Last week I had the pleasure of meeting and speaking with Ashleigh Gass, the founder of MoveGST located in Clearwater Florida.
I got a phenomenal education on nutrition and the role it plays in GST and how someone can incorporate good nutritional practices into your life and into your training.
It’s one thing to know a concept academically, it's another thing to be able to apply it to your life. Ashleigh clearly knows the academic content of nutrition but also can take those ideas and apply them to a busy person's life.
When we sat down Ashleigh discussed the idea of the exosome - which is all the factors in our life that shape our body outside of our genome. We are shaped by a million different inputs but the ones that we have the most collective control over are our:
Nutrition
Lifestyle
Environment
When our body is not meeting our desired level of energy and performance it is going to be less due to our genetics than we kind of hope it is due. It is mostly due to some combination of those three factors.
Most of our interventions attempt to deal with those inputs as though they are completely separate and unrelated categories but Ashleigh isn’t interested in looking at them as separate categories so much as how they interplay.
So with her new clients Ashleigh begins by trying to get an accurate measure of where they are. She asks patients to accurately record what they eat, how much they sleep, and then asks them to get an InBody scan, which offers a quantitative assessment of your body’s total lean mass, water and skeletal mass.
Then as Ashleigh meets with her clients she works on various aspects of a clients exosome to see how it is affecting the future readings on the Body Scans. By building individual habits with clients that have an additive benefit over time her clients are able to achieve the “holy grail” of getting in shape - body recomposition. Basically, Ashleigh's clients are able to gain muscle and lose fat more or less at the same time. The reason that she can do that is because she is getting her clients metabolically healthy - which results in both weight loss and greater muscle growth.
I was astounded to hear that - I have never really succeeded at body recomp. I've managed to lose weight but whenever I have lost a lot of weight I have inevitably lost muscle mass. When I gain muscle mass I have always put on fat mass to accompany it.
When Ashleigh confidently told me that she could help me achieve this, and showed me the evidence that she had done this with plenty of her clients, I decided I was all in. I am going to get my first body scan and meet with her monthly and work on her interventions. She focuses on the lowest hanging fruit until her clients get to where they are satisfied.
For most of her clients, the lowest hanging fruit is increasing their protein intake. I have usually gotten about 100-150 grams of protein a day. Ashleigh has asked me to increase my protein intake to about 200-250 grams a day. That sounds really tough but I think I can do it.
As I get into the habit of upping my protein I will see how that affects all three of the most important factors of my life that I want to improve:
How I look
How I feel
How I perform
"Yes I care about the number on the scale but really the number on the scale takes a far back seat to all of those other things" Ashleigh said.
She is absolutely right. Somehow Paul Watson and I weigh about the same amount if you need any proof that numbers aren't the measurement that matters!
I am going to go through Ashleigh’s 12 week plan and see what kind of changes are possible. 12 weeks is a great amount of time; it’s objectively not a long time so I won’t feel like this is a slog but it is also long enough for me to see measurable objective and subjective changes.
I am really excited to share how this goes with you all. I love this because I can absolutely see how this will improve my training - if I am feeling better I will be performing better in the gym.
I’m looking forward to sharing how this goes with everyone. I’ll get my body scan soon but right now I am weighing 245 lbs. I’m looking forward to seeing where I am at the end of January.
Yes this is the worst time of the year to be attempting to go on a physical fitness journey, with all the awesome junk food that the holiday season offers… but I’m going to give it a shot. If it doesn’t get me where I want to be… I will do another 12 weeks with Ashleigh. I am not looking for an overnight transformation, I am looking for interventions that can get me closer to my lifetime goal of maintaining physical autonomy. I’m not hoping that Ashleigh will get me six pack abs (although if she wanted to get that for me my birthday is in June) but I am hoping that I can maintain a reasonable body fat percentage all year around and not go up and down as often as I do.
I will keep you posted. This is very exciting! Thank you Paul and Nick for connecting me with Ashleigh and thank you Ashleigh for taking me on. I can’t wait to work with you!
I hope you enjoyed this fifth newsletter! I love the fact that I am stronger and better in tune with my body in my mid 40s than I ever was in my entire life! If you enjoy what you read down the road I invite you to check out my website.
I've started making "a minute of science" short YouTube videos distilling what I teach in biology and chemistry. Check them out (or subscribe if you wanna show some love to a creator) if you enjoy science!
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