are reading this newsletter and are a part of my world in any capacity, I can safely assume that you want more for your health, your fitness, and your life.

You don’t want to just “not drown.” You want to thrive. You want to be able to get places efficiently and effortlessly.

What most people miss when they want to go to the next level in their fitness and body composition at any age, but more specifically over 50 is that they just focus on moving more (so, just swimming).

But if you’ve ever swam competitively and trained for it, you know that it’s much more nuanced than that.

You have to focus on how your hand enters the water, how your hand catches the water, how you pull it back, how to breathe, and ensuring your head doesn’t pop up to cause drag, but instead turns perfectly sideways like it’s on a pivot.

You have to focus on keeping your hips up so they don’t drag you down in the water, kicking efficiently, and contracting your core to keep a streamlined body shape to glide through the water.

Phew…😅

As you can see, all of those details can be optimized when you are “just swimming.”

Now, it’s the exact same thing for your health and fitness.

The number of calories you consume matters, regardless of the source.

The source of those calories matters to ensure maximum nutrient, vitamin, and fiber intake.

The distribution of your meals throughout the day matters to ensure you get enough protein (aka the building blocks to repair from your training).

Your training needs to incorporate progressive overload every 4–6 weeks to ensure your body doesn’t plateau. You need your workouts to be challenging enough to maximize supercompensation, but not so hard that you burn out and regress.

Even the small technical nuances matter, take a lunge, for example. When pushing back up on a lunge, most people shift their weight toward their toes, which places all the tension on the quad. Instead, you should push through the heel on the way up, which shifts the tension to the glutes and hamstrings which is what you want to train. A small shift like moving the tension from your toes to your heel makes a HUGE difference. Try it out right now and see for yourself.

All this to say: nuances matter. Yes, the general advice works at first moving your body and eating a variety of plant-based whole foods works until it doesn’t.

My guess is that if you read my newsletter, it’s because you want more. Now it’s time to learn the nuances so you can get the transformation you’ve been wanting.

I have two ways for you to do that. (And listen, I know this sounds like I’m “selling something,” but I started doing this work to help and serve people. I put out tons of free content on my YouTube channel, podcast, and newsletter to get you started.)

If you want something that involves me, my coaching team, and our direct expertise, then yes, there is an investment for our time and knowledge.

If you want to learn at your own pace, I have my new course, “Forever Fit,” which I launched last month. We already have 25 people inside this incredible community. It includes over 56 modules, 25+ hours of education, and weekly group coaching calls with Ivy and me → Forever Fit Course

The second option is our world-class 1:1 coaching program that we’ve been running for 6.5 years, which has helped nearly 1,300 people across the world. You can book your free coaching/consultation call here → https://mavywellness.com/

I hope the message above helps you understand what needs to happen for you to succeed in your transformation. Whether you choose to work with us or not, there are plenty of great resources that I put online for you to use.

Alright, now let’s get into the question I received this past week ☺️

This one is from Bridget, she asked “Please give us tips on how to navigate eating in restaurants and gatherings with family and friends.”

My answer:

Traveling doesn’t mean you have to leave your health and fitness goals behind! With a little preparation, you can easily stay on track without missing a beat.

Core Rules

• Plan ahead: Research your destination before you go. Will you have access to a kitchen, mini-fridge, blender, or local grocery stores? Check if nearby restaurants have plant-based options or online menus with nutrition details.

• Prioritize protein: Plant protein is often the hardest thing to source on the go. Plan to bring or buy your protein to ensure you meet your daily targets.

• Control the controllables: If you have to eat out for lunch or dinner, make sure you win your morning by starting with a nutritious breakfast. Oats are an easy go-to option!

• Stay hydrated: Always carry water with you especially when flying or on long drives.

Quick & Easy Snack Ideas

• High-quality protein bars

• Protein powder with a shaker bottle

• Fresh fruit (apples, pears, bananas)

• Instant oatmeal packets

• Homemade energy balls

• Edamame or dried soy beans

• Pre-cut fresh vegetables

Game Plan by Travel Scenario

• Road Trips: Pack a cooler with prepared meals, fruits, veggies, and snacks. Map out stops at grocery stores or farmer’s markets along your route instead of relying on fast food.

• Flying & Overseas: Eat a protein-rich meal before heading to the airport, pack travel-friendly snacks in your carry-on so you don’t get overly hungry, and map out your food options for when you land.

• Hotel (No Kitchen): Stop by a local grocery store right after arriving to pick up fresh produce, oats, and plant milk for your mini-fridge.

• Rental with a Kitchen: Treat it like home! Stock up on groceries and prepare your meals just like you normally would.

I have grabbed these notes from a guide that our members have access to inside of our one-on-one coaching program. As an additional point, I would say travel with a portable blender. Here’s the one that Ivy and I use Ninja blender .

Also, realize that just because you’re at a restaurant or a family gathering doesn’t mean you need to eat a massive meal. If you can eat a little something beforehand to stay satisfied (so you only need a small dish that isn’t super high in calories while you’re there), do that. If you don’t have the opportunity to eat beforehand, just have a small bite at the restaurant to hold you over until you get home and can make a proper, healthy meal.

I do this a lot of the time: if I am eating out at a restaurant or family gathering, I always overestimate the calories for those dishes by 150 to 200 calories. That little calorie buffer acts as the “cost” of having the freedom to enjoy eating out.

I hope this helps, Bridget! ☺️

And that is it for the questions I received this past week. If you have any questions you’d like me to answer, please reply to this email or comment below on Substack.

I appreciate you taking the time to read this newsletter. If you made it all the way to the end, I hope you have an incredible week ahead 🌱💪

Sincerely,

Maxime

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Community → Here
💪 Custom 1:1 coaching → Here

If you’ve read any of my previous work, you know that I’ve been prioritizing monthly seven-day digital detoxes, not wearing any fitness-tracking devices, going more analog, and slowing down.

But as I’ve been sharing these insights, I’ve realized that the message might not always be received properly. Some people don’t need to slow down in certain areas of life; they actually need to speed up.

I heard this quote in that video, and I think it perfectly illustrates that point:



”A lot of people who are hyper-optimised reach a point where the marginal gains of tracking every metric actually start adding stress rather than reducing it. For them, dropping the strict routine is genuine progress because it lets them finally relax.

But when that message gets broadcast online, people who haven't built any underlying discipline use it to justify doing nothing. Anti-optimisation is a solution for driven people that gives lazy people an excuse.

It takes advice intended for high performers who need to dial it back and misapplies it to people who haven't even started working hard yet. The result is that people celebrate giving up before they've actually put in the effort.” - Chris Williamson

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I wanted to write about this today not to call anyone lazy or overly stressed, but simply to urge you to be careful about where you take advice from.

Whenever I hear or read something good, I always like to ask myself: Is this serving the good parts of me, or the parts that don’t need reinforcement?

Because I know my flaws. I know I can work myself into the ground, run until I pass out, deadlift until a blood vessel pops (I’ve done that), and work out until I puke (done that, too).

I know my “gas pedal” can be pressed hard and for a long time.

What I’ve had to learn over the years is how to take my foot off the gas and even put it on the brake from time to time, or else I would get sick.

That is why I started doing digital detoxes four years ago, and why I still do them to this day.

So please take into consideration your own situation when you are looking to transform yourself. I’ll use body recomposition and fat loss as an example, as that is my field of expertise.

We’ve coached people who were stressed out of their minds with data, or who had extremely stressful lives and needed to learn to slow down, take less action, and do more of the right actions. On the flip side, we’ve coached people who were not action-takers and needed to get momentum going people who needed to be sped up.

Everyone is on their own journey, just like I am.

I grew up as a lazy procrastinator, transitioned into an action-taking machine when I was a caregiver because I had to be, and now I am learning to relax, slow down, and be smarter and more intentional with my energy and actions.

There will always be new lessons to learn as I progress, because that’s the beauty of life. As long as you are still breathing, you can keep learning (if you want to), and your life will keep getting better.

That is why when people ask me if they are too old to do our coaching program or start their transformation, I tell them: if you are still breathing, you can still improve and reap the benefits.

There is nothing to lose from strength training consistently to build muscle and strengthen your bones. There is nothing to lose from doing cardiovascular exercise to build a stronger heart. And there is certainly nothing to lose from adopting a whole-food, plant-based lifestyle to reduce inflammation and lower your risk of dealing with major chronic illnesses as you get older.

These are all things you should be doing regardless of your personality. How you approach them will be determined by the specific lesson you need to learn.

Start today. There is literally nothing to lose and everything to gain.

Sincerely,

Maxime

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Group Coaching → Here
💪 1:1 coaching → Here

Now I know that this isn’t a question, but I thought it was valuable to add to this week’s newsletter. In reply, she’s referring to the autonomic nervous system, which regulates involuntary body functions such as digestion, heart rate, breathing, and stress response: the sympathetic fight-or-flight and parasympathetic rest-and-digest state. Basically, she’s referring to how managing stress plays a major role in fat loss and overall health.

I think that we’ve been seeing that with a lot of plant-based influencers/personalities in this space with my own journey. That’s why, everywhere on Wednesday when I write my soul posts, I’m trying to talk about that as well. Back of a transformation, on the weekly newsletter, I talk about the fitness and nutrition component, but I think it’s something that more people are becoming enlightened to: that stress is playing a bigger role than they initially thought in their transformation.

If you’re reading this and you’re struggling with your body composition, and you are compliant and actually in a calorie deficit, strength training, and doing cardiovascular exercise consistently for months, and your body is feeling a little bit stuck, then I would start looking at reducing stress in other areas of your life that could be hindering your transformation and ultimately the quality of your life as well.

Which is why I’m not a fan of really strict dieting, where you can only eat X food for lunch and you can’t have carbohydrates or things that kind of eliminate a certain macronutrient.

That’s why I’m a fan of learning how to eat out at the restaurant, because you’re going to have date nights with your partner. You’re going to go to birthday parties, and you’re going to go to family dinners and gatherings. You need to learn how to navigate all of these things and not be the obsessive person that brings their scale with all of their food prep and is not able to enjoy the moment with everyone there.

The relaxation part of the food and operating within guidelines versus strict rules makes a tremendous difference in the long run in ensuring that you have a healthy relationship with food, with your body, with yourself, and with exercise. I say thank you, Tina, for bringing that up.

Now let’s transition to Alexandra’s question. We’ll talk a little bit more about the vegan side of things.

First of all, hey Alexandra, hope you’re doing well. It’s always great to hear from you, and I think it’s a fantastic question. I have an honest answer for you. I can obviously go down the logical road by answering this question, which is that plant-based whole foods contain more fibers and vitamins and nutrients, which would satisfy your receptors and fill your gut faster because of the fiber. You’re actually going to feel fuller. Yes, potatoes are very filling. Rice is very filling. If you eat plant-based proteins such as tofu, tempeh, edamame, beans, and lentils, that’s also going to be very satiating as well.

From my personal experience, when someone says something like this, it’s not a logical argument. It is a self-justification argument. They’re just trying to explain to themselves why they can’t do it, because they couldn’t live without it, because they don’t feel full if they eat that thing. The honest truth is that they probably have never tried to do it, or if they tried, it wasn’t for long enough of a period of time where the gut bacteria was able to fully shift over to being healthier and to getting used to eating on a plant-based whole food lifestyle. If they’ve tried, they probably tried some version of junk food vegan, or they are severely eating on their calories because they didn’t know how to structure their meal. They didn’t have a good experience because they didn’t do it properly. Just like anything else that you don’t do properly, you’re not going to have a good experience with it.

Is it the fault of the way of eating, or the fault of the person for not doing it properly? I think it does warrant some research and guidance when people transition to make sure they do do it properly. In the case of your email, I would say it’s more of a psychological thing for him versus a logical argument, because yes, eating whole food plant-based is way more satiating than eggs and meat. I hope this helps.

And that was pretty much it for the questions that were submitted from last week’s newsletter. If you have any that have come up for you while you’re reading this, either about fitness and protein and body composition and training or anything like that, please ask them down below in a substack section or reply to the email. I block off an hour every week to go in depth and answer the questions so I can help you as best as I can for free on here in your transformation.

As soon as we launch our Forever Fit course, which also comes with 12 months of access to a community, weekly group calls with IV&I for coaching, and our Forever Fit software, we can build your own workout program and meal plan and track your habits and track your workouts and your progression and your transformation.

As a part of one of those group calls, I did receive some interesting questions on my last call on Monday, when I came back from digital detox. One of them was the calorie-to-protein debate: what happens when you’re at the end of the day and you’re short on your protein, but you don’t have a lot of calories left? In order to hit your protein goal, would you have to go over your calories? Now, which one do you honor? Do you respect the calories, or do you go over your calories to hit your protein goal for the day?

My answer to this is, as your indirect coach for this newsletter, always respect the calories. If you do not hit your protein within your calorie target for the day, that is just a cost of not having planned your food properly. Just take the hit, move on to the next day. You need to learn how to make your protein fit within the day. Again, one day if you’re short, it’s not the end of the world, but to do it consistently is when you’re going to start having issues with your body composition and transformation and everything getting slower and potentially losing more muscle.

The calorie target is very important, especially if you’re in a body recomposition phase, because if you go over, you’re canceling your deficit. Therefore, you’re canceling the environment that would be conducive to you losing fat, because remember, fitness builds the body, nutrition reveals it. Nutrition reveals it by being in a calorie deficit, by creating a state where there’s less energy coming in than there is going out.

In that state, in order to not lose muscle and to build some muscle, we are focusing on hitting our protein target, which is a combination of amino acids and building blocks to repair the tissue that’s being damaged through your strength training sessions every week.

So, long and short, respect your calories. If you did hit your protein too bad, that’s just a cost of not having planned properly for that date. Try again the next day.

I hope this helps some of you, because I know that it is a bigger struggle that people have when they’re eating whole food plant-based and hitting their protein. It kind of gets into our Mavy Wellness world of wanting to improve their body composition over the age of 50, and you realize how important protein plays a role in being able to improve your body composition in a favorable way.

And so I want to add, for those of you that do want everything taken care of for them, I would invite you to look into our one-on-one custom coaching program, Mavy Wellness, that we’ve been running for over six and a half years with our incredible team of coaches.

If you’re someone that wants to learn the details of how to build your workout plan, how to build your meal plan, how to adjust everything as your body progresses and plateaus, and that wants the education piece and that wants to learn how to build their own workout and have group accountability via group calls in our community, then I invite you to check out our Forever Fit course and community.

That way you can pick the one that aligns best with you, but regardless of which one we pick, Ivy and I look forward to serving you in your transformation, even if it’s just through the newsletter and our YouTube/podcast content. I hope you have a fantastic weekend. Thank you for taking the time to read, and all the links mentioned will be down below in my signature.

Sincerely,

Maxime

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Community → Here
💪 Custom 1:1 coaching → Here


Ps. Check out our latest success story episode with Brenda 👇

I bought a piano on my way back from Japan a few months ago because I wanted to get back into something artistic that wasn’t related to coaching and business.

I started off great. There was an app with it where I had a three-month membership to learn how to play.

I used it at least 5 days a week for the first month and a half.

But since moving to my new place in Vegas, I’ve only played a handful of times.

And it’s always right there in my face. It’s in my reading room where my wife and I drink our coffee and read in the morning.

I walk by it at least 20 times a day on the way to the kitchen and the rest of the house.

Sometimes I’m sitting thinking about how I haven’t played in a while and I think maybe I should add a block in my calendar to remind myself to play… so I did, in the evening after work… And it still hasn’t happened.

Mr. Discipline here is struggling.

I was sitting down reflecting this morning on it, why? Why am I wanting to play and learn, but not doing it?

It feels that the more days go by where I don’t practice the behavior, the greater the tension becomes and the greater the mountain seems between me starting again, even to just practice for 5 minutes.

Doesn’t it sound silly?

I can remember when I had the same thoughts about fitness and healthy eating.

I told myself I would workout or start to eat healthier and didn’t… and the more days that went by, the greater the tension felt in my body, the harder it became to start until, eventually, I stopped feeling bad for not taking action on what I said I “wanted.”

That was decades ago.

But for the piano, it’s interesting to have this sensation with it. I’m feeling the tension of letting days go by without playing.

And since I’m completely new at it, and didn’t know a lot, restarting means starting from scratch and re-learning the notes.

Maybe that is an element of it as well: feeling like I’m going backwards, which I don’t like.

So not only is tension building from not taking action, but also I know that I would start further back from where I was.

Kind of like most people who struggle to lose weight and get fit. Maybe they had made some progress and were doing good until life threw a curveball (like ours, we moved to a different state).

But when I think of it logically for my situation, I find it silly because when I think about it, I just need to sit down for 5 minutes, not even 1 minute to restart the habit. I could commit to 5 minutes a day to restart the practice, but for some reason, it feels like committing to hiking Mount Everest.

The action is simple. There is nothing preventing me from doing the thing I say I want. All there is, is what’s been building up in my head about it.

It’s so funny how the mind works and how we let it take over with silly rules that don’t serve us.

So I start playing again by setting the bar to success low at 5 minutes a day, just like I did with daily journaling at 1 page a day and reading (2 pages a day). And I’ve done both those things for over 500+ days in a row at this point and have read many incredible books that have helped shape my life.

I felt inspired to write this while I was on digital detox, but I just slept for 10 hours and napped for 2 hours the day prior, and my mind is feeling the most refreshed I have in a while and is the clearest it’s been since my last digital detox.

I’m writing this down with pen and paper and typing it when I get back online.

But it just goes to show me the importance of rest even more and the importance of having space to reflect.

I don’t know if this article will make sense to someone, but it’s more of a reflection than a lesson on how our minds can make up rules that don’t make sense, and my solution to it was simply to massively lower the bar to entry and start with the smallest amount of action/time that I think will compound over time. ❤️

Sincerely,

Maxime

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Group Coaching → Here
💪 1:1 coaching → Here

What is action? It’s to apply force to cause a change. Inaction on the other hand is the withholding or absence of applied force, allowing the existing trajectory, status quo, or external environment to dictate the outcome.

Choosing not to work out is an active choice. You are making a conscious decision to abstain, rationalize, or prioritize something else in that moment.

In behavioral psychology, deciding not to act is an active choice known as an act of omission.

If action is intentional momentum, inaction is default drift.

From a physical and biological standpoint, your body does not care whether inaction was a conscious choice or passive neglect. The physiological outcome is identical.

Here is how those two sides split:

1. Mentally, inaction is an active decision. You exert cognitive effort to choose comfort, rest, or distraction over physical effort.

2. Physically, inaction is non-intervention. Your muscles, bones, and metabolic system require applied physical tension to adapt and strengthen. Mentally choosing not to provide that stimulus leaves the physical system with zero input.

Without applied force, default biological processes take over. Sarcopenia, osteopenia, and metabolic slowdown continue uninterrupted.

Not working out because you are “waiting for certain things to be over in your life (retirement, kids being out of the house, after selling the house, etc…), waiting to have all the information to get started with the “best plan”, waiting, waiting, waiting….

Is the default choice. Is an act of omission wether you like it or not, is what is putting you on the default drift of your current trajectory of life.

This also applies to nutrition. Not choosing to eat less than you need to. No choosing to prioritize whole foods over processed foods. The rules are the same.

So how can we get ourselves to take more action towards the behavior that we want to enforce?

Here are four practical ways to shift from passive omission to intentional momentum:

1. Lower the threshold of applied force When people think about taking action, they assume it requires an all or nothing effort. They think they need two hours in the gym or a flawless meal plan. In reality, any applied force breaks default drift.

I use this rule in my own life with reading. I wanted to build a consistent reading habit, so I committed to reading just two pages every single day. That minimal threshold eliminated friction. Eventually, two pages a day led to finishing full books. Now, reading is an automatic habit where I often read ten or twenty pages in the morning, but my absolute minimum commitment remains two pages. Set your minimum so low that inaction becomes harder than execution.

2. Create an environment that forces the action Willpower is an unreliable strategy. Design your environment so the friction favors the healthy habit instead of the bad one. Keep real whole foods stocked in your fridge instead of processed snacks in the pantry. Make your training setup friction free, whether that means a simple home setup in your living room, dumbbells in your garage, or choosing a gym that is only five minutes away. Keep prepared whole food meals ready in your fridge so you do not rely on the convenience of food delivery apps when you are tired.

3. Focus on identity over motivation Motivation fluctuates because it depends on how you feel in the moment. Instead of asking if you feel like training today, ask what a strong, healthy person after 50 would do right now. When you view action as a vote for the identity you are building, the decision requires far less cognitive effort.

4. Remove the waiting condition with one small daily commitment Stop waiting for a clean schedule or a quieter month. Commit to one small daily action that moves the needle forward today. Because you lowered the threshold in step one, this action does not need to be massive.

This is just like assuming that investing a single dollar a day into your retirement will not make a difference, so you never get started. If you invest $1 a day into an S&P 500 index fund, compounding at an average historical return of 10 percent per year over 40 years, that single dollar a day grows to nearly $190,000. Out of that total, your actual out of pocket contribution was only $14,600. The remaining $175,000 was pure compound growth.

Small daily actions in your health compound the exact same way. The person who invests a small effort daily builds massive physical equity compared to the person who does nothing because they think a small effort will not matter.

This is also where community and accountability change the outcome. Placing yourself in an environment with like minded people reinforces your new behavior and identity. It keeps your mind in an active loop, continuously focused on the exact area of your life you are committed to improving.

Inaction feels safe in the short term, but it carries a compound interest rate that shows up in your strength, mobility, and independence years down the road.

I hope this resonates with you and drives you to apply force in the direction of change that you want to see in your health, in your body composition, in your fitness, in your bone density, and in your life.

I look forward to reading your replies ☺️

Sincerely,

Maxime

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Community → Here
💪 Custom 1:1 coaching → Here

Ps. Ivy and I will be in Washington from August 13 to 15 as a sponsor for the ICNM conference hosted by PCRM. Come and say hi https://www.pcrm.org/events/ICNM-2025

Ps. Ps. My wife Ivy and I post two weekly videos on our YouTube channel, and we’ve had a new cooking video and a new workout video go live, along with our latest podcast. You can see down below 👇

It will work out if you don’t give up. It probably won’t happen the way you imagine it, but it will happen if you don’t quit. And honestly, it will be better than what you had planned.

Commitment is just caring enough about the thing, the person, or the project to not quit. Yes, there will be times of inaction. Rest and creating space are essential to continue working toward bigger goals. It makes the journey more sustainable because you can’t sprint for 50 years.

Protect your mind. Getting a concussion over a year ago changed my life. I’ve been working my tail off to get back to where I was, and in certain aspects, I’ve surpassed where I was. It just looks different now. My mind doesn’t operate from the exact same perspective it did last year.

From 22 to 27, life will kick the crap out of you with your partner going through cancer. Understand that there is no perfect way to deal with this; there is no manual or guide provided. Do the best you can, and know that you did the best you could.

In the moment, it will feel like you are making so many mistakes, and you will beat yourself up. Don’t. You did your best with what you had, and know that Jen appreciated you for it. Remember that you are a good person, because you’ll forget that sometimes simply because you couldn’t heal her.

Rest, rest, rest. I can’t emphasize the importance of it enough. I used to see rest as being lazy because I lived in a culture of “hustle,” but my most life-changing ideas and actions came from the space of doing nothing.

Doing nothing for extended periods of time (which is what I use my monthly 7-day digital detox for) has led to the most productive weeks of my life when it comes to ideas, self-discovery, and self-growth.

Working harder will only get you so far, and it will get you sick at some point. Eventually, you have to learn to work smarter.

Prioritize relationships. I’ve seen too many rich people on their second or third marriage. Money, freedom, and free time don’t matter if you don’t get to share them with the people you love. Always choose people over everything.

Take care of your body. Training like an athlete is cool, rewarding, and good for the ego at times. BUT if you don’t stretch, prioritize mobility, focus on recovery, and take time to heal from injuries, you’ll end up like me at 33 with knee and body pains you shouldn’t have at this age. That is the reality of training like an athlete for 20 straight years.

Learn to sit down. Your inability to sit still and do nothing is what causes stress, reactive decisions, saying things you don’t mean, and making you work harder than you have to. Learning to sit still for hours on end staring at nature changed my life and my mind.

Pursue all the goals that you want because you will learn so much from each of them. It will build a strong mind and give you cross-skills and insights that apply to new goals in the future. As Steve Jobs said, you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward.

Lastly, understand that everyone is just figuring this out. We live in a world with so many new technologies, so much new information, and access to more knowledge than ever before. Everyone has the ability to reach thousands or millions of people online to document their journey, lessons, and beliefs. What someone currently holds as true is just true for them right now, and it might change in 10 years as they evolve through life. Take things with a grain of salt, check in with your gut, and learn to make your own decisions.

Hope this speaks to someone who needed to hear it today.

Maxime Sigouin

Ps. I wrote this right before going on my social media detox that I do on the first seven days of every month, so look forward to reading your comments and replies when I get back online ❤️

I hope you had a fantastic week. It seems like many of you enjoyed last week’s newsletter when I was answering your questions. Unfortunately, we didn’t receive any since the last newsletter. If you want me to answer your questions directly on a newsletter, please reply to this email or comment on the substack post.

I appreciate you all. Since there are no questions, I decided to write a little something from my heart to help serve you on your transformation journey ❤️

But before we get into that, I wanted to say thank you for your support of the work that Ivy and I do. Because of your support, we’re able to donate to cancer patients every single month for the past six years to help them on their healing journey. This month, we were able to support Liz and her husband Brian and their family as they battle breast cancer: https://gofund.me/1b95d2a43

Now let’s get into this weekend’s message:

Forcing, rushing, and impatience are all things that slowed me down in my pursuit of reaching different goals in my life.

Here is how it was disguised… as looking for that “edge.”

I’ll use fat loss as an example, as there was a time in my life where I was carrying an extra 60 lbs of unwanted fat on my body.

The reason I was stuck is because I was looking for that “edge,” that “secret sauce”—the thing that everyone else was missing so that I could get out of this uncomfortable body I was in.

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I thought people didn’t understand. I felt chubby, uncomfortable, everything jiggled, everything overlapped, everything felt thick, and I was hot all the darn time.

They didn’t get how quickly I wanted this coat of fat off of me.

I wanted the miracle solution now.

I looked at special supplements, fat burner stacks, HIIT cardio, fasting, and extreme protocols. I looked at all of it, and I tried all of it (or at least that’s what I was telling myself).

But it wasn’t the truth. The truth was I was doing EVERYTHING and trying EVERYTHING except the basics:

1. Lift weights consistently and do some basic cardio.

2. Eat in a calorie deficit for long enough to lose fat.

3. Hit my daily protein goals.

4. Move my body by walking at least 10,000 steps a day to maximize NEAT.

5. Get good quality sleep.

It was so boring, simple, and hard to do consistently that I lied to myself. I was doing everything except what I actually needed to do, and then I wondered why my body wasn’t transforming.

I see this so often in our members’ psychology before starting their transformation, and in people who struggle with weight loss in general (myself included when I try to reach new goals in different areas of life).

We know the basics, but we don’t do the basics. Instead, we focus on doing 10 different minor things we heard from doctors online that might combined move the needle maybe 1%.

We miss the fact that those additional actions ONLY make a big difference once you are consistent with the basics, and I’m talking for 6 to 12 months of consistency minimum.

Not 1 week, not 1 month, and not even 3 months.

You won’t get anywhere meaningful—and especially nowhere that lasts—in that short period of time.

Consistency takes time. Mastering this aspect of your life takes time.

I don’t consider myself a absolute master of the game, even after being at it for 21 years in the fitness world. The more I learn, the more I realize there is to learn.

It’s not just about workouts and nutrition. It’s primarily about psychology and habit building.

Another thing I find interesting—that I also do myself—is worrying about the small details that are close to or past the finish line. I know I’m not the only one who does that.

We try to have all the answers mapped out ahead of time. But the reality is, if you have 50 lbs to lose right now and you aren’t even strength training, monitoring your calories, hitting your protein, or walking 10,000 steps a day, you haven’t even started.

You are about to embark on an ultra-marathon journey of 12 months, and you haven’t crossed the starting line yet. Don’t worry about what mile 99 looks like.

Start by starting the race. Overthinking it and trying to have everything mapped out ahead of time is keeping you frozen in place.

Start doing the basics consistently. Get moving, make progress, and then worry about those tiny details when you get close to them. Once you get to mile 90 out of 100, then let’s worry about the fine-tuning.

Be consistent first before trying to optimize, because in order to optimize something, you need to have been consistent with it for a long time.

I know it may sound like I’m going off right now, but I am a little bit.

This is a LONG journey. Frankly, you are supposed to be doing this for the rest of your life.

Whether you do our 1:1 coaching program or our course, I am only a small part of your journey. I am here to serve, educate, get you results, and help you shift the direction your health was heading in.

From there, you have to keep moving in that direction—not perfectly, but consistently.

This is a lifetime commitment. There is no amount of short-term hard work that will EVER allow you to do nothing for the rest of your life.

I’ve been working out for 21 years. If I stop working out today and eat whatever I want, I’ll be out of shape in 4 weeks and overweight in 12 weeks.

Even at my age, where my body is responsive, that holds true. So if you are over 50, stop thinking of this as a temporary fix. Once you start, this is a lifelong commitment to yourself, your partner, your kids, and your grandkids.

You owe it to yourself and to them.

Focusing on small details that make a 5% difference in your transformation is non-important right now. Focus on the basics that produce 80% to 90% of the real results in your life.

If you need accountability, that is completely okay. We’ve helped over 1,200 people just like you who needed structure and support. If you need education, tools, and community, there is nothing wrong with that either. Those are the very first things I invest in whenever I set a new goal for myself, which is exactly why I built our course.

You can do it alone, but you don’t have to. And honestly, if you haven’t reached your goals on your own up to this point, you have nothing to lose by asking for help.

I want to see you win for yourself, for your kids, and for your grandkids, because after all, that is what life is about.

Take care of yourself and have a great weekend.

Sincerely,

Maxime

Ps. Our initial 20 founding member spots have filled up in eight days since launching our Forever Fit course/community, and we’ve just opened up tier two of the founding spots. If I were you, I would jump on that rate, as it will go up when another 20 members join. This is the most affordable that it will be to have access to the course and to join the community.

🎓 Forever Fit Course/Community → Here
💪 Custom 1:1 coaching → Here

Ps.Ps. My wife Ivy and I post two weekly videos on our YouTube channel, and we’ve had a new cooking video and a new workout video go live, along with our latest podcast. You can see down below 👇

I lived with the mindset of poor me, my life is hard. Poor me, all these bad things are happening to me.

Poor me, I have too much fat on my body, I’m out of shape, I’m unhealthy, I’m poor, I’m stressed, and the list went on. And to a certain extent, all those things were true.

This was when I had just turned 22 years old. I had just come off traveling the world via hitchhiking because I had no money and I didn’t want that to stop me from exploring. It was about eight months after I met this wonderful girl, and within three months of us dating, she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Mind you, when I met her, I was living on a couch, paying $150 a month to live at a friend’s house in Vancouver. I had nothing.

And there it was: the big diagnosis, the big life changing moment. When the doctor told Jen, “You have breast cancer,” my heart sank. That bus ride from the hospital back to the couch was a brutal one.

That’s when I decided to stay because of love. I got a better job in Vancouver and got my own apartment. It was my first time renting a place in my life, my first time having monthly bills, my first time living with a girl, and my first time being a caregiver to someone I cared about who had cancer.

It was the hardest transition I had ever made up to that point.

I even called my closest friend six or seven months into it and told him it was too much and that I wanted to jump off the Cambie bridge. I’m happy I didn’t.

We talked over the phone until two in the morning, and he made me realize that I was imagining all these awful scenarios in my head because I was afraid and had never been in a situation like this before. He told me, “Listen, none of these things have actually happened. They are all situations you made up in your head that are making you suffer, and there is a high likelihood that none of those things will ever happen.”

He was right.

As I continued down this path in what I would call the hardest chapter of my life, I slowly, over time, fell into a victim mindset.

And that close friend of mine I was talking to on that dark night became labeled in my head as my savior. He had done really well for himself financially and saved my ass more times than I can count.

When I lost everything almost eight years ago, he gave me a place to live for dirt cheap and helped pay my rent. He gave me a car so that I could drive to a new job that paid more, even though it was an hour away from our place.

Ah, I loved that car. It was an old beater 1989 Toyota Corolla (which I ended up hydroplaning in on a rainy day one year later right before my big Ironman 70.3 race in Whistler, totaling the car and smashing both my knees).

He gave me a job running his supplement company called Vytogo, which was too early for its time and has now been restarted as Nutrigazm, which you might have seen me share online before as Ivy and I are now investors in the company. It’s funny looking back now.

He was the first person to believe in me and see CEO qualities in me.

I didn’t expect my writing to go in this direction, but you guys know that I write from the soul and I don’t plan ahead of time what I’m going to write about.

To get back on topic: because that good friend had always been there for me, I started to rely on him to help me financially. I was doing fundraisers left and right to help pay for cancer treatments because I worked almost a minimum-wage job, and it feels crazy to say that now, looking back.

Looking back, I realized I was letting my fear trap me in a victim mindset, when the person who truly needed all my strength and support was Jen, who was fighting for her life every single day. I don’t have a lot of regrets, but I wish I had understood sooner that taking ownership was the only way I could truly show up for her.

It wasn’t until three to three and a half years into the cancer journey that I got tired of waiting for the knight in shining armor, and I realized that I had to BE the knight in shining armor.

It was also the time when I was laid off from my corporate job because they were running out of money. Not only did I not have a job anymore, I didn’t have the company car, which I was also using to drive to cancer treatments.

I was running out of money to pay for my apartment. I had $34.37 in my bank account, minus $70,000 in debt. No money for rent. That’s when I started eating at the food bank so that any money I had could go directly to my partner to buy organic fruits and vegetables for her healing. I just ate whatever came in that brown paper bag.

That’s what made me really hit rock bottom, and that’s when I decided to take control of my life. It didn’t happen overnight, and it took years of relentless, unglamorous work, but I committed to building something that provided real value to the world while allowing me to pay for cancer treatments and organic food. That resolve is what birthed my first company, Fit Vegan Coaching, which has now evolved into Mavy Wellness.

It wasn’t until I made the decision to take ownership of my life, my actions, my decisions, and my mind that my life started to change.

I’ve had several moments like that in my life where I’ve gotten out of shape, blamed it on circumstances, and then finally had enough. I would tell myself, “I need to tighten up. This is my responsibility. No one is coming to save me. No one is coming to do the workout for me. No one is going to stop buying the junk food for me. No one is going to make or eat the healthy meal for me. I need to do it, because if I’m waiting for someone or blaming everything, my body, my health, and my household will never change.”

And don’t get me wrong, I have my moments just like any other person where I waver off and forget to tighten up certain areas of my life. But when things start to drift too far, I catch myself and remind myself that it is my responsibility to:

• Take care of myself

• Take care of my wife

• Take care of my family

• Take care of the clients we serve

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Any time things start to go sideways, I’m not trying to blame circumstances. The reality is that it is my responsibility, and I need to take ownership.

That is why, when I was 80 lbs overweight, I had to be honest with myself: for me, my body was a direct reflection of my daily choices. I was putting food in my mouth that didn’t serve me, and I was eating far too much of it. It wasn’t my genetics or my circumstances holding me back; it was my lack of ownership over my own plate. I’m not here to preach from a high mountain as if it was an easy journey or a perfect one, but over time, I was able to get there. I was able to develop my mind, my habits, and my strategies.

I understood from the start that if I sought a shortcut, I would get short-term results, and I was looking for lifelong results. Anyone can be fit for two or three months, but who cares? I’d rather be fit for decades.

It wasn’t until I stopped blaming the world, the environment, and my lifestyle that things started to change. I had to take ownership. I realized I had direct control over:

• What food came into my house

• What food went into my mouth

• Whether I worked out or not

• Whether I went to bed on time or not

• Whether I let my phone control me and affect my sleep at night or not

• Whether I read a book for the day or not

• Whether I prioritized date night with my wife every week or not

• How I showed up every single day

I think that is the beauty of being human: we have so much more power than we realize, but we tend to forget it.

I think what needs to happen for a lot of people is to simply get tired and get pissed off with how things are going, whether in your health, your fitness, your relationships, your finances, or your household. Start taking real ownership over your actions, your decisions, and your lack of action, because choosing to do nothing is still a decision.

I wanted to share this today because I recently caught myself lacking in the area of my fitness and nutrition. Twelve weeks ago, I made the commitment to retake ownership and really dial back in. Right now, I am in the best shape I’ve been in for years, and I feel fantastic.

By the way, I was not out of shape by society’s standards before I started, but now I am at a place that matches my personal standard for how I want to show up for my life and the people around me. Having a strong body gives me the energy to do everything I want to do in this world.

I hope this resonates with someone today because this one came straight from the soul. Am I perfect? Do I do things right every single time? Far from it. But whenever I realize that I am giving ownership away, that’s my cue to take it back, own my actions, and focus on what truly matters.

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

PS: If this post resonated with you today, drop a comment below or reply to this email and tell me: what is one area of your life where you are choosing to take extreme ownership back starting today? I read every single reply and I would love to hear your story.

What a fantastic week this has been, it was the soft launch of our brand new Forever Fit course , we’ve had many new members join and several more coming along the way. Our 20 founder spots will fill up really fast (7 left) after which the investment will go up so jump on it now before it does.

Besides that, I am happy to hear some of your questions from last week’s newsletter issue ❤️ This new format only works if I keep receiving questions from you 😉

So don’t be shy! Ask them below via Substack or simply reply via email, and I will receive them and answer them in next week’s newsletter.

We have tons of great ones that we can jump right into. Our first one is from Beth:

Hey Beth, first of all, I want to celebrate you for reaching out. Deciding to start strength training at sixty eight is one of the most powerful choices you will ever make for your independence, your bone density, and your longevity.

Since you are a complete novice, please know that you do not need to walk into a gym and lift heavy weights on day one.

Your main goal right now is simply building confidence and getting your body moving safely. I want you to start with basic bodyweight movements right at home.

Building strength is not a race, and you are building a foundation that will serve you for the rest of your life.

I would recommend starting with the basics: three full body workouts a week of maybe 20 to 30 minutes if you can. Focus on compound movements (there are tons of videos on my YouTube channel to guide you). Stay consistent with that for about 4 to 6 weeks before considering changing anything.

Ivy and I have a few workout plans on our YouTube channel, plus we have new ones coming out starting next week. As a side note, you can learn how to build your own plan in our new course and get it verified by me via our weekly group calls :)

I hope this helps 🌱

Clarence, congratulations brother on reaching your goal weight! That is a huge win!

But transitioning out of a weight loss phase is where most people get tripped up because no one teaches us how to stop dieting. Maintenance is actually an active, strategic phase. You do not want to instantly jump back to eating huge amounts of food.

Instead, slowly add about one hundred to one hundred and fifty calories back into your daily routine each week until your weight stabilizes over a few weeks (it is the process of reverse dieting that we teach our members, which is also now in our course).

Keep your protein intake high so you preserve your lean muscle, and use that extra food energy to push a little harder in your workouts.

Give yourself a natural three pound window for normal daily weight fluctuations, and if you ever bump slightly above it, simply tighten up your nutrition for a couple of days.

Once you have brought your calories back up, then it is a consistency game. You GET to keep working out for the rest of your life and have your food intake be higher at maintenance.

Honestly, down the road, you will probably have other goals you want to reach, and that will switch things up for you. So keep on that maintenance journey until you find a new fun goal to work toward. You are in a beautiful place.

Alright, I received three deeply thoughtful questions from Jackie, one of our readers who is balancing fitness with major family caregiving responsibilities, starting with this question about recovery:

First, I want to honor you for the deep care and selflessness you show by supporting your family. Life happens, I get it.

The reason why your muscles are sore the second day after is because of what is called DOMS (Delayed Onset Muscle Soreness). There are ways to reduce it through post workout stretching, mobility work, good nutrition, and proper rest.

As for your question of how long the recovery phase should be between full body workouts, assuming you are talking about resistance training, you want 48 to 72 hours between your sessions.

You also don’t need to go to a gym to get a full body workout in. You can do a full body workout from home with something as simple as a $10 to $15 resistance band from Amazon and your own bodyweight. You can achieve great results by spending more time under tension if you have lighter weights.

Honestly, I don’t like to keep referring back to the course, but I teach all of this stuff in my new course because these are common things that most people need to learn. I put them in the course so that I can go more in depth on each subject :)

And to appease your worries about not maximizing your supercompensation window: that concept is for what is optimal, but then there is also what is realistic.

And sometimes, depending on the chapter of life we are in, what is realistic is what we need to do.

Doing a full body workout on Monday, the next one on Friday because life happens, and the next one the day after on Saturday is MUCH better and will move you forward far more than doing nothing just because it is not the theoretical optimal way.

I hope this helps. Now let’s get to your next question ☺️

Fantastic question. For those reading that missed last week’s newsletter about the process of supercompensation, Jackie is basically referring to the days where you are slightly stronger than your previous workout after a little bit of recovery. And yes that is when you should be doing your strength training workout like the exercise you just mentioned.

All form of physical exercise will be advantageous on that day because you can also use it as a cardiovascular day if you want too if you are training for a marathon for example, so it’s not only for resistance training. But what matters more in my opinion than maximizing those days where the body does supercompensation is having a bigger overall structure and build across your strength training plan to ensure that there is what we can in the fitness world “progressive overload” I have a whole module of that in the course.

Progressive overload is like compound interest it’s the 9th wonder of the world, right after compound interest 😉 So the overall structure and build of your plan matters more than those supercompensation days. They go by hierarchy of importance.

I hope this helps.

Now let’s get to your last question Jackie and the last one I received for this newsletter:

Fantastic question, as it is something that I receive often.

I’d love to tell you that I have a miracle solution for fixing lower collagen production as we get older. I’d probably be a billionaire if I did! lol

Here is what I can tell you: while we cannot completely reverse the natural loss of skin elasticity that comes with age, you can absolutely tighten and strengthen the structure beneath it.

A lot of what feels like a sagging midsection comes down to posture, deep core strength, and overall body composition. To pull the stomach inward naturally, you want to train the deep internal muscle called the transverse abdominis, which acts like your body’s natural corset.

You can practice abdominal vacuums and dead bugs, gently pulling your belly button toward your spine as you exhale. Combining that deep core activation with a clean, high plant protein diet and improving your posture will significantly pull your midsection in and give you back that feeling of strength and support.

Answering Your Questions About the New Forever Fit Course:

I did a live on YouTube where I answer the questions, show inside of the course, the community, the fitness software. You can watch the video down below, or you can read my answers to the questions below the video.

Mission: To continue to serve our community and help 10,000 people get lean, thrive, and reduce their risk of dealing with chronic illness by 2033 and a million by 2050 using the power of whole food plant-based eating . This course, along with the book and our one-on-one coaching, are just vehicles to help us have further impact to serve more people and to allow us to donate more to cancer patients every single month like we have for the past six years.

How does it work? The course is self-directed. It will teach you everything I know and then some. You can watch the modules as fast or as slow as you want. My intention behind it was to teach everyone how to do what we do with coaching clients in terms of manipulating workouts and nutrition to achieve health and a fantastic body recomposition transformation at any age. You will learn how to build your own workout program and meal plan.

You also have access to a beta version of my Forever Fit software to help you build your own workout plan and meal plan based on your preferences.

The course comes with 12 months of access to the software and 12 months of access to weekly group calls (twice a week with Ivy and me) *except during the first 7 days of every month when I am on a digital detox with Ivy.

You can jump on those calls for accountability, to ask questions, connect with others, get your exercise form reviewed, get a workout you built for yourself reviewed, and more. We are there to serve you during those 1 hour group calls.

It is a group setting. You do not get an assigned 1:1 coach, there is no weekly check-in form, there are no private 1:1 calls, and there are no custom workouts or meal plans created for you by a coach. That is what our 1:1 Coaching program is for.

When are the group calls? The official group calls start the week of August 10th on Mondays and Wednesdays. The times will vary, and everything is listed inside the platform where the course is hosted.

Who is this course for? This course is for beginners to intermediates, specifically for people who want to transform at their own pace versus joining our more intensive 3, 6, and 12 month coaching programs. This course is for people who want to get educated and learn the intricacies of transforming their body on a whole food, plant-based lifestyle.

How much is the course? What is the refund policy? The course is currently $1497 if you pay in full, or $167 per month for our first 20 founding members who join. After those 20 spots are filled, the investment will go up to $2000 and we will work out way up to $3000 +/

Also, the reason why the course is only $1,497 for the year right now is because it is a direct exchange for your feedback on how to make the course better. You get steep savings in exchange for your feedback!

As for refunds, there are none on the course since you get immediate access to my intellectual property upon joining. If you select the month to month option, you complete all 12 monthly payments to retain lifetime access to the course.

How do I pay in full if I only see the month to month option? When you go to the sign-up page, click on the yellow button for $167 a month. That will prompt you to enter your information. After that, it will give you the option to pay in full for the 12 months, which saves you over $500. I am answering this one because I have had a few emails about it :)

What happens after the initial 12 months? After the initial 12 months, you are grandfathered in at your current rate! Regardless of how much the course or community costs at that point, you will get to renew at the exact same rate. Now, if you have paid in full or completed the month to month option for 12 months, you have lifetime access to the core course. If you want to continue having access to the community, the weekly group calls, and the AI software to track your workouts, track measurements, and build plans, you will have the opportunity to renew at a big savings. Realistically, it will probably be the same amount as the founding member rate. If the public rate goes higher, you do not have to pay that as long as you secured your initial rate! That is why I am encouraging everyone to join now before it goes up.

Is there a workout tracker or meal plan tracker in the course? Since this is a self-directed course that you get to watch at your own pace, you get to build your own workout plan and meal plan. You come on the group calls to ask your questions for extra accountability. It does not come with a live food logging tracker inside the platform, but inside of our Forever Fit AI software, you will have the ability to track your weights and your workouts. You will have the ability to create meal plans, but you will not have the ability to track daily food intake inside our app. I have created a whole training video showing you how to set up your MyFitnessPal account to track your food if you wish to go down that path versus using a template meal plan.

I think that is pretty much it for this newsletter. There is a lot in here, a lot covered! I also did a live stream on YouTube where you can watch the replay as I go over the entirety of the course, its details, and how it works if you want to watch that before joining.

Besides that, thank you to Beth, Clarence, and Jackie for asking such incredible questions for this week’s issue. I want to receive more of your questions so that I can serve you even more. Please let me know in the comments section below or by replying to this email, and I look forward to connecting with you next week!

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

📖 Read the Forever Fit Book → Here
🎓 Forever Fit Course/Community → Here
💪 Custom 1:1 coaching → Here
🏋️‍♀️ Join our Las Vegas Fitness workshop in September 2026 (Cut off to join is August 1st) → [Get more info]

When I first heard the term consistency, I thought it was just about doing a good habit over and over again until you reaped the benefits.

But it’s not. At least, it’s not the whole picture. What people don’t tell you when they talk about consistency is that you have to fight off so many distractions.

You see, consistency is absolutely about doing the right action to get the outcome you want, but it is equally about not being distracted by our phones, by shiny objects we think are shortcuts, or by shifting our focus to entirely different goals.

That was a massive lesson for me to learn. If you have set a big, worthy goal for yourself, it is probably going to be really challenging. It is going to force you to become a completely different version of yourself.

If it didn’t require growth, the goal would be easy and you would have already reached it. Let’s use fitness as an example. People think that losing 20 pounds should be simple. It is not. That process is hard. You have to consistently work out, even when you don’t want to, and most importantly, you cannot eat whatever you want.

You have to budget your food just like you budget your finances.

It requires deliberate effort and an upgraded version of yourself. It is tough, and that is exactly why people struggle with it. This is even before we take into account people who struggle with a complicated relationship with food, medical conditions, or physical limitations.

What most people do when they take on a big goal and it gets challenging is they choose to set a brand new goal. They pick something that might feel easier to hit in the short term, but it is 100% a distraction from the main objective.

I had to learn to stop lying to myself about this. I used to tell myself I could work on four or five big goals at once. Maybe I could handle the workload, but I sucked at all of them and many of them went completely unreached.

If you focus on five goals at once, everything takes longer, some will fail, and others will be done in a mediocre manner. If I take on four, I might do a slightly better job, but it still won’t be excellent. But if I focus on three, two, or just one big goal, I will completely dominate because my energy isn’t fractured.

If you are still telling yourself you can successfully do five massive things at once, I hope you realize that it is just a masked form of distraction and procrastination to avoid doing the real work that actually moves the needle.

That is what I had to learn, and I keep having to be reminded of that lesson over and over again.

Doing one thing for a long time toward a goal that actually matters to you, a goal that you know will make your life better, your family’s life better, and help you become the best version of yourself, is tough. It can feel boring because you are always working on the exact same things.

But there is so much fun and beauty within that repetition.

Yes, the day to day journey can look boring from the outside, but the overarching theme is deeply exciting because there is progression. You are becoming the exact version of yourself that you were created to be.

This process comes in waves. There are big waves and small waves, and it will constantly ebb and flow. Sometimes it will feel so mundane that you will want to distract yourself with other goals, with social media, or with new ideas. Other times it is going to be incredibly exciting, and you won’t believe how far you have actually come.

My piece of advice for my younger self in this scenario is simple: when it is exciting, enjoy it and go along with the ride. And when it is boring, remember that it is not going to be like that forever.

The boring phase is when most people quit by default of distraction. The people who get ahead and reach their goals are simply the ones who are able to endure these bouts of boredom. This capacity is ultimately the thing that helps them stay consistent.

A lack of consistency and self-sabotage do not only come from a lack of feeling worthy. Sometimes it stems directly from our short attention spans, our incessant need to be stimulated at all times, and the craving for something new.

This is my reflection on distraction because I have to continuously catch myself on a daily, weekly, and monthly basis. I have to force myself to go back to the basics, to keep things simple, and to do the boring, redundant actions that actually compound over time.

Anytime I have a brand new idea or a project I want to take on, I put it through a strict filter:

• What do I want my life to be?

• What do I want my relationships to be?

• What do I want my health and fitness to be?

• Is this new idea a distraction or just a short-term spike of dopamine from starting something fresh?

• Is it actually going to make a difference in the long run, or is it distracting me from doing the core work?

To be completely honest with you, another angle to this whole thing is that it is genuinely hard to have a lot of free time where you are alone with your own head. A lot of people, myself included for a very long time, didn’t have the ability to just sit still with no music, no distraction, and just listen to what was inside.

For a long time, looking inward meant facing trauma, grief, and unresolved things. It wasn’t until I truly worked on myself and took dedicated time to be alone in my own thoughts, diving into all those quiet corners, that I started to develop peace from doing nothing.

That is how you eliminate the guilt of resting. That is how you start to find peace with just being you in the present moment, even when nothing is happening.

I hope this resonates with you, because it is easily one of the biggest lessons that has helped me at this point in my life. I am incredibly happy that I spent those hundreds of hours alone in my head to get to this point.

Sincerely,

Maxime

I have some exciting news as I progress towards my goal of impacting 10,000 lives by 2033 and 1 million by 2050.
​

As some of you know, when I was 27, I lost my partner to breast cancer. I didn’t know it then, but that loss would become the reason I started my coaching company.
​
Grief has a strange way of turning into purpose if you let it. Mine turned into a mission to help people live longer, stronger, more vital lives, especially the people who’ve been told they’re “too old” to change their body or their health. I’ve spent every year since trying to prove that wrong.
​

I’m proud to say we’ve now directly helped over 3,700 people transform their health through coaching and the book, and reached hundreds of thousands more through the podcast and our platforms. That work is part of a bigger goal we’re chasing, helping 10,000 people transform by 2033, and 1 million by 2050. Big numbers, but every big number starts with one person deciding to try.
​

Today I get to open a new door for that mission, one that’s been years in the making.

I’m officially launching The Forever Fit Course. Taught entirely by me and Ivy, with special guest speakers joining us monthly.
​

Here’s the truth. Our one on one coaching has always been deeply personal, and it always will be. But I’ve learned that not everyone needs or wants that level of customization, some of you have told me you’d rather learn the exact system yourself, at your own pace, in your own hands. So I built this for you.
​
Over 56 modules and 25 plus hours of education, where I walk you through, step by step, exactly how to build muscle and improve your body composition after 50.

But it’s not just a course sitting on a shelf. It’s a living, breathing community. Here’s what’s inside:
​

• The complete methodology and tools we’ve used to help transform over 1,200 people

• Over 56 modules and 25 plus hours of education on building muscle and body composition after 50

• A community of people walking the same path as you, so you’re never doing this alone

• Access to our brand new beta Forever Fit AI platform

• Monthly check ins forms with Ivy and me, so we can track how your body is responding and adjust with you

• Weekly live group coaching calls with Ivy and me (except the first week of the month, that one’s ours, it’s our digital detox)

• Guest speakers every month, some of the biggest names in the plant based movement

I want to be really clear about what this is and what it isn’t. This is not one-on-one coaching. There’s no dedicated coach assigned to you, no custom program built around your individual case. Instead, Ivy and I teach you the exact system, live, in a group setting, so you learn how to build your own workouts and your own meal plans yourself, using the same methodology we’ve used with over 1,200 clients. You’ll also have full access to our Forever Fit AI platform to help you build and adjust those plans along the way.
​

This course is built for beginner and intermediate levels, for anyone starting their journey or building their foundation. If you’re already deep into advanced training or have more complex needs, one-on-one is still the better fit for you, and that program isn’t changing.
​

If you’re currently one of our one-on-one clients, this might be a great next step once you’ve graduated from your program and want to keep building on your own. It’s also a great place to send a friend, a partner, or a family member who’s been wanting to start but isn’t ready for the full one-on-one investment yet.
​

The investment is $1,497 paid in full, or $167 a month for 12 months. Less than half of what this course will cost once it opens to the public and fully optimized.
​

One thing I want to be honest with you about. Your course access is lifetime, yours to keep and return to whenever you need it. The community, the calls, the guest speakers, the AI platform, those are included for your first 12 months. After that, if you want to keep going with all of it, you can continue at a lower member rate.
​

We’re opening this to 20 founding members first. The course is already built, but we’re actively refining it, and as a founding member, you get a real hand in that. You help shape which modules we sharpen and what we add next. You also lock in the lowest price this will ever be.
​

This closes September 1st, or when the 20 spots are filled, whichever comes first.

If you already know this is for you, here’s where you join :https://mavywellness.com/forever-fit-course-2026

And if you want to talk it through with Ivy and me first, no pressure, just a real conversation, here’s where you book a call: Book Here

If you join us, you become part of our mission too. Another life changed for the best ❤️

Maxime

Co-Founder & CEO, Mavy Wellness
Host, Forever Fit Podcast
Author, Forever Fit

*Photo with some of our clients a few weeks ago at a conference 💪🌱

I hope you had a fantastic week. I loved hearing your feedback from last week’s newsletter and answering the questions you submitted.

In case you missed it, we have a brand-new weekly newsletter structure. Moving forward, I am dedicated to answering the exact questions you ask in the previous week’s edition.

If you want your questions answered in next week’s segment, simply reply to this email with your question or leave a comment below on Substack.

I decided to switch up the structure so that I can best support you with whatever you actually need right now in your transformation, versus me just writing about what I think you need. I’m fully willing to film videos demonstrating exercises, break down complex topics, or write out deeply detailed responses depending on what your question requires.

The Honest Truth About This Week

So here is the honest truth: no one submitted questions from last week’s newsletter.

It seems that I have taught you all a little too well 😉 It looks like you already know everything you need to know to improve your body composition, structure your workouts, and manipulate your nutrition to achieve true body recomposition on a whole-food plant-based lifestyle.

Apparently, there’s nothing left for me to teach. It only took six years and four months of posting thousands of pieces of content online to achieve this incredible feat 😉

In all seriousness, I understand that this is a completely new format, and it will take some time to pick up. If you are a regular reader of this newsletter and you’re genuinely stuck on something, I invite you to share your hurdles.

Don’t worry, I will happily blur out your name or just use your initials so your privacy is completely protected. This format only works if you ask the questions.

I can think of a million topics to write about, but the truth is, some of you reading this are struggling with very specific roadblocks right now. Having a direct answer, a proven system, or a tailored strategy is incredibly valuable. I am dedicating one to two hours of my week to writing these newsletters to serve you for absolutely free, so please take full advantage of it. You can do so by replying directly to this email or commenting under the post on Substack.

A Massive Announcement Three Years in the Making

Now, enough teasing. Since we don’t have user questions today, I want to share something that has been in the works for over three years. I am incredibly excited to finally release it on July 21st.

For years, I wanted to build an educational platform that would extract the knowledge from my head and place it into a perfectly structured format. To an extent, my book was a version of that, but I had far more to share than what could fit on those pages without making a 2,000-page textbook. I wanted the book to remain a beginner-friendly stepping stone.

As many of you know, since I lost my lead partner to breast cancer, I created a lifelong mission for myself: to serve 10,000 people by 2033 and one million people by 2050. I want to help people get lean, thrive, and drastically reduce their risk of dealing with chronic illnesses using the power of whole-food plant-based nutrition.

I needed another medium to scale this impact. A structured course is a format I am incredibly comfortable with because I love recording videos, sharing stories, and using analogies to simplify the transformation process.

Because of that, I created the first-ever Forever Fit Course.

What You Will Master Inside

As a quick disclaimer, this course is designed specifically for beginners to intermediates. If you are already at an advanced stage in your fitness, I recommend applying directly for our one-on-one coaching program through Mavy Wellness instead.

This course is for those who want to master the absolute fundamentals:

• How to build your own customized workout program

• The exact training structures you need to follow

• How to determine your ideal sets, reps, and rest periods

• When to progress your movements and change your routines

• How to target different types of muscle fibers for optimal toning

• How to utilize the process of supercompensation for faster results

• How to master recovery and protect your joints

• How to manipulate your whole-food plant-based nutrition to completely shift your body composition

The Founding Members Circle

In addition to the core curriculum, the course comes with an exclusive community featuring two weekly live trainings: one hosted by myself and one hosted by Ivy. These take place every single week, except for the first week of the month when Ivy and I go on our regular digital detox.

I have also built a beta version of the Forever Fit App to help you build your own workout programs and meal plans along the way, complete with progress tracking and a monthly check-in form built right into the software. You will have direct access to Ivy and me inside this private community.

We are officially launching on July 21st, and we are opening the doors to only 20 founding members at first.

Because I want to gather your real feedback to make this even more world-class, these first 20 people will receive a steep savings of 50%, and your investment rate will be locked in for life.

As a founding member, you will help shape the future of the platform by telling us what modules to add and what topics to cover next. We are also bringing in monthly celebrity guests to host exclusive live trainings for this specific community. Once those 20 spots are filled, I am closing registration completely so we can focus entirely on our founders before reopening to the public.

The link to join will be shared right here on July 21st. I’ll be completely honest with you: I am both incredibly excited and nervous. I have taken everything I know and built 56 distinct modules containing over 25 hours of educational content.

Every single month, a portion of our proceeds at Mavy Wellness is donated directly to cancer patients to help them cover their treatments and medical bills so they can focus entirely on their healing journey. By joining this course, you are directly supporting that mission.

A massive new chapter starts next week, and I cannot wait to share it with you.

Get a Taste of the Course

To show you exactly what we’ve built, I’ve unlocked one of the core modules from the recovery curriculum for you to watch today for free. Check it out below to get a head start on your training.

Can’t watch the full 19-minute lesson right now? Jump straight to these key insights:

0:00 – Why your body never actually gets stronger inside the gym.

12:39 – The hidden plant-based recovery advantage.

15:10 – The exact structural shifts your biology needs after age 50.

I hope this deep dive into supercompensation gives you a massive breakthrough in how you view your training and your rest days. This is just a tiny fraction of the level of depth and structure we are bringing to the full curriculum.

I’m excited for this course to go live and to help transform many more lives. As a closing statement for the newsletter.

I invite you all to ask your questions below to reply to this email with questions so that I can serve you to the highest extent next Saturday. I appreciate you.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend and week ahead, and I look forward to hearing from you ☺️

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

PS. If you are tired of training consistently without seeing your body composition change, let's look at your routine together. I opened up a few slots on our calendar this week for our community to map out a personalized strategy one-on-one. You can claim a spot right here → https://mavywellness.com

During my seven day digital detox at the start of this month, Ivy and I went back to California to spend time with her mom.

While we were there, the neighbors were having everyone over for a get together. I had never been in that neighbor’s backyard before and as soon as Ivy and I saw it we were in awe.

He built this beautiful garden with over 1000+ different types of cactus and plants in his backyard.

He had avocado tree, apple tree, blood orange, orange, blueberries, blackberries, kumquats, mango, papaya, etc…

He offered us a tour of the property and started explaining to us the different species of plants he had back there.

When he got to the papaya tree, he showed us a tree that was an easy 8 feet tall and thick. He mentioned that he had this plant for only a few months and that he had another one further down that he had gotten at the same time.

When we got to that tree (still in the pot) it was maybe 1.5 feet high and a thickness that I could probably break without trying.

I thought that was interesting since both trees were the same age. But one had access to broader space since it was planted in the ground versus the other, which had a boundary from being in the container.

It got me thinking, where in my life am I limited by being planted in a pot and how can I get myself into broader land with good soil.

It reminded me when I left my small town back home, my mindset felt limited by what I thought was possible with my life, and it wasn’t until I left home, travelled the world, experienced new cultures, met new interesting people with jobs or careers I didn’t even know existed, that my mind started to expand.

Those “mind roots” took a hold, went wide, and helped me build the life I have today.

BUT I am also aware that sometimes I am not aware that I may be putting myself in a “pot” (creating restrictions or boundaries for myself), maybe that is out of fear, insecurity, etc…

It’s the exact reason why it’s easy to see and solve other people’s problems, but it feels impossible with us because we don’t see what others see.

So I took that mental challenge on during this past digital detox, where was I “potting” myself in my health, my fitness, my relationship, my business, etc…

And a lot of the “potting” happening was me self-limiting myself by taking on more, doing more projects, working with more people, rushing, stacking meetings, etc…

I realized that for me, being planted in the soil represented the power of space.

Not just physical space but mental/psychological space.

Space to reflect, ponder, to be more intentional with my choices, time and energy.

Which is why I ruthlessly eliminate things when I came back online and added a few intentional things.

I ruthlessly eliminated having a working block without structure, I’ve cut projects like our Thailand workshop in 2027 (for multiple reasons), I’ve simplified my workflow with my team, I’ve turned down projects that people were waiting on an answer on whether I wanted to join or not. I’ve simplified my workout regimen. I went down to reading one book at a time instead of two.

And the two things I added were to reinstate weekly date nights with my wife Ivy. I never realized that it had slipped since we came back from our three month Asia trip and the move to a different state.

And I added a 30 min block in the morning, extra, to ensure that I don’t rush my morning so that I could read longer, write longer, and take time to master my latte making skills ❤️

So my lesson from this past detox continues to remain the same, and I keep getting reminded of it in many different ways because I’m not perfect, ahah.

I forget to slow down and smell the roses, I forget not to rush, I forget not to add more things to my plate.

I feel like I’m constantly battling this “balance” of wanting to serve the world at all cost, build something meaningful, but also wanting to be happy, relax, enjoy the beautiful ride of life that I am on with my incredible wife.

Instead of being a Type A, I’m trying to be a Type A-B, ahah.

It’s a learning process, that is for sure.

In having shared all of that, I’m curious to see where I catch myself “putting myself in a pot” versus ensuring that I stay planted in the vast and open space of the world with good soil (which could be a good community, healthy food, a healthy body, etc…)

You will know by asking yourself that question, what that looks like for you.

Sincerely,

Maxime

You will notice that we have a new weekly newsletter structure where I answer your questions that you’ve asked in last week’s edition I sent out.

If you want your questions answered in next week’s segment, reply to this email with your question or comment below on substack.

I decided to switch up the structure so that I can best support you with whatever you may actually need right now in your transformation versus me writing about what I think you may need. I’m willing to film some videos demonstrating exercises, to answer your questions, film a video answering your question or writing out my answer if I think it’s more appropriate, etc...

As the saying goes, you snooze you lose, so don’t be shy and ask your questions away. The more the better ❤️

This week we received three questions, let’s get into them:

Question 1:

Fantastic question Alexandra,

This is one of my favorite technical questions because the answer explains so much of the frustration people feel on the scale.

Here is what is actually happening in your body after a bigger meal or a heavier day of eating.

The first 24 to 48 hours: mostly water, not fat. When you eat more food, especially more carbohydrates and more sodium, your body holds onto extra water. Carbohydrate is stored in your muscles and liver as glycogen, and every gram of glycogen is stored with about three grams of water attached to it. So a bigger carb intake means more glycogen, and more glycogen means more water weight. On top of that, the food itself has not fully moved through your digestive tract yet, so there is simply more physical weightt in your body. None of that is fat. That is the bloat you are feeling.

Days two through five: this is where your nutritionist’s comment comes in. She is right. The number on the scale this week is heavily influenced by what you ate last week, because your body is still catching up on water balance, digestion, and hormonal shifts like cortisol and insulin from the days before. This is why we always tell our clients to judge progress by the week and not by the day.

Actual fat storage: it takes a real, sustained calorie surplus over time. Your body does not efficiently convert a single overeating episode into stored body fat. The process of turning excess carbohydrate into fat, called de novo lipogenesis, is metabolically expensive and your body avoids it unless glycogen stores are already completely full, which is rare for most people.

What actually drives fat gain is a sustained caloric surplus across days and weeks, not one meal or even one day. One indulgent dinner will not make you fatter tomorrow. A pattern of consistent surplus over two, three, four weeks will.

If you think of it this way, one pound of fat is equivalent to 3,500 calories. You would have to be over your maintenance calorie by 3,500 calories to theoretically put on one pound of fat. If you were to eat that much over your surplus, the number on the scale would shoot up even more because of the glycogen, because of the salt, because of having physically more weight in your body.

So if you overate once, the honest response is to simply return win the next meal and revert back to your normal way of eating. No punishing yourself, no extra cardio, no skipping meals. Just get back to your baseline and the water weight will resolve itself within a few days. What matters far more than any single meal is what your average week looks like over a month.

I hope this helps :)

Question 2:

Here is my answer 👇

Here is the article on Reps range, sets and rest period I was referring too:

Question 3:

Hi Lynne,

First, thank you for sharing something this personal with me, and I am so sorry you are going through this. Fourteen plus years fully plant based, mostly SOS free for three of those years, and still facing something like this after a fall is genuinely hard, and I want to honor that before anything else.

I have to be honest with you though, because I care more about you actually healing well than I do about sounding like I have all the answers. Avascular necrosis in the hip is a serious thing, and it really does need to stay in the hands of your orthopedic team. Depending on how much of the joint is affected, the path forward could look really different from person to person, sometimes it’s close monitoring, sometimes there are procedures that can help preserve the joint before things progress further, and sometimes surgery ends up being the right call down the road.

I wouldn’t feel right telling you diet is going to reverse something like this on its own, that wouldn’t be fair to you. If you haven’t already, I’d really encourage you to talk to a hip preservation specialist if you can find one near you, since that’s their whole focus and they see cases exactly like yours all the time.

What I can do is share how I’d support your body nutritionally while you’re going through this, alongside whatever your doctors have you doing, not instead of it.

I’d lean into foods that calm inflammation, things like berries, leafy greens, turmeric, ground flax, walnuts. And honestly, since you’ve been plant based a long time, I’d want you to get your vitamin D, B12, and K2 checked if you haven’t recently, those three work together with calcium for bone health and they’re easy to overlook even when you’re eating really well. Good calcium sources for you would be fortified plant milks, tofu made with calcium sulfate, tahini, and greens like collards and bok choy. Ground flax and chia are great for omega-3s too, which matter for circulation, and that feels especially relevant given what you’re dealing with. And I’d just make sure you’re getting enough protein every day since your body leans on that heavily right now to repair itself, things like lentils, tempeh, and tofu are great for that.

But Lynne, please bring all of this to your medical team and let them weigh in, especially before changing anything major. You clearly already have the discipline and consistency that got you this far, I just want that same care applied to the medical side of this too.

I’m genuinely rooting for you and your healing. Please keep me posted on how you’re doing.


Alright that is it for this week’s newsletter. I hope it was helpful :)

Please let me know how you enjoy this format and ask your questions away so that I can best support you.

I hope you have a fantastic weekend and stay tuned for this upcoming Wednesday’s soul post.

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

Ready to take the next step?

📖 Start your transformation for $20 → [Get the book on Amazon]
🎓 Build your body the right way → [Show me the Forever Fit Course] *Coming soon
💪 Get one-on-one coaching from our Forever Fit team → [Book your free call]
🏋️‍♀️ Join our Las Vegas Fitness workshop in September 2026 → [Get more info]

I’m not exaggerating. I went from eating a standard diet to 100% whole food plant-based in a single day. Cold turkey, no transition, no game plan. And my body let me know how it felt about that decision almost immediately. I was bloated, gassy, cramping, and genuinely uncomfortable for days. My fiber intake probably went from somewhere around 15 grams a day to 70 grams in one shot, and my gut had absolutely no idea what to do with that. I powered through it because I’m stubborn, but looking back, there was no reason it had to be that miserable. I just didn’t know any better.

Since then, I’ve helped over 1,200 people make this same transition, and the single biggest lesson I’ve learned is that most people don’t fail because they chose the wrong diet. They fail because they tried to change everything at once. The enthusiasm is there, the information is there, but the execution overwhelms them within the first few days and they abandon the whole thing before their body ever gets a chance to feel the difference. So I built a framework to fix that, and it works every single time when people actually follow it. One meal at a time, four weeks, no drama.

Why overnight overhauls don’t work

Before I walk you through the framework, I want you to understand why the “all in on Monday” approach fails for most people. There are three reasons, and they compound on each other.

The first is gut adaptation. If you’re currently eating a standard Western diet, you’re probably consuming somewhere between 10 and 20 grams of fiber per day. A whole food plant-based diet can easily put you at 50 to 70 grams. Fiber is incredible for your health, it feeds your gut bacteria, supports digestion, helps regulate blood sugar and cholesterol. But your gut needs time to adjust to that volume. If you flood it overnight, you’re going to experience bloating, gas, cramps, and general discomfort that will make you question every decision you’ve ever made. It passes, but most people don’t stick around long enough to find that out. They just assume “this diet doesn’t agree with me” and go back to what they were eating before.

The second is the learning curve in the kitchen. Think about how effortlessly you prepare your current meals. You don’t have to think about it. Your brain knows exactly what to grab, how to cook it, how long it takes. That’s years of repetition at work. Now imagine every single meal requires that level of thinking all at once. What’s the protein source? What’s the base? How do I season this? What do I even buy at the grocery store? It’s exhausting when it’s every meal, every day, from day one. But when it’s just breakfast for a week? Totally manageable.

The third is habit formation. Eating differently isn’t just a nutrition change. It’s a behavior change. It requires different shopping patterns, different prep routines, different timing in the kitchen. Habits take time to form, and stacking too many new ones at once is one of the most reliable ways to ensure none of them stick. We know this from the research, and we see it play out with real people every single week in our coaching program.

The framework: one meal, one week

Here’s the game plan. Four weeks, four meals. By the end of it, you’ve fully transitioned without ever feeling overwhelmed. And more importantly, you’ve built actual habits around each meal so the changes stick instead of lasting until Wednesday.

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Moving from one thing to the next as fast as possible.

The next thing you know the whole day has gone by, you’ve accomplished a lot (or sometimes not because being busy is not always being productive).

When you get to the evening time, you try to unwind but you just can’t.

You just feel wired, walking around like a pack of nerves that can’t relax so you continue rushing between making dinner, the dishes, finishing the laundry, taking out the trash, etc…

Then you try to watch TV to “force” yourself to relax, but there is still that underlying tension in your body from a whole day of “rushing” and then it’s bed time and it makes it more challenging for you to fall asleep?

Do you ever feel that?

Maybe it’s just me ahah

When my wife and I were traveling through Asia for 3 months, there was a big sense of calmness that started to take over us as we visited different countries like the Philippines, Indonesia, Japan, Thailand, etc…

Even though we were grabbing a flight every single week to our next destination, there was a sense of peace that came over me as we progressed in our adventures.

Maybe it was the different culture we were experiencing that is in my opinion a lot more calm than Western culture. Where there isn’t this “hustle” energy of “go-go-go” happening all around you. Where people don’t wear being busy and exhausted as a badge of honor as a representation of identity to show that we are somehow more “worthy” because we are busy.

Throughout my countless digital detox weeks I’ve discovered that doing nothing once a month is the most productive thing I’ve ever done for myself, my health and my mental health.

In the midst of traveling I think there came a point where I decided to give up the tightness, that sense of hurry that was inside of me.

Traveling always used to make me nervous, not because of the plane, but because I wanted to make sure we got there early enough, to drop off our luggage, go through security and get to our gate on time to grab our flight.

But as we were taking flights often (about 19 in 3 months), I was getting so tired from being so tense so I just decided to give up the tightness out of tiredness.

I just accepted that things would go smoothly and that if they didn’t, I would deal with it whenever it came up versus trying to obsess and control every little detail ahead of time (which I wasn’t really but it made my head feel good thinking that I did).

So that in combination with the peaceful Asian culture we were experiencing REALLY relaxed me and slowed me down because there was no need to rush.

Then I started to catch myself in different areas of life where I was speeding up for no reason.

And it was in the smallest and silliest things that didn’t need to be sped up.

I was rushing and going fast to wash my face, brush my teeth, write in my journal every morning, read my book every morning. Drinking my water, my coffee, eating food, etc… you get the pattern.

I didn’t realize that I was a rushaholic.

I started to catch myself more and more and really slow down my movements to be more present with them and more intentional.

It brought on a sense of peace that I had never experienced in my adult life before.

Now having been back from Asia for two months now, I can feel myself speeding back up again.

I can feel myself rushing things for no darn reason.

I feel like I can feel the energy of the people around me, in my city, in the gym where everyone feels like they are in a rush.

I have to force myself and catch myself more often to take a big breath.

Slow down my movement and really be intentional with what I’m doing.

It’s hard and don’t get me wrong I’m not perfect at all.

I don’t have a solution for you, because if I did I’d be doing it right now ahah

But I am trying to be more cautious about how I structure my day so things aren’t on a back-to-back tight schedule.

I’m intentionally leaving myself more time in the morning to have a slower morning because I found that if I wake up and feel tight on time then I’ll most likely have to fight the rush energy all day long.

I even bought myself a proper espresso machine to add a slower ritual to my morning routine and I’ve been geeking out on the different grains, how fine to grind it, the extraction time and weight. I’ve been working on perfecting my latte art in the morning.

The only thing is that Ivy has to wait a bit longer for her morning coffee which she’s still getting adjusted to ahah

I wanted to share my story of being a recovering “Rushaholic” because nothing has made my life better than slowing down (besides eating whole foods and exercising).

Focusing on a slower life, slower eating, slower task production, has forced me to be more intentional with where I put my time and effort.

I’ve cancelled many projects, cancelled many meetings or delayed a few things just to ensure that I can do quality work and focus on the things that matter to me like quality time with my wife, serving our clients and writing + recording podcast episodes.

I know this is a lifelong journey and that I will have to navigate the natural tendency to lean more towards “rushing” and going faster. I think it comes with having a type A personality and living in the society that we live in.

I know many people are slowly starting to wake up and get tired with how society has been built and what has been put on a pedestal which is one of the many reasons why I decided to stop following the norm and do my 7-day monthly digital detoxes on the first 7 days of the month, why I ate the way I eat, where I don’t have social media on my phone, why I focus on creating more than I consume and why I make sure that I have time to be bored out of my mind because that is when my nervous system resets and my best ideas come from.

Thank you for reading,

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

I hope you had a fantastic weekend.

Starting next week, I’m changing how I do this newsletter.

Instead of me deciding what you need to know, I want you to tell me.

Every week I’m going to pick a few of your questions and answer them in depth sometimes in writing, sometimes in a video, sometimes showing you an exercise or walking you through a meal. The goal is simple: I want this to feel less like a newsletter and more like a conversation.

So here’s what I need from you: reply to this email or reply on substack below the post with one specific question you’ve been sitting on. About plant-based nutrition, building muscle after 50, fat loss, recovery, mindset anything in our world. Be specific. The more specific your question, the more useful my answer will be for you and for everyone else reading.

This is coming out while I’m on digital detox as I take the first week of every month completely offline. When I come back, the first thing I’m doing is reading your questions and building the next newsletter around them.

Hit reply. Ask me anything.



Also, as you may know, every month I go on GoFundMe and find patients who are trying to heal from the cancer diagnosis. We donate to them on behalf of our Mavy Wellness community and on behalf of everyone that supports the work that I do. This month we got to support Judy (https://gofund.me/afc0fd81f ) to help her pay her medical bills and cancer treatments. I want to say a big thank you for supporting the work that I do.

I do this because when I was a caregiver to my late partner, it meant a lot to me that strangers donated to our fundraiser and tried to support us. I feel blessed to be able to do this every month on behalf of all of us, so thank you ❤️



Alright let’s get into today’s last newsletter with this format:

I recorded a podcast recently with one of our members, Patty, and her story has been sitting with me since. She’s 69 years old, turning 70 next year, and when she joined us about a year and a half ago, she was struggling to lift Christmas boxes out of the garage. Her shoulder was in constant pain from a cycling accident five years earlier, and she had sciatica that kept her sleeping on her back every night because laying on her side hurt too much. She was active, walking, hiking, cycling, but she could feel herself getting weaker, and it scared her.

What I found interesting about Patty’s story is that she wasn’t starting from zero. She was already doing five or six cardio sessions a week when she came to us. She was already eating well. She was already moving her body. But she had never consistently strength trained in her life. At 68 years old, she started for the first time, and the difference it made was something even she didn’t expect.

Within the first few months, her shoulder started to feel normal again. Not perfect, she says it’s about 80% compared to her other shoulder, but she went from barely being able to lift her purse into the car to pressing dumbbells overhead without pain. The sciatica that had been bothering her for two years just disappeared. She’s not even sure which exercises fixed it, but one day she realized she could sleep on her side again, and it wasn’t an issue anymore. She told me something that stuck with me. She said she had just accepted those things as her new normal. The pain in her shoulder, the discomfort sitting in the car, the weakness when she tried to lift anything. She thought that’s just what getting older meant and there was nothing she could do about it.

That’s the part that gets me, because I hear it all the time. People normalize pain. They normalize limitation. They tell themselves this is just what 55 or 62 or 70 feels like, and they stop trying to fix it. But Patty’s body didn’t accept it. Her body was waiting for her to give it a reason to heal, and when she started loading those muscles properly, even starting with the thinnest resistance band she had for her shoulder, the body responded. It always does when you give it the right stimulus.

The win that made me the most proud was the skiing. In 2019, Patty had a serious ski accident. Broke her tibia plateau, had surgery, couldn’t walk for three months, and spent a full year recovering. After that, she just couldn’t bring herself to get back on the mountain. She didn’t feel strong enough, and there was a real fear there, almost like PTSD from the accident. So when she committed to our program, she set a quiet goal for herself. Next winter, I’m going to ski again.

In March, a big snowstorm hit Tahoe. She bought new equipment, drove up, and did it. She told me on the podcast that she’s already getting a season pass for next year. That’s not a woman who’s winding down. That’s someone whose world is expanding because her body can support the life she wants to live.

And that’s really what this is about. I’ve said it before and I’ll keep saying it. Being fit and strong is the foundation to living an incredible life. It’s hard to live your best life when your body is limiting you from doing the things you want to do. For Patty, that was skiing, traveling, hiking in Croatia, planning a pilgrimage in October. For you, it might be something completely different. But the principle is the same. Your body should never be the thing holding you back.

One thing Patty said that I want to highlight because I think it applies to a lot of people reading this. She told me that in the beginning, her goal was to lose 30 pounds. She’s lost 12 so far, and for a while that frustrated her. But then she said something really honest. She said she’s gained so many other things that the weight loss has almost become secondary. Her shoulder works again. Her sciatica is gone. She skied for the first time in five years. She’s doing lunges with 8 to 10 pound dumbbells when she couldn’t even balance doing them with no weight at the start. She just got back from two weeks in Croatia climbing stairs and hiking without a second thought. She’s planning a 50 mile bike ride as her next goal.

That’s what body recomposition actually looks like. It’s not always a dramatic number on the scale. Sometimes it’s your friend telling you that you look lean. Sometimes it’s lifting a 50 pound box of flooring and not being sore the next day. Sometimes it’s realizing that you stopped thinking about what you can’t do and started thinking about what you want to do next. The scale is one pixel of the entire picture, and Patty’s picture is looking pretty incredible right now.

The last thing I’ll share is her advice for anyone sitting on the fence about starting. She kept it simple. Just do it. You can think about it, you can straddle the fence, you can research programs and watch YouTube videos. But at some point you have to jump in and trust the process. She told me that when she looks back at her first workouts, everything was hard. She was wobbly, she couldn’t hold weights during lunges, she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to do a proper push up. And now it’s become such a core part of her identity that she can’t imagine her life without it. That didn’t happen because she had some perfect plan from day one. It happened because she kept showing up, even during the weeks where life got chaotic and she could only manage her strength training and nothing else.

Consistency doesn’t mean perfection. It means you keep going. And Patty, at 69, with a healed shoulder and a season ski pass and a 50 mile bike ride on the horizon, is living proof of that.

I hope this week’s message serves you on your journey.

I appreciate you and I hope you have a fantastic weekend.

Consistency compounds.

Sincerely,

Maxime Sigouin

Ready to take the next step?

📖 Start your transformation for $20 → [Get the book on Amazon]
🎓 Build your body the right way → [Show me the Forever Fit Course] *Coming soon
💪 Get one-on-one coaching from our Forever Fit team → [Book your free call]
🏋️‍♀️ Join our Las Vegas Fitness workshop in September 2026 → [Get more info]

One of the most common things I hear from people when they first start working with us is some version of “I’ve been going to the gym, but I have no idea if what I’m doing is actually working.” They’ll watch a YouTube video, follow along with some workout titled “exercises for people over 50,” and do whatever the person on screen is doing without understanding why they’re doing it. And then a month goes by, nothing changes, and they assume strength training just doesn’t work for them. But it does work. It works incredibly well. The issue is almost never effort. It’s architecture. Most people have no structure underneath what they’re doing, so all that effort goes nowhere.

So I want to give you the blueprint. This is exactly how we build workout programs for our coaching clients, and it’s pulled directly from the course material I just finished recording for our upcoming Forever Fit program. I’m going to walk you through rep ranges, sets, rest periods, volume, and how often to change your program. By the end of this, you should be able to look at your current workout and know whether it’s actually set up to change your body, or whether you’re just moving for the sake of moving.

Not all reps are created equal

This is the foundation, and most people skip right past it. The number of repetitions you perform per set isn’t arbitrary. Each range activates your muscles differently, serves a different purpose, and should be used at different stages of your journey. Here’s how it breaks down.

The 15 to 20 rep range is what I call muscular endurance. Because you’re doing that many reps per set, the weight is going to be lighter by default, and you’re resting about 60 seconds between sets. The purpose of training in this range is to build stamina, cardiovascular conditioning, and most importantly, movement habit. This is where everyone should start if they’re new to strength training or coming back to it after a long break. The reason is simple. Before we load the body with heavy weights, we need to make sure the body is moving correctly. If your squat is all over the place, your knees are caving in, your back is rounding, your hips are shifting to one side, adding weight to that is just asking for an injury. So we start here. High reps, lighter weight, sometimes no weight at all, and the goal is to wire the movement patterns into your nervous system so deeply that your body just knows what to do. Think of it like learning to drive. You don’t start on the highway. You start in a parking lot until the mechanics feel natural.

The 8 to 15 rep range is muscular hypertrophy, and this is where the magic happens for body recomposition. The weights are moderate to heavy, enough that those last two or three reps of each set feel genuinely challenging. You’re resting 60 to 90 seconds between sets, and the purpose is to stimulate the muscle tissue to grow while supporting fat loss. This is the range where you’re going to spend the majority of your training life, and it’s the range that produces the most visible and functional changes in your body. When I say body recomposition, building lean muscle while losing body fat, this rep range is the engine that drives it.

The 3 to 6 rep range is pure strength training. The weights are heavy, the reps are few, and the rest periods are long, two to three minutes between sets. I’m including this for education, but I want to be direct. If you’re over 50 and you haven’t been strength training consistently, you don’t need to touch this range. It’s hard on your nervous system, it requires excellent form that takes time to develop, and the risk to reward ratio isn’t worth it when the hypertrophy range will give you everything you need. I competed in powerlifting years ago. I was deadlifting 550 pounds, squatting over 400, bench pressing over 300. My joints were hurting all the time. We don’t need to go there. But I want you to understand it exists so that if someone at the gym tells you to “lift heavier,” you have the context to know what that actually means and whether it applies to you.

Why this matters more after 40

There are two types of muscle fiber in your body, and understanding them changes how you think about training.

Type 1 fibers are your slow twitch fibers. They’re activated by lighter loads and higher repetitions, and they’re responsible for endurance and sustained effort. Think of gardening, long walks, cycling, anything where you’re using your muscles repeatedly over an extended period. These fibers are important for daily function and long-term cardiovascular health.

Type 2 fibers are your fast twitch fibers. They’re activated by heavier loads and more explosive effort, and they’re responsible for power, strength, and the majority of visible muscle mass. These are the fibers that make you look and feel strong. You start tapping into them when you’re working in the lower end of that hypertrophy range, around 8 to 10 reps with a weight that genuinely challenges you.

Here’s the part that matters. After the age of 40, we lose type 2 fast twitch muscle fibers at an accelerating rate. That’s one of the primary reasons strength, power, and muscle mass decline with age. It’s not just “getting older.” It’s the specific loss of these fibers because they’re not being used. Lifting progressively heavier weights, safely and over time, is the only way to preserve and rebuild them. Walking won’t do it. Yoga won’t do it. Even cycling won’t do it. Those are all wonderful for your health, but they primarily engage type 1 fibers. If you want to keep the muscle that keeps you independent, mobile, and strong as you age, you have to load the body in a way that recruits type 2 fibers. That means strength training in the hypertrophy range with weights that actually challenge you.

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