HeartButt Week 6 - Eating to Grow Your Booty

Eating to Grow Your Booty

We’ve been learning throughout the Heart Butt Challenge to sculpt our backsides in a whole different way, and I’m thrilled this week to take it beyond exercises into the health of our tissue! Nutrition interfaces with both the health of our fascia and our ability to build muscle. I’m not a nutritionist, so I’m here to guide you to the resources that you can use to research and decide what eating style is right for YOU.

During the New Year, New You program, I explained that it’s difficult to multitask leaning out and building muscle at the same time. Losing fat and adding muscle simply require different processes within the body. If you’re trying to calorie deplete and shred off fat, your body isn’t in the same mode as growing muscles. If you want to Build-A-Butt and shape those glutes, you have to fuel them!

The first thing to figure out is how much you need to take in just for maintenance, the base of what your body needs to survive, and then we’ll add on for muscle growth. There are scientific ways with advanced machines to test your personal daily caloric needs (I’ve seen it done, including in our research study), it generally follows the pattern I’m going to give you. You can take your body weight and create a calorie range for yourself where you multiply by 11 for the lower end and 14 for the higher end.

So, for a woman who weighs 140 pounds, her range would look like this:

Now, the younger and more muscular you are, the nearer you’ll be to the higher end of the range. Older and less muscular wouldn’t require as much fuel and would be near the lower end of the range. Then you figure in your activity, such as what you burn off doing cardio. If you want to build muscle and you burn off 500 calories per high-intensity workout, you’ll need to add those calories back in...and not with empty calories but with the kind of foods that fuel you! If you really want to GROW DAT BOOTY, you might need to multiply your weight by 18 or 20!

With that as your foundation, there are two very different dietary philosophies for how to structure those calories. I’m going to give you a little primer, and arm you with some great resources to continue your research. This has to do with what your body uses as its power source - glucose or ketones.

• If you eat any carbs (other than in non-starchy vegetables) like grains or fruits, you’re running on glucose
• If you eat high fat and only consume carbs in vegetables, you might be running on ketones

My biggest tip for anyone who gets their energy from glucose: make it a slow, steady drip throughout the day rather than a big dump all at once!

For those who like to look at the ratio of macros (macronutrients, i.e. carbohydrate, protein, and fat), here is a basic breakdown for each:

• Glucose-driven: typical split is 25% fat, 35% protein, 40% carbohydrate
• Ketone-driven: 75% fat, 20% protein, 5% carbohydrate

There are different pros and cons to each of these eating styles, and I really recommend you do your research and think about what works best for YOU! You might end up trying both over time, and you can always adjust your diet as your body changes, your goals change, or you get better at listening to your body! For example, the winner of our New Year, New You challenge decided she wants to grow her glutes even more, so she’s upping her calories during the Heart Butt Challenge!

If you’re going to do keto, do it right! The same doctors who helped conduct the FasciaBlaster research study wrote the Ketogenic Bible. If you’re even thinking about trying keto, read this book first because it’s so much easier if you understand the philosophy behind it!

Ketogenic Bible by Dr. Wilson Dr. Lowery

If you’re doing a glucose-fueled diet, there are lots of great resources for refining your plan! You can look into an Ayurvedic cookbook, intermittent fasting, clean eating. I also personally like looking into food sensitivities and noticing how different foods make me feel.

In general, I choose to eat to be healthy and happy. I like to eat things as close as possible to when they come out of the ground or the ocean. Skipping processed foods and eating from the Earth will go a long way! I wanted to give you all of these concepts as a launching point for you to dig into the details.

When it comes down to it, the best diet is the one you’re going to follow through with. Our food plays a huge role in what we’re trying to do for Heart Butt and most certainly in our fascia! Fascia is made up of cells like all of our other cells, and we want to feed them all the same. Remember, your fascia is a system that is literally in every nook and cranny of your body. If it’s not good for your stomach or your brain, then it’s not good for your fascia. The key is to find YOUR balance.

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